surprised were we attacked by those wild men,” Belinda said, shuddering.
“They didn’t seem so very wild in the end, did they?” Daisy asked. She thought of the warnings her friends had given her before she’d departed for Scotland. She’d invited several ladies over for tea. “What trouble you’ll find there, what with all the traitors among them,” Lady Dinsmore had cried. “You can’t go! I’ve heard they slaughter the English.”
“They’re savages,” Lady Whitcomb had added gravely. “They have been unnaturally influenced by the Stuarts and are quite impossibly untrustworthy! You won’t be safe for a moment among them—everyone knows the greatest prize is an Englishwoman.”
Daisy didn’t share their pessimistic view. She’d been married to a man who was himself a Scot by blood, and he had never given her any reason to believe she should fear them. Then again, she’d never seen a Scot like the one she’d encountered today.
Neither had Belinda apparently, for her head snapped around, her brows almost to her hairline. “I thank the good Lord we escaped unharmed!”
Ellis lifted his head and looked at his mother, an expression of worry on his face. Daisy smiled reassuringly and hugged him to her side. “We are safe, darling.”
She’d often privately wondered if she’d done something while she carried the boy to produce such a fretful, fearful child. What else could explain it? He was nine years old and had never wanted for anything, had no outward ailments to speak of, and yet he was so timid. Their London physician had warned Daisy a few years ago that her son suffered from a weak constitution. “No doubt he shall be sickly all his life,” he’d said as he’d closed his bag.
That news was not what Daisy had expected, and she’d looked at him with confusion. “Sickly? What do you mean?”
“Just that.” The physician had no regard for her, much less Ellis, who was old enough to understand what he’d said.
“Do you mean he will have a chronic ague?” Daisy had asked, for certainly that particular winter, it had seemed her son was perpetually ill. And then she’d led the physician from Ellis’s bedside and whispered, “Or something worse?”
The physician had shrugged and said absently, “One never knows how these things will manifest themselves.”
“I beg your pardon, sir, but that is why I sent for you,” she’d said impatiently. “So that you might explain to me what his illness is and how it may manifest itself.”
“Lady Chatwick.” The physician had sighed, as if she was testing his patience, then had said quite loudly, “You will not understand the nuances of the boy’s medical constitution. You must trust me when I tell you that he will never be a robust lad.”
Ellis had burst into tears as one might expect having just heard such a callous delivery about the state of one’s health. Daisy had known then that the physician meant only to collect his fee and didn’t care a whit for her son. “Then we have a problem, sir, for I don’t trust you at all,” she’d said, then called for the butler to dispatch the good doctor.
When she’d complained of his demeanor later that evening, her husband had chastised her for being disrespectful to the doctor.
Nevertheless, Daisy refused to believe the man’s prediction of Ellis’s future. Frankly, her son’s health was the second reason Daisy had undertaken what had become an increasingly dangerous journey north.
Robert was the first reason. If Robert had only reached her in time, this travel might well have been avoided.
She mindlessly touched his letter, kept safe in the pocket of her gown. I will come with great haste as soon as my commission has ended, he’d written her.
But not soon enough, as it turned out.
“If they don’t find us now, they’ll surely find us at this lodge,” Belinda warned, settling back against the squabs, still intent on worrying them all.
“We are perfectly safe,” Daisy said, and tried to convey a warning to her cousin with her expression, which, naturally, Belinda did not notice. Daisy smiled and squeezed Ellis’s knee. “Pay Cousin Belinda no mind, darling. It’s been a trying day for us all.”
“I am not unreasonable in my concern,” Belinda said. “We were all of us frightened by those dangerous men.”
“Need I remind you that those dangerous men offered to repair our wheel?” Daisy asked, then impulsively covered Ellis’s ears with her hands and leaned forward, whispering, “Forget that now, darling. Did you not see the gentleman? He was so...alluring.”
Belinda blinked. “The Scotsman? Alluring? Daisy!” She gasped, clearly appalled. “What is the matter with you? Scotsmen are not alluring. They are traitors to the Crown!”
Were she not so exhausted, Daisy would have argued that Belinda was not acquainted with any Scotsmen, and, therefore, couldn’t know if they were all or any of them Jacobites. Instead she was disappointed that Belinda had not noticed the man’s allure. She could not share in the observation of how a man with his extraordinary presence could be found on an abandoned road in what seemed the most remote region of the earth. With a sigh, she let go of Ellis’s ears and turned her gaze to the grimy window as Belinda began to speculate if they would be forced to camp on the road tonight.
He’d been so utterly unexpected. Daisy flushed again, thinking about the Scotsman. Oh, but she was a hopeless cause. Quite possibly even mad! She shuddered to think how foolishly beguiled she’d been, particularly in the face of what could have been terrible danger. She’d long been an admirer of healthy men, but this...this bordered on lunacy.
And yet...she hoped she might see him again one day. She would very much like to make him smile, to see the light she was certain could be coaxed from those blue eyes under the right circumstances. She quivered a little, imagining just how she might.
Oh yes, she was mad—completely and utterly mad.
This tendency to fantasy was something that had been slowly building in Daisy since her husband’s death more than two years ago. She’d since dabbled liberally in the art of flirtation in salons across Mayfair, had imagined any number of handsome gentlemen in varying degrees of compromise, so much so that now that tendency often felt impossible to control. The truth was that Daisy very much missed a man’s touch.
Her husband, Clive, had been robust when her marriage was arranged, but he’d contracted a wasting illness soon after Ellis’s birth. In the last years of his life, he’d suffered gravely, too sick to be a father, too sick to care for her as a husband ought. Now, at nine and twenty, Daisy felt desire flowing in the vast physical wasteland of her life like a river that had overrun its banks.
Her steady stream of suitors since Clive’s death were the raging storm waters that fed that river.
But the Scotsman was not a suitor, and she thought of him in an entirely different light. She closed her eyes and imagined being kidnapped by him, carried off on the back of his horse, tossed onto a bed high in some rustic castle. She imagined his large hands on her body. She imagined resisting him at first, then succumbing to his expert touch. She imagined feeling his body, hot and thick inside her, and those blue eyes boring into her as she found her release.
Daisy shifted uncomfortably.
“Are
