The Heiress Bride - Catherine Coulter [37]
“Go into the drawing room, Ryder. You can tell me all you wish to there.” Sinjun turned to Colin and raised a brow.
“This way,” he said, and led them across the narrow entrance hall, which smelled musty and clogged the nostrils with dust, through a single door into a room that could kindly be called elegantly shabby.
“Oh dear,” Sinjun said, eyeing the room. “It’s proportions are quite nice, Colin, but we must get a new carpet, new draperies—goodness, those must be eighty years old! And just look at those chairs—the fabric is rotting right off them.”
“Be quiet!”
“Oh, Douglas, I’m sorry. You aren’t interested in all my housewifely plans, are you? Please sit down. As I said, welcome to my new home. Colin tells me the house is all of two hundred years old.”
Douglas looked at Colin. “Are you well yet?”
“Yes.”
“You swear you’re fully and completely healed and back to your strength?”
“Yes.”
“Good, damn you!” Douglas leaped on him, his hands going for his throat. Colin, no fool, was ready for him. They went down to the floor, dust billowing up from the faded carpet, and rolled, Douglas on top, then Colin, each kicking the other with his legs, each rolling the other over.
Sinjun looked at Ryder, whose lovely blue eyes were narrowed and filled with fury. “We must stop this. It happened before. It would be a very bad melodrama were it not so dangerous. Will you help me? It is absurd. You’re all supposed to be civilized gentlemen.”
“Forget civilization. If by any wild chance your husband just happens to knock Douglas out, it’s my turn.”
Sinjun shouted, “Blessed hell! Stop it!”
There was no discernible effect.
She looked wildly around for a weapon. No blessed umbrella stand or any other piece of dilapidated furniture she could use to bash Douglas’s head.
Then she saw just the thing. She calmly picked up a small hassock nearly hidden behind a sofa and swung it with all her might, striking Douglas’s back. He roared, jerking about and staring at his sister, who now had the hassock raised over her head.
“Get off him, Douglas, or I swear I’ll break your stubborn head.”
“Ryder, take care of our idiot sister whilst I kill this mangy bastard.”
But it wasn’t to be. The panting, the cursing, the grunts were all abruptly stopped by the obscenely loud report of a gun. In the closed room it sounded like a cannon.
Angus stood in the open doorway, an old blunderbuss smoking in his hands. There was a huge hole in the ceiling of the drawing room.
Sinjun dropped the hassock with a loud thud. She looked at that hole, smoking and blackening the ceiling all around it, and said to Douglas, “Is my dowry large enough to repair even that?”
CHAPTER
6
ANGUS STOOD QUIETLY in the corner of the drawing room, holding the blunderbuss close, eyes still watchful, even after he’d announced, “Forgive me, my lords, but her ladyship here bain’t much of a Kinross yet, and thus if someone must have his neck shot through, it will be one of ye even though yer her brothers. Ye also be Sassenach toffs, an’ that makes me finger itch like th’ divil.”
And that was that, Ryder thought, after he’d figured out the essence, which wasn’t at all good as far as he and Douglas were concerned.
Now Colin and Sinjun sat side by side on the worn pale blue brocade sofa, Ryder and Douglas on equally worn chairs facing them. There was no rug between them. Silence was the news of the day.
“We were married in Gretna Green,” Sinjun announced.
“The devil you were,” Douglas said. “Even you, Sinjun, wouldn’t be that stupid. You would think that I would go there immediately, and thus you would go elsewhere.”
“No, you’re wrong. After I thought that, I realized that you wouldn’t go there, that you would come to Edinburgh instead and quickly find Colin’s house. You see, I know you very well, Douglas.”
“This has nothing to do with anything,” Ryder said. “You’re coming home with us, brat.”
Colin raised a black eyebrow. “Brat?