Page 1 of Irresistible
Prologue
Edinburgh, Scotland, August 1815
The low ceiling and dark beams of the Oak and Thistle ought to have felt claustrophobic, but to Dougal MacNair, the space was a warm hug, holding him close after too much time away. Glancing across the small, worn table at his cousin, Robert Clark, who was just three years younger than Dougal’s twenty-eight, he felt a surge of affection. He was only sorry it had taken the sudden death of his brother to bring him home.
“Ye’re going to be the earl, then?” Robbie asked.
“Eventually.” Dougal still couldn’t quite believe it. He’d created a life for himself—one that he liked very much—that didn’t include being an earl or even living in Scotland. Now he had to change everything. On top of losing Alistair, it was too much to contemplate. And so he preferred to avoid thinking about it too deeply. At least, not yet. The time would come, very soon, probably, when he’d have to face it. For now, he just wanted to be with his family, both here in Edinburgh and just north near Stirling, where his father’s seat, Stagfield, was located.
A tall Black man brought tankards of ale and deposited them on the table. “If we weren’t busy, I’d plant myself right next to ye and hear what ye have to say.”
Dougal looked up at his Uncle Rob and nodded. “I know. Just as I know Robbie will tell you everything.” Well, almost everything. As cousins, they shared certain secrets.
Uncle Rob grunted. “Aye, he will. I’m glad ye made it to town.” Town being the Old Town of Edinburgh, where Rob’s tavern was tucked into a basement along the Lawn Market. Rob owned the building and leased out several floors. He and his family lodged on the second floor. The New Town, where Dougal’s father owned a new, fashionable house in Charlotte Square, was not at all what Uncle Rob had meant. Dougal might stay there when he came to Edinburgh, but this was as much a home to him.
Leaving them alone, Uncle Rob returned to the bar on the other side of the common area. Dougal took a long drink of ale, the taste taking him back to the many summers he’d spent here before he’d gone south to Oxford. He looked over at Robbie. “When are you going to start making your own ale?”
“Och, not for a while yet. I just started the apprenticeship last winter.” He sipped his ale and narrowed one eye at Dougal as he set his tankard back down. “Ye sound like my father.”
“We’re both enthusiastic about your future. You can hardly blame us.”
Robbie stared at him a moment. “What about yer future? Ye going back to London?”
That answer fell firmly in the category Dougal preferred not to think about at the moment. “Yes, at some point.” He at least wanted to meet with his superior at the Foreign Office, even if it meant he wouldn’t complete another mission. The thought of that made him anxious. He had unfinished work.
“I dinna think your father will like that.”
Perhaps not, but he would understand. Still, Dougal hated leaving him, and it was more than just the grief of losing Alistair. So much more that Dougal wasn’t yet ready to face. “He knows I need to go back, at least for a short while.”
“Yer father’s a good man, and he loves ye like no other,” Robbie said with a confident nod before taking another pull from his tankard.
What he said was true, and it was remarkable because Dougal’s father wasn’t his sire. He was white, just as Dougal’s mother had been white. She’d stepped outside their marriage, which hadn’t troubled her husband. Their union wasn’t a love match, and after four children, they’d agreed to take comfort where they might since they would not with each other.
When Dougal’s mother’s affair with a Black ship captain had resulted in a child, Dougal’s father hadn’t hesitated to claim the babe as his own son. He’d raised Dougal with love and ensured that no one questioned Dougal’s parentage—at least not to their faces. There were always whispers. It wasn’t unusual for a man to raise his wife’s bastard as his own, but in Dougal’s case, it was rather obvious he wasn’t the product of his two white parents. He was a Black man in a white household, and there was no hiding that. Nor did Dougal’s father—or any of the rest of his family, which had included another brother besides Alistair and two sisters—make any attempt to do so. They loved and included Dougal as one of their own.
That hadn’t meant that Dougal didn’t notice he looked different from them. When he asked his mother about that, she never wanted to discuss it. So he’d asked his father, and he too had avoided answering, which Dougal had later learned had been in deference to his wife’s wishes. She hadn’t wanted Dougal to meet his Black relatives. Aunt Mairi said it was because she feared they would want to take him away, and that Dougal would want to go.
After his mother died when Dougal was eight, his father had brought him to this very tavern to meet his sire’s family. By then, Captain John Clark had perished at sea when his ship had gone down in a storm, but the rest of the family had been thrilled to learn that John had a son. They had, in fact, asked if they could have him, but Dougal hadn’t wanted to leave his father. Instead, they’d agreed that Dougal would spend time with them each year when the earl and his family came to Edinburgh.
Robbie sat back in his chair and smirked as he regarded Dougal. “Will ye still come here when ye’re the earl?”
Dougal scowled at him. “Of course I will. Why would you think otherwise?”
Leaning forward, Robbie sobered. “I was only jesting. I know ye’ll still come here. We’d drag ye if necessary.”
“It would never be necessary.” They were his family, just as his father and the white brother he’d recently lost to an accident were. “Forgive my bad humor.”
“To be expected as ye’re grieving.” Robbie’s dark eyes gleamed with sympathy. “We’re all so verra sorry. We loved Alistair too. Family is family.”
That was a phrase they all shared. So much that it ought to have been their family motto. In addition to the brother he’d just lost, Dougal had lost another brother along with their mother to fever. He also had two white sisters who were long married with children of their own. Here in Old Town, he had Robbie, his Uncle Rob and Aunt Mairi, several other cousins, and another aunt and uncle who was a tailor. They’d all come to Stagfield to mourn with Dougal and his father. Family was family.
“I know you loved him,” Dougal said quietly. “That has always meant a great deal to me.” Just as it had always touched him that his white family loved his Black family. They’d all come together—for him.
“What will happen with your position in London?” Robbie knew the truth of Dougal’s life in England, that he worked in a…special capacity for the Foreign Office. That was because Robbie had been with Dougal in the Black Watch when Dougal had been recruited for this work. He was the only person, outside of the people he worked with, who was aware. Dougal had never told his father or his brother. He shouldn’t have even told Robbie, but he’d been there and discovered what was going on. Besides, Dougal supposed he’d wanted, or needed, to tell someone.
And now Dougal had to consider whether he would tell Robbie another secret. About his father. He wanted to, but the words wouldn’t come. If he spoke them, they would become all too real, and he wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.
“I’ll have to tell them I’m leaving. But there’s something I’m rather desperate to do first.” Dougal spoke softly so no one could hear him.
