A Winter Wedding: Strangers at the Altar / The Warrior's Winter Bride

‘Has no part in your arrangement. I heard you. Methinks you protest just a little too much.’

‘But do you approve?’ Ainsley said anxiously.

Felicity picked up her pencil again and began to twist it into her hair. ‘I approve of anything that will make you happy. When does the ceremony take place?’

‘The banns are being called on Sunday for the first time. The ceremony will be immediately after the last calling, in three weeks. Will you come, Felicity? I’d like to have you by my side.’

‘Will you promise me that if you change your mind before then, you will speak up? And if you are unhappy at this Strone Bridge place, you will come straight back here, regardless of whether you feel your obligations have been met?’

‘I promise.’

Felicity got to her feet. ‘Then I will be your attendant, if that’s what you want.’ She picked up the bundle of letters and held them out. ‘Make a start on these. I will draw up the advertisement, we’ll run it beside Madame’s column for this month and I will send you a note of the terms once I have them agreed. Will you be disclosing your alter ego to the laird?’

‘Absolutely not! Good grief, no, especially not if I am to— He will think...’

Felicity chuckled gleefully. ‘I see I’ve given you food for thought, at the least. I look forward to reading the results—in the form of Madame’s letters, I mean.’ She hugged Ainsley tightly. ‘I wish you luck. You will write to me, once you are there?’

Ainsley sniffed, kissing her friend on the cheek. ‘You’ll get sick of hearing from me.’ She tucked the letters into the folder, which was already stuffed with the bills she was to hand over to Mr Ballard, Innes’s lawyer.

‘Just one thing,’ Felicity called after her. ‘I’ll wager you five pounds that if your Highlander ever discovers that you are Madame Hera, he’ll be far more interested in finding problems for the pair of you to resolve together than taking umbrage.’

‘Since I shall take very good care that he never finds out, you will lose,’ Ainsley said, laughing as she closed the door behind her.

Chapter Three (#u9fb7ab2a-420a-57fd-8a18-126f472776c9)

Dear Madame Hera,

I have been married for three months to a man whose station in life is very superior to my own. Having moved from a small house with only two servants to a very large manor with a butler and a housekeeper, I find myself in a perfect tizzy some mornings, trying to understand who I should be asking to do what. My husband has suggested turning to his mother for advice, but she obviously thinks he has married beneath him and would see my need for guidance as evidence of this. As it is, I am sure the housekeeper is reporting my every failure in the domestic sphere to my mother-in-law. Only last week, when I committed the cardinal sin of asking the second housemaid to bring me a pot of tea, the woman actually chastised me as if I were a child. Apparently, such requests should be relayed through the footman, and I should not desire to take tea outside the usual hours, whatever these might be.

I love my husband, but I am being made to feel like an upstart in my new home, and I dare not tell him for fear he will start to take on his mother’s opinion of me. Is there some sort of school for new wives I can attend? Please advise me, for I am beginning to wonder if my housekeeper would have made a better wife to my husband than I can.

Timid Mouse

Argyll, July 1840

It was cold here on the west coast. Despite the watery sunshine, a stiff breeze had blown up in the bay at Rhubodach. Innes shivered inside his heavy greatcoat. He’d forgotten how much colder it was here, and it would be colder still in the boat. Sitting on a bandbox a few feet away, Ainsley was reading a letter, clutching the folds of her travelling cloak tightly around her and staring out over the Kyles of Bute. These past three weeks there had been so much business to attend to they’d barely had time to exchange more than a few words. Standing before the altar beside him just a few days ago, she had been almost as complete a stranger to him as the day he’d proposed. Yet in a very short while, they’d be on Strone Bridge, playing the part of a happily married couple.

The dread had been taking a slow hold of him. It had settled inside him with the news of his father’s death. It had grown when he learned the terms of his inheritance, then became subdued when Ainsley agreed to marry him, and even suppressed as they made their arrangements and their vows. But on the coach from Edinburgh to Glasgow it had made itself known again. Then on the paddle steamer Rothesay Castle as they sailed from the Broomilaw docks to the Isle of Bute it took root, and by this afternoon’s journey from Rothesay town to the north part of the Isle of Bute where they now stood waiting, it had manifested itself in this horrible sick feeling, in this illogical but incredibly strong desire to turn tail and run, and to keep running, just as he had done fourteen years before.

He was Innes Drummond, self-made man of fortune and some fame in the business he called his own. He was a man who made his living building bridges, engineering solutions to problems, turning the impossible into reality. Yet standing here on the pebbled shores of Rhubodach bay, he felt as if none of this mattered. He was the second son, his father’s runt, the upstart who had no right to be coming back to Strone Bridge to claim a dead man’s property. The memories of his brother he had worked so long to suppress were lurking just across the water to claim him. On Strone Bridge, Malcolm’s absence would make his death impossible to deny. Guilt was that sick feeling eating away at his stomach. Fear was the hard, cold lump growing inside of him. He had no right to be here. He was afraid that when he arrived, he’d be subsumed, that all he thought he was would be peeled ruthlessly back to expose the pretender beneath.

Innes swore under his breath, long and viciously. And in Gaelic. He noticed that too late, and then swore again in the harsher, more familiar language of his construction workers. Picking up a handful of pebbles, he began to launch them one after the other into the water, noting with faint satisfaction that they fell far out.

