What Happens in Scotland by Jennifer McQuiston Read Free Book Online Page B

tight, Randolph’s gaze fell on her hand. “Let me see the ring.”
    Georgette drew back, startled. “I beg your pardon?”
    “The ring.” Without waiting for her concurrence, he snatched up her hand and inspected the stamped gold seal, a heavily antlered stag on a shield.
    “Do you recognize it?” Georgette choked out.
    His fingers tightened around hers, and his mustached upper lip thinned to a razor’s edge. “Did the man have a beard, or no?”
    “He had a beard,” Georgette, answered, confused by the question, unsure how that narrowed the field. What man in Scotland didn’t sport a ragged, filthy beard? “Why do you ask?”
    Randolph flung away her hand without answering. “Saddle the mare immediately,” he shouted to the groom, who had just emerged from the little stone stable. “I will ride out from here without the curricle.”
    Georgette burrowed her hand and the ring in the safety of her skirts. “You are leaving me here?” she accused. “ Alone? ”
    “I am securing our future.” Randolph pivoted toward the startled groom. “A future which you seem all too willing to toss away.”
    Georgette reached out a hand to stop him, but she clutched empty air. Her cousin was already striding toward the stables, his ungainly stride and loose-limbed posture the closest thing to a walking slouch. She watched him with a dawning sense of horror. Randolph thought he was securing their joint future, a future that she had repeatedly denied wanting. She thought of a lifetime spent with him and felt suffocated by the same certain sense of repulsion that had forced her objection to his offer—or insistence—of marriage earlier this morning.
    In the end, she was left with no answers, and no further chance to protest. Randolph swung up on the aged mare, dug his heels to the beast’s flank, and cantered off with the gracelessness of a man far more comfortable in a library than in a saddle. She watched him ride away with rising panic.
    The sharp pleasant scent of the surrounding pine forest should have been a balm to almost any hurt, but she could feel nothing but panic. She had a kitten needing milk. A husband she didn’t want and a pressing need to find him. And she was stuck here, without a horse, no idea where her cousin was going or when he would be back. Was Randolph trying to help her?
    Or punish her?
    The groom approached and they stood a long moment, watching Randolph disappear over a ridge. “Did he happen tell you where he was going?” Georgette asked despairingly. Her feet ached and her eyes pricked as if they were laced with sand. The journey from Moraig had taken less than an hour in a curricle, but the distance might as well be the length of London to attempt it on foot.
    The big groom shook his head. “No, Mr. Burton did not say.” He paused, and cast an apologetic look toward her, spreading his thick, work-roughened hands. “You have a visitor waiting for you, miss. I . . . I placed ’em in your bedroom. I thought it best not to mention it while Mr. Burton was in such a temper. I ken he will not approve of this one.”
    Georgette’s throat threatened to swell closed over the groom’s halting explanation. She had a visitor. The sort of visitor of which Randolph would not approve.
    The sort of visitor who sent the great, burly servant’s color high and his hands twisting at his side.
    Whereas moments before she had been facing a long, hard walk back to Moraig, certainty thudded in her chest. She knew—she knew —her mystery Scotsman had come for her.
    Randolph’s threats and barbs fell away to an odd state of reassurance. If she could just speak with the man, she suspected she would find some answers, and of a better sort than those sought by her cousin, who was heading into town and tilting at shadows.
    She whirled, her skirts in hand and the kitten bouncing in her bodice, and hurried toward the house. She stumbled into the sudden darkness, the rented cottage’s musty interior balanced