a fortnight later, she tells me she won’t marry me after all.”
No wonder Robbie looked exhausted. He, too, had spent many a night these past few months tossing and turning, thinking about his feelings for Catriona McNare. What he’d done and not done, said or should have said. Although he would never have sought solace in a bottle as he feared Robbie had been doing, he could certainly appreciate the inclination to want to drown his sorrows and seek the comforting company of an old friend. “I’m very sorry, Robbie.”
“I knew I could count on you to be sympathetic,” Robbie said with a grin. “And in one way, I suppose I should count myself lucky. Do you know what her father was before he inherited the title? A wool merchant. A very rich wool merchant, but a wool merchant nonetheless.”
The ceiling collapsing on Gordon’s head couldn’t have shocked him more. A rich wool merchant would have warehouses, or access to them.
“He was so distantly related to the late earl,” Robbie continued without looking at his silent friend, “it came as a shock to everybody—including him, I gather. And Moira herself can be eccentric. She has a positive mania about educating the poor. Wants to build a school for the children of Dunbrachie, although what they’d do with an education I have no idea. It’s not like most of the men in Dunbrachie want a school, either.”
If it was the same woman—and Gordon clung to the fast-diminishing hope that he was still jumping to the wrong conclusion—why had she broken the engagement? To be sure, Robbie could be impulsive and wasn’t prone to planning, but he was handsome, rich and titled, loyal and good-natured. Many a nobleman’s daughter could, and did, do worse.
“It would have been upsetting if she’d refused when I’d asked her, but I daresay I would have gotten over it soon enough. After all, there are plenty of other attractive, rich and nobly born women who would welcome my attention.”
Whoever the woman was, Gordon could certainly understand Robbie’s bitterness. Still, there was an arrogance in his tone that made it more difficult to sympathize with his friend. On the other hand, would he not have sounded so bitter and defensive if someone had asked him what was troubling him lately, too?
Robbie walked to the French doors, turned on his heel and made a sweeping gesture with the hand holding his empty glass. “Who does Moira MacMurdaugh think she is, that she can make a fool out of Sir Robert McStuart? She’s the fool if she thinks I’m simply going to let her humiliate me. That’s why I need your help, Gordo.” He straightened his shoulders and a triumphant gleam came to his bloodshot eyes. “I want to sue Lady Moira MacMurdaugh for breach of promise.”
Now it was as if the floor had given way, too. “You want to sue this woman for breach of promise?” Gordon repeated.
“Exactly.”
Gordon forced himself to try to forget about the woman who might or might not be the one he’d kissed, and think like the solicitor he was. Robbie clearly hadn’t considered all the ramifications of starting a legal action that was generally the province of women. “I can appreciate that you’re upset—”
“Upset? I’m not upset,” Robbie snapped, setting his glass down on an ebony-inlaid side table so hard, Gordon expected it to break. “I simply want her to understand that she can’t go around accepting proposals and rejecting them out of hand. Or don’t you think I have a case?”
Now things were getting even more difficult. Robbie might have a case, but there were other considerations he should take into account, as Gordon proceeded to explain. “If the engagement was public knowledge, you do have some cause of action. However, there’s something else you might want to think about first, Robbie. Dunbrachie is a small village, but this sort of legal activity will likely come to the attention of a wider circle, and probably the press, at least in Scotland. Your—” he hesitated, and chose a word other than humiliation “personal concerns may well become gossip fodder, splashed about the papers and discussed by complete strangers.
“Would it not be better to simply forget what happened? After all, as you yourself said, there have always been women eager for your attention.
“I’m sure you’ll find love again,” he finished, voicing a wish he harbored for himself, a wish that had suddenly seemed far more possible when he’d looked up and seen a beautiful woman trapped in a tree.
“You’re rather missing the point, Gordo,” Robbie said as he threw himself onto the sofa. “I’m not just doing this for myself. I’m doing it for all the other poor sods whose hearts she might break.”
He turned his head and regarded Gordon with a measuring, sidelong look. “If I were a woman in such circumstances, you’d take the case, wouldn’t you?”
“Perhaps,” Gordon replied. He wasn’t really sure what he’d do. However, he truly believed it would do Robbie more harm than good to sue. “What reason did she give for breaking the engagement? She did have a reason, I assume.”
Scowling, Robbie sat up. “She said she didn’t love me,” he replied with more than a hint of defiance, as if such a thing were too ludicrous to be credible.
Given Robbie’s experience with the fairer sex, he might be excused for thinking so. Nevertheless… “Perhaps it’s for the best then,” Gordon replied, repeating the same thing he’d been telling himself ever since he’d met Catriona McNare’s fiancé.
Robbie’s brows lowered and his mouth got that stubborn set Gordon well remembered. “She said she could never love a man like me.”
A man like Robbie, who was handsome and charming and a good friend? “What on earth did she mean by that?”
Robbie jumped to his feet and strode to the window. “It means she doesn’t understand how the upper class lives. I haven’t committed any crime. I haven’t done anything every nobleman in Scotland or England and certainly France hasn’t done before me. She claims to be a lady, yet she broke the engagement over a trifle.”
If he had done something to cause her to change her mind, that made a difference. “I think you’d better tell me what exactly this ‘trifle’ was.”
Robbie didn’t answer right away. First he marched to the cabinet and poured himself another drink, making Gordon wonder if too much drink was the trifle, and if so, it was indeed no trifle. No woman of sense wanted to marry a drunkard.
“If I’m to act as your solicitor in this matter, Robbie, I have to know all the details,” Gordon said quietly, beginning to feel a bit sorry that he’d accepted Robbie’s invitation.
He thought his friend had asked him there because they were friends and it had been a long time since they’d seen each other, not because he needed legal advice, yet now there was a possibility he was going to get embroiled in a case he’d prefer to avoid.
Robbie gulped down his whiskey and when he looked at Gordon again, he appeared even more haggard, as if telling the truth was physically painful. Nevertheless, he smiled his merry, charming smile—only this time, it seemed more like a death’s-head grin to Gordon.
“No need to look so stern, Gordo. It was only a dalliance with one of the maids, the sort of thing that goes on all the time.”
He should have guessed it would be something like this. Robbie had always had “high spirits,” as their headmaster had called it when Robbie had been discovered with one of the maids at school. Indeed, he’d been famous for his
