The MacGregor's Lady by Grace Burrowes Page A

do.”
    Despite the conviction in his words, old Fenimore was ill. Malcolm Macallan could smell it on him, the way a child called down from the schoolroom could smell an upcoming beating on the fumes of his father’s breath. “Why would I treat family so shabbily, Uncle?”
    “I am not your uncle, and you will do as I say or the sum advanced to you each quarter will disappear like that.” Fenimore snapped bony, liver-spotted fingers, his signet ring loose above swollen joints.
    Malcolm paced around the study, which was heated to stifling—appropriately enough—and rife with the smell of camphor and decrepitude. He paused before an arrangement of decanters on the sideboard and began lifting the stoppers, sniffing them one by one to chase the scent of decline from his nose. “Your remittance was late last quarter, my lord. Time to get a solicitor whose education started before the turn of the century.”
    They were cousins at two removes, but for all the affection between them, it might have been twenty.
    “Perhaps the remittance was late because you’ve been tarrying on English soil too long. The likes of you belong in the sewers of Paris. In my day, your kind were hung by the neck as a public spectacle.”
    Where Malcolm belonged was Greece, Denmark, or somewhere a fellow wasn’t defined solely by the nature of the orifices he’d penetrated with his erect cock as a schoolboy.
    “I like Asher. What has he done to deserve marriage to a Colonial who likely squints and trots around with a pet squirrel on her shoulder?”
    The old man had to work to suppress a smile at that description. “He has deserted his responsibility for years on end, left his family to weather the results of the famine without his title to aid them, allowed his only niece to be all but snatched into the hands of the Marquess of Quinworth, and reduced his brother Ian to assuming the title and taking in paying guests—for the love of God—before Ian would apply for funds from the earldom’s trusts.”
    Malcolm chose a gentle whiskey, one aged in barrels that hadn’t been very heavily treated with peat smoke, or perhaps not peated at all. Even in their distilling, the MacGregors took odd starts as often as hares on the heath changed direction.
    “You’re saying Asher has been independent and proud. Terrible shortcomings in a Scottish laird.” Malcolm saluted Fenimore with his drink to add a further dash of sand in the old man’s gears.
    “He’s neglected every one of his duties, and by God, he will not neglect them any longer. The American will understand a heathen like Balfour. She’ll put up with his uncouth manners and bring a sizable dowry to the bargain. She’s used goods, and a title, even a Scottish title, is far more than she ought to expect. The two of them deserve each other.”
    Trust the old man to know everybody’s business, even as he was being measured for his shroud, and trust him too, to judge all in his ambit and pass sentence on them as well.
    Malcolm wanted no part of Fenimore’s game, and yet… a man had to eat. Even frittering his life away in Paris, a man had to eat, and so did his dependents.
    “If I’m to do the pretty on the London social stage this spring, I will need a house, a wardrobe, a coach-and-pair as well as a riding horse. I might very well have to pursue the lovebirds to the house parties and perhaps even into the fall Season. The paltry sum you send to ensure I remain at a safe distance from home is not adequate for the scheme you set me to now, Fenimore.”
    The baron twitched the afghan over his knees—the MacGregor plaid, though the MacGregors wanted no part of him—licked old, colorless lips, and stared at the fire. “You are unnatural in so many ways.”
    The accusation hardly qualified as an insult, except for the quiet despair with which Fenimore spoke. Malcolm took a sip of lovely libation and struggled against something close to pity—guilt, perhaps? Not for seizing an advantage