Page 44 of The Scot Who Loved Her

Caroline chattered the entire carriage ride back to Charlotte Square, but again, Olivia couldn’t hear her. She was sitting across from Malcolm, and his heated gaze was on her. His knees pressed intimately to hers. She’d not noticed before how very long his legs were. How very large he was. How he filled the carriage space.

Just as he took up space wherever they were together, including a large portion of her mental property.

“So, tomorrow then?” Caroline was asking.

But Olivia was not sure at all what she’d said about tomorrow. She nodded, even though she was oblivious, too embarrassed to ask what. “Yes.”

Malcolm winged a brow at her, perhaps aware of her distraction. Did he not realizehewas the distraction?

“I’ll bring over the sheet music in the morning, so we can practice,” Caroline said.

And that was when Olivia’s attention snapped back into place. Practice? Sheet music? Oh, dear God, had she just agreed to perform with Caroline?

Nerves and self-preservation kept her from admitting any sort of lack of knowledge. So again, she agreed. “I look forward to it,” she said, when in fact, it felt as though her worst nightmares were coming true.

“As do I,” Malcolm interjected, the wide smile on his face teasing. He’d taken in every aspect of her demeanor and deciphered the whole thing. A man that decoded human behavior that quickly was terrifying.

Olivia’s heart sped up. What in the world had she gotten herself into?

12

Malcolm pulled the timepiece from his pocket. He had about fifteen minutes to break into theLady Edinburghoffice. In broad daylight, he’d not be caught dead going into the lady’s rag magazine. He didn’t care for gossip unless it helped him on his mission. And in this case, he thought it might.

Anything having to do with Olivia, he considered to be involved in his mission. And something she’d said tonight about her sister stuck with him. She’d mentioned that her sister had been fine one day and then slowly slipped into madness that culminated in her breaking into a lord’s London house before her parents sent her up to Edinburgh to be institutionalized.

Malcolm was no expert in the decline of one’s mental faculties or how the brain worked when it came to things like going mad. However, there was something that didn’t sit right with him about this whole situation. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but when his instincts tingled, he refused to let a matter drop until he’d gotten to the bottom of it.

His mind kept coming back to poison. Of course, what could poison have to do with Marian Aston? One of the signs of a slow poisoning was a gradual descent into madness. Of course, paranoia from diseases of the brain could do the same thing. And perhaps he’d never know for sure. Didn’t matter, though—when he was on the case, he was on the case, so he needed to flesh out every possible lead, no matter how twisted.

If Malcolm was on the right track of the Huntford-Helvellyn household being involved somehow in the smuggling ring squirreling stolen goods out of Scotland to France, was it possible Olivia’s sister had found something out beforehand and been afraid? Was she now being quieted, or was that notion too farfetched? Malcolm wasn’t certain. And he needed more details that he was not yet willing to draw out of Olivia. So,Lady Edinburghit was.

Gossip rags always had information that most people forgot about the next day with the new rumors. But those stories were forever etched in the archives.

Picking the lock was easy. Maneuvering in the dark was also easy. Malcolm’s eyes had been trained and accustomed to doing such for years. Once inside the office, the curtains tightly closed to bar anyone from seeing his activities, he lit a single candle so he could read—one thing he wasn’t able to do in the dark. Malcolm opened the wooden cabinets, sifting through old papers until he found the correct dates, and scanned the papers until he found several articles about Marian Aston.

A cartoon showed a lady’s rear-end and legs dangling from the window of a house, and beneath it, the caption read:

Mad Marian hedges bets hanging over the hedges of Lord T’s house.

Lord T… He skimmed the other articles, finding a reference to a Lord Thirlestane, whom he was particularly acquainted with, and in another one, a reference to Paisley. That bastard. He knew the man was up to something. And yet in another article, not mentioning Marian at all, there was mention of Lord T and Lord P losing their shirts at an underground pugilist ring. That made Malcolm smile.

At night, Edinburgh, became Malcolm’s playground. When he wasn’t playing at being a gentleman or spying in a pub on dockhands, he was melting into the crowds at a gaming hell or hedging his bets in the rookery rings on his own victory.

He was going to trap those two lordly bastards, and they’d never see him coming. It was too much of a coincidence that Paisley’s name had come up. He’d not trusted the man since he met him, and it wasn’t simply because he was courting Malcolm’s sister.

The following night, with Lorne, Euan and Alec all dressed the part of lowborn fighters, they made their way to the most popular ring in the rookery, which he happened to know was often visited by those of the upper classes, seeing as how he was one of them.

The underground fighting ring was jam-packed with men and women who were either looking for a fight, winning a few coins, or just watching. The stench was overwhelming. Blood and piss and sweat and spirits. The kind of smells that were always associated with dangerous, dark places. There was a raised and roped platform in the center with spectators crammed around it, and then a square wooden balcony erected around the perimeter of the ring for more viewing.

When at these things, Malcolm and his friends always chose to stay out of sight because that meant out of mind. They’d taken up a spot on an upper balcony to watch, where they wouldn’t be seen as well by the spectators—and thus not recognized. While Lorne, Alec and Euan had not specifically said they wanted to join in, Malcolm was fairly certain by the end, one of them would jump at the chance to show their superior skills.

Of course, Malcolm was killing two birds with one stone here tonight. Not only was he going to burn off some much-needed steam, but he’d heard through the proverbial grapevine that Paisley liked to make wagers at this particular underground. The man never fought, but he was up to his eyeballs in debt, which was why Malcolm assumed he was going after Caroline—unless he was working with Helvellyn and wanted to be closer to Malcolm, all of them unaware he was aware of their idiotic machinations.

Dressed in black—leather breeches, a black shirt, and a black mask—Malcolm rolled up his sleeves to take on his first opponent. The bruiser was easily a head taller than Malcolm, which being as tall as he was himself was a rare sight. He wouldn’t even really call his opponent a man so much as a behemoth. The ring leaders had a good sense of humor, and they were smart. They likely bet on Malcolm to win—because they knew his style, and no matter the odds stacked against him, the odds were in his favor—while the rest of their audience would bet on the beast , and they would lose.

“Nice to meet ye,” Malcolm said with a grin that would look out of place on any other man.

The ogre growled and hunched over, bunching the muscles of his arms to show their power as he bellowed louder, complete with spittle pinging off his scarred and misshapen lips. Aye, ogre was a good description. The man had likely been in so many fights, his head pummeled so often, that he lacked the verbal functions most men had—or at least that was the impression he presented.

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