Page 72 of To Wed an Heiress
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to look so disreputable.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mercy. You’ve come through a storm.”
He startled her again by placing both of her feet in the bowl.
“Irene isn’t going to be pleased if you’re using one of her cooking bowls,” she said.
He grinned up at her. “I wouldn’t have the courage. We keep this bowl around for nights such as this.”
“Do you often go traipsing through the glen in the middle of a storm?”
“I do not,” he said. “I have too much sense.”
Before she could offer a rebuttal to his comment, he added, “Nor have I been as desperate as you, Mercy.”
She sat back in the chair, watching him wash her feet. They were beginning to prickle, almost like feeling was coming back to them. When she said as much, he only nodded.
His hands were very gentle. No one had ever washed her feet, at least since she was a baby. She wondered if his touch was due to his training as a physician or whether it was just something natural to him.
She hadn’t told him the whole truth. She really didn’t want to leave Scotland. She didn’t want to leave him. There was no other alternative, however.
“We need to get you dry,” he said.
She looked down at her dress.
He stood and went to the cupboard, grabbing a length of toweling before returning and removing her feet from the bowl. He dried them one by one, still gentle.
“Has Gregory threatened you?”
She shook her head. “No, but my grandmother is set on arranging my wedding at any moment.” At his look of surprise, she asked, “Can that even happen in Scotland?”
“We have some odd marriage laws here in Scotland, but I don’t know if they apply to Americans.”
“Well, she’ll make sure there’s a way. She informed me that, in order not to shame the family, I need to marry Gregory. I’m not going to marry him, but even Gregory doesn’t accept that. I’ve told him a dozen times that I’ve no intention of marrying him and he only laughs.”
He came and sat beside her.
“What can I do?”
She almost kissed him again, right then and there. She was so grateful for his offer that she thought she might weep.
“I was going to ask for your help.” She nudged the valise with her bare foot, then bent to open it, revealing the cache of money. “But I was more than willing to pay you.”
If she hadn’t been watching him so closely, she would’ve missed the look that flashed over his face. Had she insulted him?
“I wanted to get to Inverness,” she said. “In order to book passage back to America.”
“On your own?”
She shook her head. “That was the second part of what I was going to ask you. I was hoping that Irene could get word to her sister and that Ruthie could leave the house and meet me here.”
He didn’t say anything for such a long time that she decided she had insulted him. How did she make reparations for that?
“I didn’t know Connor hadn’t returned,” she said. “Or that Irene wasn’t here.”
What was she going to do now?
Lennox stood, picked up the bowl, and went to dump out the water. When he returned, he held out his hand to her.
