“It was right easy,” Taran boasted. “We just went in, snatched them, and left. No one even put up a fuss.”
Lord Oakley let out a long, agonized breath. “How is that possible? Surely your parents . . .”
Fiona Chisholm cleared her throat. “I think the guests thought it was all part of the entertainment.”
Rocheforte started laughing again.
“How can you find this funny?” Lord Oakley demanded.
“How can you not?” Rocheforte sputtered.
“I feel faint,” Marilla twittered.
“You do not,” Catriona snapped. Because really, the whole thing was bad enough without Marilla’s nonsense.
Marilla gasped in outrage, and Catriona had no doubt that she would have hissed something monstrously insulting if they had not an audience of unmarried gentlemen.
“Might we go inside?” the Duke of Bretton asked, each syllable icy sharp.
“Of course,” Lord Oakley replied quickly. “Come in, everyone. We will get this sorted out and have everyone back on their way home”—he glared at his uncle at that—“posthaste.”
“We can’t go home,” Catriona said.
“What do you mean?”
“The roads are impassable.”
Lord Oakley stared at her.
“It’s a miracle we even made it here,” she told him. “We certainly cannot return tonight. There is no moon, and”—she looked up at the sky—“it’s going to snow again.”
“How do you know?” Lord Oakley asked, with perhaps more than a touch of desperation.
She tried not to stare at him as if he were an idiot, she really did, but his white-blond hair was practically glowing in the moonlight, and with his mouth still open in horror, he looked like a traumatized owl. “I have lived here my entire life,” she finally said. “I know when it’s going to snow.”
His reply was something that should never be uttered in front of a gently born female, but given the circumstances, Catriona opted to take no offense.
“Let’s get inside,” he muttered, and after a moment of confusion, they all piled into the castle.
Catriona had been to Finovair Castle, of course; Taran Ferguson and his crumbling abode was the Burnses’ third-closest neighbor. But she’d never been so late at night, after most of the fires had been allowed to die down. It was so cold the air had teeth, and none of the young ladies was wearing a coat or pelisse. Catriona’s gown had been sensibly tailored with long sleeves, as had Fiona’s, but Lady Cecily’s powder blue confection had little cap sleeves, and Marilla’s practically bared her shoulders.
“There’s a fire in the drawing room,” Lord Oakley said, hurrying everyone along. It was difficult to believe that he was related to Taran; they looked nothing alike, and as they passed the candlelit sconces, Catriona could see that Lord Oakley’s features were uncommonly stern and severe.
As opposed to Mr. Lord Rocheforte, who had one of those faces that looked as if it didn’t know how not to smile. He was chuckling as they made their way through the cavernous great hall, although Catriona did hear him say to the duke, “Oh, come now, Bret, surely you see the humor in this.”
Catriona pricked up her ears, but she didn’t hear “Bret’s” response. She didn’t dare steal a glance at the duke, not when they were all in such close proximity. There was something about him that made her feel uneasy, and it wasn’t just the fact that he was certainly the highest-ranking individual to whom she had ever been introduced.
Except she hadn’t been introduced to him. She’d only watched him from across the Maycott ballroom, as had the rest of the local peons. The Earl of Maycott was one of the richest men in England, and heaven only knew why he had wanted his own Scottish castle, but want it he had, badly enough to spend a fortune restoring Bellemere to a level of magnificence that Catriona was fairly certain it had never enjoyed, even when it was in its supposed glory.
Once the work was completed, the Maycotts had decided to hold a ball, inviting a few of their London friends but, for the most part, the local gentry. Only so that their first annual Icicle Ball would be a crush.
Or at least that was what the local gossips said. And while Catriona knew better than to believe everything she heard, she always listened.
The Chisholm daughters had been brought to meet the duke, of course. They were heiresses, quite possibly the only heiresses this corner of Scotland had ever seen, and they’d each had a season in London. But not Catriona. Her father was a local squire, and her mother was the daughter of a local squire, and as Catriona fully expected one day to marry a local squire, she didn’t see much sense in begging an introduction to the visiting aristocracy.
Until.
Catriona still wasn’t sure how she had come to be snatched up along with Lady Cecily and the Chisholm daughters, but she’d been the first to be tossed into the carriage. She’d landed squarely atop the duke, who responded first with a snore, and then with a frisky hand to her bottom.
Then he’d called her Delilah and started nuzzling her neck!
She’d jumped away before she could dwell upon the fact that it all felt rather nice, and then the duke had fallen back asleep.
Someone, Catriona had decided acerbically, had got into the Maycotts’ good brandy.
Catriona had only a minute alone with the sleeping duke before the other three ladies were tossed into the carriage, and then he had woken up. She shuddered to think how much brandy he’d have had to drink to sleep through that. Marilla was shrieking, Lady Cecily was banging on the ceiling with her fist, and Fiona was yelling at Marilla, trying to get her to shut up.
Sisters the Chisholm girls might be, but there had never been any love lost there.
The duke had tried to get everyone to be quiet, but even he wasn’t able to break through the din until he bellowed, “Silence!”
It was at that moment that Catriona realized that the other ladies had not yet noticed he was in the carriage. Lady Cecily’s jaw dropped so fast Catriona was surprised it stayed hinged. And Marilla—good Lord, but Catriona had never liked Marilla—she had been immediately tossed onto his lap by a nonexistent bump in the road.
He had not, Catriona had noticed with some satisfaction, responded by squeezing her bottom.
She wasn’t certain how long they’d been trapped in the swiftly moving carriage. Ninety minutes at least, perhaps two hours. Long enough for the duke to announce that no one was to utter a sound until they arrived at their godforsaken destination. Then he went back to sleep.
Or if not sleep, then a crackingly good imitation of it. Even Marilla had not dared to disturb him.
But whatever good sense Marilla possessed had fled when she’d stepped out of the carriage, because now she was chattering to the duke like an outraged magpie, clutching his arm—his arm!—as she went on about “shocking” this and “insupportable” that.