Penelope had run straight from fireplace and…well, right into the enemy.
Except, the enemy was a man she had once considered…nearly a friend. Her only friend in the whole world, once upon a time. Oh, if her father had known it would have meant disaster for them both. But he hadn’t. She had been careful, sneaking out of the manor during the day when her father was otherwise occupied. When he had left her to her own devices, left her without a governess, she had nothing else to do.
So, she had made the hours pass picking across the fields that surrounded the property. And she had often rescued wounded animals she’d found there.
Lachlan had helped her.
She’d thought him an angel. She’d loved his funny accent and the way the sunlight caught the curls in his hair. She’d loved the way he’d smiled at her.
She’d been quietly destroyed when he’d gone. Another brush with grief.
It was tempting for a moment to think he’d come back for her. He had. But she knew it wasn’t like that. She could look at him and know.
There was almost nothing of the boy she’d once known left in him.
She didn’t remember him being quite so tall. But then, she’d been a child when he was here and to her, everyone seemed tall. That he still towered over her now seemed notable.
She knew for a fact he had not been quite so broad.
His hands were battered and scarred, a great, raised slash extending from his neck down beneath the collar of his white shirt. A shirt which was open at the neck and revealed quite a bit more of his chest than was at all decent.
He wore a kilt with a green tartan, a sword at his hip, and a sporran clasped with a badger’s head.
She knew that the kilt was common dress for Scottish soldiers, but it was very rare to see a man wearing one for a social call.
She looked to his face, hoping to see someone she recognised. Hoping to see Lachlan as she’d known him somewhere in those eyes.
But they were hard as flint, his mouth set into a grim line. As mysterious and frightening to her as the Highlands themselves.
If she had hoped to find an ally in him, she suspected she would be disappointed. Because this man was not soft. She couldn’t imagine him bending down to help a small, distraught child save a doomed bird. No. Instead, she could imagine that large hand wrapping itself around the vulnerable creature and crushing it.
She thought to use the same tactic with him that she used with her father. Rational, reasonable negotiation.
‘I am engaged already,’ she said, trying her very best to look beset by regret. ‘A sad truth. But that will make a betrothal between you and me quite difficult.’
‘Nothing difficult about it, lass,’ he said, his voice rich and low. She remembered the accent, but the voice had definitely changed. She could feel it echoing inside her chest and she did not like it.
He had come into her home and filled the space here. Now he was invading her as well.
‘Your father owes me a debt. And money will not suffice.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s not for you to understand. It’s for you to do as you’re told.’
Well, rational did not seem to be working. He certainly wasn’t giving her any answers that she could hold on to. Nothing about this made sense to her. He had been a boy, a servant when he had left, and now he had returned, saying that he had some sort of hold on her father.
‘I’m not certain I understand,’ she said, keeping her tone exceedingly patient. ‘You see, when you were here last you were a servant. You can see how I might be having some difficulty connecting how you went from there…’ She circled her hand and then pointed at the floor. ‘Here.’
‘I saved the neck of the right rich man while fighting in the war. His parents were exceedingly grateful. They gave to me what your father promised and did not deliver.’
‘What?’
‘I worked for your father for years. Sweat and blood, lass. There were no wages paid. I was nothing but a penniless boy in a foreign land unfriendly to me based on my origins. I had few options when I arrived, less after I’d spent a year here, with all the money sent by my mother long since gone. And when I approached your father about the lack of payment, he promised me a merchant ship, if only I were to work three more years.’
‘That’s… I can’t imagine that my father would pay a boy something with that sort of value.’
‘He didn’t,’ Lachlan said. He smiled, but there was nothing at all nice in that smile. ‘He lied. And he sent me off with nothing. After years of promises. Years of working for nothing. I had no means of getting home and, by the time I was through here, by the time I realised that nothing would come of this, that I had wasted those years, my mother was dead.’ His lip curled, the expression savage. Thunderous. ‘And there was nothing I could do to save her.’
‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ she said. ‘Really. I know what that’s like. My mother’s dead, too.’
‘Are you trying to appeal to my softer side? Because you’re wasting your time, lass. I haven’t got one.’
‘That’s not true. You did.’ He had and it had meant everything to her at the time. Everything to a girl trapped inside herself.
‘That boy you knew is dead.’ Those words were haunting, but had they been spoken in anger, had there been some discernible emotion on that face of his, they might have been less terrifying. But it was the emptiness there, the way his face seemed carved directly from rock, as immovable and unreadable as a sheer cliff, that made her soul turn to ice. ‘He died somewhere on a battlefield in Belgium. The man who stands before you wants nothing but revenge before he returns home for absolution. I got my ship, but I paid for it with blood. And I’ve made my fortune. Which means I have the power now. And your father has none. He has nothing. And I’ve purchased his debts. Sadly for him I’ve made you the price.’
‘But why?’ she asked. ‘If you have the money, then what difference does it make?’
