Page 77 of What a Scot Wants
“We will see,” he said. “Now eat.”
He stalked forward with a brown paper bag, and the smell of the Cornish pasties inside made her eyes water. She hadn’t eaten today, and while she didn’t want to accept anything from Silas, if it was one thing she’d learned from the survivors at Haven, it was that she would need her strength…strength to fight or to flee.
Imogen might be a woman and considered of little value, but she was a fighter. A warrior. She’d battled for every scrap of her independence. She fought daily for the lives of others. She wouldn’t give up now.
Chapter Twenty-One
“I am no’ wearingthat!”
Ronan scowled at the gaudy waistcoat that Riverley’s personal tailor had brought in from Paris. Though Julien was absent, at home with his wife who was about to birth her second child, Ronan wished the man was here so he could plant him a facer. As if he would ever wear such a garish thing. It was a jest, he knew, given when Julien had met Imogen. He grinned. Perhaps heshouldwear it. The pale pink fabric with the darker embroidered rosebuds would make her smile.
Monsieur Martin inspected the waistcoat that he’d held up for Ronan to see, frowning, as if he didn’t see what Ronan did. “But Lord Riverley wrote that this was your color of choice, Your Grace. That your engagement ball would be all pink.”
Ronan poured himself a whisky and swallowed it in one gulp. “Of course he did, that horse’s arse.”
The tailor lowered the pink waistcoat with a sudden look of understanding. The man likely knew his best client well enough to guess what Riverley had been up to.
“It’s finely done, Monsieur Martin, but I believe my fiancée has changed her mind about the colors for the ball.”
An odd pounding happened inside Ronan’s chest as he sat down in the chair before the hearth. Imogen had changed her mind about everything. She actually wanted to marry him, and, astoundingly, the idea didn’t strike him as terrible at all. In fact, the more he mulled it over, the lighter his limbs seemed to become. The faster his heart seemed to pump. Not in alarm, but with what he was very cautiously, very dubiously pinning down as excitement.
Excited. To marry. To marryImogen.
Ronan stood from the chair and went for another finger of whisky. He’d spent the night so focused on controlling his anger in regard to Silas Calder and the man’s underhanded designs on Imogen that he hadn’t spent nearly enough time sorting through the fact that he had willfully pledged himself to her. He couldn’t believe he was actually thinking it, but he didn’t regret it in the least.
And that slightly scared him.
“Might I suggest a deep blue, Your Grace?”
He turned toward the tailor, distracted. “Blue?”
“For your new waistcoat.”
“Right. Aye. And send that other one up to Duncraigh, will ye? We both ken Riverley will wear it with pleasure.”
The tailor was taking Ronan’s measurements for the new design when Vickers entered the room.
“Your Grace, Lady Tarbendale is here to see you. She says it’s quite urgent.”
Vickers hadn’t stopped speaking before Aisla edged her way into the sitting room, her eyes bright and brows pinched.
“Aisla?” Ronan stepped away from the center of the room and Monsieur Martin’s tapes and toward her. “What is it? News from Maclaren? Or Duncraigh?”
The drawn expression on his sister-in-law’s face worried him. Makenna’s bairn was due, and he knew how perilous childbirth could be.
“No news from Scotland,” she assured him quickly. “It’s Imogen.”
His legs went to stone. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
“I was to meet her at Gunter’s two hours ago. When she didn’t arrive, I went to Kincaid Manor but was told she had left long before. She should have arrived in time.”
“What of their driver?” Ronan asked, his pulse slowing even as his mind started to pick up speed.
“No driver. Imogen went on foot. Gunter’s is only a few blocks from Kincaid Manor,” Aisla replied. “No one has seen her. Ronan, I’m worried. It’s not like her.”
“Could she have thought ye were meeting elsewhere?” he asked, trying to think of all possibilities before jumping to the next one: that something untoward had happened.
“She’s not an idiot,” Aisla scoffed. “We’ve only ever met at Gunter’s.”
