Read Online The MacGregor's Lady by Grace Burrowes - Free Book Online Page A

this good, though, or cuddled this agreeably. Canadian winters might have worn an entirely different face if they had.
    He woke several times in the night, cozy and warm, the fragrance of Miss Hannah Cooper’s hair tickling his nose. She smelled incongruously of flowers and lavender.
    Were their situation not so dire, his unruly body would no doubt be getting ideas . To Asher’s relief, cuddling, while comfortable and even comforting, did not engender overwhelming sexual cravings.
    Evidence that even his long-deprived intimate parts comprehended the folly of entertaining notions about a woman determined to return to her side of the ocean without a husband, fiancé, or similar inconvenience.
    ***
    “Beastly damned weather, Laird.”
    Maxwell Lockhart Fenimore was laird of nothing more than a constant bellyache, sore joints, and a lot of bleating sheep, but Evan Draper was a loyal retainer and of mature years himself—also stubborn as hell.
    “It’s merely cold and snow, Draper. This is Scotland, and we excel at cold and snow. Did Balfour get under way, or is he still fussing about in Edinburgh?” Though thank God the boy was fussing about on Scottish soil at long last.
    “They left the town house for the train station early this morning,” Draper reported. “Shall I build up the fire, sir?”
    Fenimore’s study was a veritable camphor-scented inferno, and yet, the ache in his joints was unrelenting. “You’ll provoke my cough if you add coal to that fire. Tell me about the Americans.”
    “Perhaps your cough might benefit from a wee dram, Laird.” Meaning Draper was in want of a wee dram or three, but then, the man had spent much of his day braving the elements, and everybody benefited from an occasional tot.
    “Help yourself to the decanters, you reiving ingrate.” Had Fenimore been a few years younger, he would have risen to pour the man a drink himself. Instead he twitched at the tartan over his knees and silently cursed old age.
    “Don’t mind if I do. The American girl limps. The aunt tipples or uses the poppy. I chatted up the maids, and they don’t have much good to say about the aunt.” Draper tossed back a shot of whiskey and patted the decanter as if it were a pretty girl’s bum.
    “Draper, have you gone daft?”
    “Oh, aye, years ago. It’s that cold, too, and the drink is that good. Balfour’s being a conscientious host.”
    “He’d better be.”
    Without permission, Draper poured himself a second drink and ambled over to the hearth with it. He turned his backside to the fire, not out of any manners, of course, but because a roaring blaze felt ever so good toasting that part of a fellow’s anatomy. “The American girl sasses Balfour, according to the maids. He seems to like it.”
    This was good news. “You call that a report?”
    “She slipped on the ice, and he carried her nigh five blocks in his arms, all romantic-like. The maids were fair swoonin’ over it.”
    Draper’s grizzled face split into a beatific smile, one the occasional maid found passably tolerable. There was no accounting for the queer starts of females, though Fenimore suspected cold weather might be a factor. A fellow of Draper’s hulking dimensions would give off significant heat.
    “Balfour was a physician before he started running from his birthright. I take it he dealt with any twisted ankles, megrims, or sprains the American came up with?”
    Draper peered into his drink. “He read to her.”
    Outside the wind moaned as only a Scottish winter wind could, but inside, Fenimore felt a spark of hope. “Balfour has years of medical education, the woman’s worth a bloody fortune, and he read to her ?”
    Half of Draper’s whiskey disappeared. “Aye, when they wasn’t arguin’. Even the housekeeper found it quite touchin’.”
    The Edinburgh housekeeper, one Bessie Flaherty, had been old when Roman legions had marched past Arthur’s Seat.
    “Draper, I do not pay you to decimate my stores of whiskey. You