‘Impressive.’

He hadn’t heard her moving. How long had she been standing there, watching him? ‘The boat is late.’ Innes made a show of shading his eyes to squint out at the Kyles.

‘You must be nervous,’ Ainsley said. ‘I know I would be, returning after such a long period of time. I expect you’ll be wondering how much has changed.’

Her tone was light, almost indifferent. She was studiously avoiding his gaze, looking out at the water, but he was not fooled. She was an astute observer. One of those people who studied faces, who seemed to have the knack of reading the thoughts of complete strangers. ‘Nothing will have changed,’ Innes said with heavy certainty. ‘My father prided himself on maintaining traditions that were hundreds of years old. You’ll feel as if you’ve stepped back into the eighteenth century.’

Her brows lifted in surprise. He could see the wheels turning in her clever brain, but she chose merely to nod, and perversely, though he knew he would not like it, he wanted to know what she was thinking. ‘Go on. Say it.’

‘It is nothing. Only—you are very much a man of the nineteenth century.’

‘You mean you’re not surprised I left such a backward place.’

‘Such a backward place must be crying out for a man like you.’ Ainsley pushed her windswept hair out of her eyes. ‘I meant that I am not surprised you and your father could not see eye to eye.’

She slipped her gloved hand into his, in the folds of his greatcoat. He twined his fingers around hers, glad of the contact. Ainsley Drummond, his wife. A stranger she might be, but he was glad of her presence, and when she smiled up at him like that, the dread contracted just a little. ‘I think that’s the boat,’ she said, pointing.

It was, and he could see already that Eoin was at the helm. With a determined effort, Innes threw off his black mood. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked, sliding his arm around Ainsley to anchor her to his side.

‘You sound like you’re standing under the gallows, if you don’t mind my saying.’

Innes managed a rigid smile. ‘Judgement Day is what it feels like,’ he said wryly, ‘and I suspect it will be a harsh one.’

* * *

Looking out over the bay, Ainsley’s nerves made themselves known in the form of a fluttering stomach as she watched the little boat approaching. Until now, she had lost herself in the bustle of arrangements, the thrill of the journey. Her first time on a paddle steamer, her first time on the west coast and now her first time in a sailing boat was looming. Then would be her arrival at Strone Bridge with the man who was her husband. She worried at the plain gold band on her finger, inside her glove. She still couldn’t quite believe it. It did not feel at all real. She was now Mrs Drummond, wife of the laird of Strone Bridge, this stranger by her side whose dawning black mood had quite thrown her.

Innes didn’t want to be here, though he was now doing a good job of covering it up. There was a lot going on below the surface of that handsome countenance. Secrets? Or was it merely that he had left his past behind and didn’t want to be faced with it again? She could understand that. It was one of the reasons she’d been happy to leave Edinburgh for a while. Perhaps it was resentment, which was more than understandable, for unlike her, the life Innes was leaving behind was one he loved.

As he hefted their luggage down to the edge of the shoreline, Ainsley watched, distracted by the fluidity of his movements, the long stride over the pebbles, the smooth strength in the way he lifted even the heaviest pieces so effortlessly. She recalled Felicity’s joke about him being a wild Highlander, and wondered if he would wear a plaid when he was back at Strone Bridge. He had the legs for it. A prickle of heat low in her belly made her shiver.

‘Feasgar math.’ The bump of the boat against the tiny jetty made her jump.

Ainsley stared blankly at the man. ‘Good day to you, Mrs Drummond,’ he repeated in a softly lilting accent, at odds with the curt nod he gave her before starting to heave the luggage Innes was handing him into the boat.

‘Oh, good day,’ Ainsley replied.

‘This is Eoin Ferguson,’ Innes told her, ‘an old friend of mine. Eoin, this is my wife.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t speak any Gaelic,’ Ainsley said to the boatman.

‘Have the Gaelic,’ he said to her. ‘We don’t say speak it, we say have it.’

‘And there’s no need to worry, almost everyone on Strone Bridge speaks English,’ Innes said, frowning at the man he claimed for a friend, though Ainsley could see no trace of warmth between the two men.

‘I have never been to the Highlands,’ she said with a bright smile.

‘Strone Bridge is not far north of Glasgow as the crow flies,’ Eoin replied. ‘If you’re expecting us all to be wandering around in plaid and waving claymores, you’ll be disappointed. Are you getting in or not?’

‘Oh, right. Yes.’ She could feel herself flushing, mortified as if he had read her earlier thoughts. He made no move to help her. Seeing Innes’s frown deepen, Ainsley gave him a slight shake of the head, clambering awkwardly and with too much show of leg into the boat. Eoin watched impassively, indicating that she sit on the narrow bench at the front of the dinghy, making a point of folding his arms as she then proceeded to clamber over the luggage stacked mid-ship.

She tried not to feel either slighted or crushed, reminding herself she was a stranger, a Sassenach, a lowlander, who spoke—no, had—no Gaelic and knew nothing of their ways. Innes, his mouth drawn into a tight line, had leaped into the boat, and was deftly untying the rope from the jetty as Eoin tended the sail. She watched the pair of them working silently together as they set out into the water, the contrast between the harmony of their movements stark against the undercurrent of tension that ran between them. It spiked as Innes made to take the tiller.

‘The tide is against us, and I know the currents,’ Eoin said, keeping his hand on the polished wood.