‘My mother is dead. And I would have your life for hers.’
Fear rioted through her. ‘You don’t mean to… You don’t mean…’
‘You’re no good to me dead.’
‘Honestly,’ she said, losing track of strategy altogether, ‘I probably wouldn’t be any use to you alive. My father often tells me that I’m useless. Save my beauty, of course, which I find to be quite a hollow comfort.’
He stared at her, his eyes cold, and she realised it was perhaps not good of her to speak of her own beauty. But truly, now, it meant nothing to her at all.
She cleared her throat and continued. ‘It must be said, I accomplished some sort of usefulness when I secured an engagement to the Duke of Kendal.’
‘If Kendal found you useful, I imagine I can find something to do with you.’ The words were rough and hinted at a mystery she didn’t fully understand.
One that made her stomach shiver and the hair on her arms go up on end.
She pushed the unwanted sensations down deep. ‘I’m not entirely sure he found me useful. But his sister likes me quite a lot and so does his mother, and…’
‘I’m not interested in the particulars of an engagement that no longer exists.’
‘Then perhaps you would like to tell me about the particulars of this one.’
He took a step towards her. ‘You are right. Your father was very proud of your engagement to the Duke. His highest achievement. And a pathway out of debt. It brings me great joy to deprive him of both of those things.’
‘So I’m…simply revenge to you? A pawn? No regard whatsoever for the fact that I had plans. For the fact that I’m supposed to be getting married to somebody that I’m actually quite fond of. It doesn’t make any sense. You…’ She sputtered, trying to think of some way she might appeal to a humanity she wasn’t certain he possessed. ‘You saved a bird.’
‘That is the second time you’ve mentioned the bird. I confess I don’t remember much about you as a child, but I do remember your chatter and I had hoped you’d grown out of that.’
‘It’s not chatter!’ she protested. ‘The bird matters.’
She was no longer able to keep her feelings, her frustrations, wholly locked away. The bird, the truth about Lachlan as she’d known him, had been her only hope.
She was so very tired of glimmers of hope, faintly shining in the distance, only to be snuffed out.
‘You helped me save the bird,’ she said again. ‘I came and I found you and you were working in the stables. I had found a small bird that had fallen out of its nest and you helped me save it.’
‘You are applying far too much meaning to it. I was simply a servant doing his best to keep the mistress of the house from reporting to her father that I’d disappointed her. I still thought I was saving my family then, my clan. I still had a heart in my chest. I think what you’ll find is that what war can do to harden a man, to change him, is beyond understanding. There is battle, yes. But what happens in that battle turns men into beasts and what those men will do to the innocent is beyond comprehension.’
There was something utterly cold and desolate in that tone, something that chilled her from the inside. But she refused to back down. She met his gaze, hard as it was, and would not look away. ‘I don’t understand how the same boy who could help me save that bird would do something so utterly barbaric as to force me into a marriage that I don’t even want.’
‘You haven’t even seen the beginning of how barbaric I can be. And if you think I care about your feelings any more than I care about the plight of a bird, you are gravely mistaken.’ His tone was laced with iron and there was a promise in those words that she could not quite untangle. It made strange waves of tension begin to radiate low in her stomach, spreading out through her limbs. ‘I care about two things, lass, and your feelings are not among them.’
His eyes were green. Deep and dark and unfeeling. When she had seen him standing there she had been struck by a sense of the familiar. But the longer she looked, the more that feeling drained away.
Until all she could see was a stranger.
He was right, he wasn’t the boy who had helped her. The boy she’d thought she’d befriended all those years ago. The boy whose absence she’d once mourned. She had thought it impossible to find herself in a colder situation than the one she had grown up in. But it seemed that she had.
Perhaps that wasn’t fair to her father.
He had kept her fed and clothed. He had not sent her away. He had not struck her. She was lonely. But loneliness was not fatal.
‘Are you spiriting me off to Scotland to be married right away?’ She lifted her chin, trying not to appear frightened.
But she was frightened.
Still, she knew a bit about dealing with feral dogs and showing fear was a certain way to get bitten.
She had no desire to be bitten.
Not only that, she didn’t want him to have the satisfaction of her fear. He hated her father. How much more joy would he get from his revenge if she cowered? If she wept?
The only control she had was in what she chose to keep hidden and what she chose to show.
Still, fear wound itself around her in cold coils like a viper.
Marriage, and all that it entailed, was a mystery to her in many ways. She could vaguely remember her mother and father speaking to each other. Her mother had always seemed pale and drawn. The sort of lonely Penny often felt. She could not remember her parents together. Many girls could take cues from the way their parents acted together—good or bad—and try to ascertain some of the mysteries therein. But she had not even had that.
She had felt confident that the Duke would make it right. That he would treat her with patience and that he would help her understand not only her duties as a duchess, but as a wife.
She had no such confidence in a man like Lachlan Bain.
What would he want from her? And how quickly?
Her entire body trembled at the thought.
