Kilgannon Read Online Free PDF

she was gone I did not move, reluctant to lose Alex in a roomful of people. Rowena rose, however, and Alex stood and made the necessary polite remarks, bowing over her hand. She flounced away in a swish of silk, looking for more cooperative game elsewhere, leaving us alone in the dining room with the footmen. Alex sat down next to me again with a grin, leaning his chin on his hand. "What were we saying, Mary?" he asked, and I laughed. I had no idea.
    We talked while everyone else went to the ballroom and while the staff began clearing, and when they needed us to move we sat at a part of the table already cleared, still talking. Louisa floated in and out of view in the hallway but never approached us. No one approached us, and dimly I became aware that the servants were yawning and putting out tapers. When Louisa and Will and Betty appeared at the dining-room door, I realized that everyone else had gone and the evening was over. Alex looked up at Louisa with a start and stood abruptly, reaching for my hand as I rose next to him. His hand felt warm and strong in mine and I did not want to let go of it, but he released me and we waited at the foot of the table as Louisa approached, my good sense returning with her. I knew we had behaved outrageously and would be the talk of London tomorrow. Before either of us could speak, Louisa stretched out her hand to him. "Good night, Alex," she said graciously. "You have monopolized my niece enough for your first meeting."
    "I am sorry," Alex began, but she waved his words away.
    "Hush, I am too exhausted to hear anything. You may call on me soon to apologize. Good night, Alex." He bowed over her hand and with a smile to me excused himself. Will shook his hand. Betty yawned. And then Alex was gone. I waited for Louisa and Will's comments, but neither said a thing except good night. I went to my room in a daze, still feeling the touch of his hand in mine.
    In the morning I felt the same, and I thought of Alex with an excitement that was almost intoxicating. Whatever London thought of us, I had enjoyed our conversations and revisited them now. He was the tenth Earl of Kilgannon, but he had dismissed it with a shrug, saying that he'd been raised to it and that it was more important to him that he was the chief of the MacGannon clan. "It's a vast responsibility, being the laird at home," he'd said, "not like in England, where ye just wear nice clothes and collect yer rents and remember yer title. In the Highlands, to be a laird means ye have many tasks that only ye can see to and ye have the responsibility to see that all yer kin are well fed and prosperous. If ye fail they starve." He had been so serious that I did not have the heart to laugh at his description of peerage in England nor to correct his perception.
    How different our lives had been, I had thought as I listened to him talk. He was the oldest of the four children of Ian and Margaret, but two of the children had died in childhood, leaving Alex and his brother Malcolm. Alex's father had died when Alex was nineteen, and he had assumed the leadership of the clan. Two years later he had married Sorcha MacDonald, as his parents had pledged when he was a boy, and they had had two sons, Ian and Jamie. Alex's mother had died the year after Jamie's birth, and soon after that Alex had been asked to go to France as a show of unity to Queen Anne. While he was there Sorcha had died. Ian was four now and Jamie two and Alex the leader of five hundred.
    In contrast my life had been uneventful. Raised at Mountgarden in Warwickshire, on the lands my father had inherited, with Will as my companion and ally, I had been pampered and protected. It was only in the last few years, when my father had died and my mother became ill, that any unpleasantness had touched my life, and even now I was cared for and comforted by my aunt and friends. My greatest accomplishment thus far had been to resist marrying the men paraded before me, but even that had been