What Happens in Scotland Read Online Free PDF Page A

like it. Did you get in a fight with your piss pot, then?”
    James squinted up at his brother, absorbing his words like water into sand. As a fledgling solicitor, his life was built on seeing the truth behind a set of given facts, but he was damned if William’s remarks made any kind of sense. He had spent yesterday bent over his desk sorting out the proper legal precedent for damages over a mixed-breed bull jumping the fence to impregnate someone’s prizewinning heifer. His evening had consisted of dinner and several draughts of ale in the local pub house. Now he felt as if he had been hauled in from the knacker’s.
    What had any of that to do with a ruined chamber pot?
    “You don’t know what you are talking about.” James started to shake his head and then decided better of it. Life seemed so much easier when his brain wasn’t bouncing around his skull.
    “Oh that’s rich, coming from a man who doesn’t know where his boots are.” William tossed a pair of battered footwear onto the bed. “ ’Tis a bonny nap you’ve had, nigh on two hours since dawn. But the innkeeper insists on your removal now, I am afraid.”
    “Innkeeper?” James sat up and waited until his chest stopped heaving and the walls stopped bending toward corners. “Is that where I am?” He swung his bare legs off the edge of the mattress and hefted his barer arse off the bed, for once grateful for William’s brute strength as his brother caught him in a forward pitch. The floorboards crunched under his feet, and the sharp, sweet odor in the air gave him pause.
    Christ, had he smashed a bottle of brandy on the floor last night? He peered around the room, took in the ruined wardrobe, the upturned washbasin. Feathers floated in the air and stuck to the walls. A woman’s corset hung from the drapery rod, something plain and demure but oddly beautiful for its lack of adornment. There was no denying the room looked as if a bloody good party had taken place.
    “I hope she was worth it, you daft fool,” William snorted.
    “Who was worth it?” James muttered, grabbing his shirt from the floor.
    “The woman you brought up here last night.”
    James stiffened against the slide of fabric across his chest. The shirt seemed different. It smelled of brandy, and an exotic fragrance that he could not quite name. “What woman?” he managed, starting in on his buttons. “And where in the bloody hell am I?”
    “The Blue Gander.” His brother chuckled. “And the woman you married last night.”
    That froze James’s progress more efficiently than had his hands been tied. What William was suggesting was impossibly vile. He was not someone who married women he didn’t know. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
    “Oh, stop your sniveling outrage,” William chortled. The obvious glee on his face sent James’s fingers curling into a tight fist around the edges of his shirt. “It wasn’t a real marriage.”
    James managed to raise one brow. This, at least, was familiar. He was used to being teased, by William in particular. Perhaps his brother had even cracked him over the head with the chamber pot himself, although that would admittedly be beyond the pale. “Put your wasted Cambridge education to work and attempt to formulate a complete sentence,” he growled. “What are you talking about?”
    “I am simply telling you what I heard when I stopped by your rooms this morning looking for you,” William qualified. “I don’t know what went on last night, but your friend was right full of information and all too willing to share. I came here to see for myself.”
    “Have you been checking up on me?” Anger spliced through the pounding of James’s skull at the mention of his friend. Patrick Channing shared a set of rooms with him on the east side of Moraig, a necessity when you struggled to save every penny your fingers touched. More to the point, Patrick had shared several of those pints he recalled from last night.
    But neither