She had such vague ideas of what passed between a man and a woman. She was a voracious reader and it was a topic she found quite curious. Her father’s study was mostly absent of books that contained such topics, but she had a skill for finding mentions of copulation. Between horses. Chickens. Every so often hints at it between men and women.
She knew just enough to be mortified by the thought and little enough to feel as if she might as well know nothing at all.
‘No, that is not what I have in mind. I have no patience for the reading of the banns, but I will purchase for us a special licence. We can get married immediately.’
‘What is the purpose of that?’
‘A wedding in a church. Legal in England. Gossiped about in England.’
‘I think you’re underestimating the power of an elopement.’ She didn’t know why she’d said that. She didn’t want to elope.
‘Not at all. But I take great joy in forcing your father to witness the event. At the same church where you might have married His Grace.’ Somehow the Duke’s honorific sounded like an insult on his tongue, the slight twist his accent making the word sound a vile curse.
She frowned deeply. ‘You’re playing a game.’
‘Perhaps. One of logic. Chess, I think.’
‘I don’t fancy being a chess piece.’
‘I don’t think a chess piece gets to choose which game it’s a part of. And that is all you are. A pawn.’
She had thought it impossible to be dismissed any more thoroughly than she often was by her father on a given day. Lachlan Bain proved it was in fact possible to make her feel yet more insignificant. Not a skill she would have listed as a high priority in a husband.
‘Will I be given a chance to speak to him?’
‘Your father?’
‘The Duke.’
‘I don’t own your time yet, lass. If you’ve a desire to go and speak to him, that’s your decision.’
‘How very generous of you.’
Her toast was now rebelling in her stomach.
Did they eat toast in Scotland? She didn’t know. In all her reading she hadn’t studied the food of Scotland. She hadn’t thought it would be relevant to her. It turned out it was desperately relevant.
‘Do you eat toast?’ The question came out quite a bit more plaintively than she had intended. Of course, of all the things she could have asked about, the presence of toast should perhaps have fallen to a lower priority.
It seemed imperative at the moment, however.
That granite face contorted into an expression of shock, if only for a fleeting moment. And were she not half so distressed she might take it as a victory.
‘Toast?’
‘I don’t know very much about Scotland. My father’s library is thin on the subject.’
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘No toast. Nothing but haggis and porridge.’
She felt ill.
She suddenly wished she had been able to enjoy that toast more, if toast was about to become a rare commodity in her life.
‘Well, I’m certain there will be many things to adjust to.’
‘I see you’ve met.’
Penny turned and saw her father standing in the doorway. He looked a stranger to her. They had never been close and his gaze had never held any great affection for her, but even that sense of familiarity that she’d had from living within the same walls for so many years was absent now.
This man was selling her to pay his debts.
This man had put her in an impossible situation, where her life would only be given value if it saved his.
It hadn’t been any different, of course. Her marrying the Duke of Kendal. In her father’s eyes, it had been his accomplishment. The value in her existence.
But at least she had wanted that.
She did not want this. Not at all.
But the big Scottish brute was correct. If she refused, she wouldn’t be marrying the Duke of Kendal anyway. The Duke was utterly and completely above reproach. His reputation was spotless, not just because he was insulated as a man of high position, but because he was a man of the greatest of integrity.
There had never been rumours of improper behaviour, secret children, gambling or any of the other vices that often gripped the peerage.
If she were to be disgraced, her family name and reputation damaged, the Duke would want nothing to do with her.
No matter what, there would be no saving that relationship.
So she had to swallow hard, had to lower her eyes to avoid allowing her father or Lachlan to see the distress in them. And she had to give the consent that Lachlan had been so confident she would give.
It burned at the last remaining vestiges of her pride to do so.
She was her father’s property. Pretending otherwise was a luxury of the past. Remembering Lachlan’s words about chess pieces, she had to reluctantly acknowledge to herself that she had been a far happier chess piece when she had been in a different game.
But when you were a chess piece, you did not get to choose. And any illusion of freedom had been just that. An illusion.
All that was left was her pride. The walls of that shiny jewellery box she’d built to hold all her pain.
She would not allow it to break now.
There was no point weeping. When she had been a bereaved five-year-old there had been no point to it. She’d wept and wailed and gained only her father’s ire. She doubted she’d get anything more at twenty-two.
Penny had had, for a few sweet months, hope in a softer future at Bybee House. A life that had seemed too beautiful to be hers. And lo, it had turned out that it was.
But that hope had only existed inside her for such a short time, by comparison to what she knew best. Grim acceptance.
She knew how to protect herself. She knew how to find worlds of information in books, a salve for her soul in one-sided conversations. A sense of accomplishment in saving animals about the estate.
She knew how to move in limited quarters with grace and skill.
In short, she knew how to survive.
She would survive Lachlan Bain as she had survived everything else.
‘Everything is settled then,’ she said softly. ‘I accept your very generous offer of marriage.’