Once the first had fallen, Aden had no doubt seen what lay ahead, and so when he’d stumbled across Matthew Harris’s sister, he’d staked his own claim. Coll sighed. Which left him. As the oldest, he no doubt should have been the first to wed. It was his duty to lead the way into such perils. But every time he thought to make an effort toward wooing a lass, he recalled how badly his father had mangled a marriage with his own Englishwoman. Angus MacTaggert and Francesca Oswell had managed to remain beneath the same roof for twelve years, but none of them had been peaceful. None that he could recall, anyway.
But that was neither here nor there, because tonight all he’d accomplished was an escape from two more prospective brides and a few minutes of imagining that he and Mrs. Persephone Jones might have spent a sweaty, naked night together. So now he could return to Oswell House and make a list of which lasses might serve, or he could stay where he was and watch a rather inspired performance in As You Like It.
In the end, the play won out, and while he felt a wee bit cheated that all the lads had found their loves while he stood in the wings without so much as a bridal prospect, he could say one positive thing about English tastes—they were all correct when they raved about Persephone Jones.
All the actors gathered onstage for a standing ovation before they flooded past him to the dressing rooms and the rear door. He waited where he was; no sense making an appearance outside until Lady Aldriss and her weeping maidens were well away.
“We’ll be putting out the lights in ten minutes,” one of the behind-the-stage men eventually informed him, “and there’s nothing darker than a theater.”
“Except a lady’s heart, mayhap,” Coll rejoined, hiding his shudder at the idea of being in this cramped space in complete darkness, and the lad laughed.
Back to Oswell House it was, then, where he’d have to listen to his mother bellowing about how she was attempting to save the MacTaggert properties by helping him find him a bride, and all he could bellow back was what he’d been saying for eight weeks: he would find his own damned wife. He made his way through the clutter in the direction the rest of the occupants had headed.
“—don’t think that’s necessary,” Persephone Jones’s sweet voice came from a cracked-open door, and he slowed.
“What I think is necessary is that you stop dancing about and give me what I want,” Claremont’s voice retorted. “You flutter as if you have some virtue to protect. Do I need to remind you that you are an actress? A pretty one, but that’s not enough to see you invited to a soiree. I have purchased gifts for you—several expensive gifts, if you’ll recall. In recompense, you will give me what I want. And that is what is between your legs, Persephone.”
“No.” There was just the faintest tremble at the end of the word. “You have forced gifts on me in an attempt to buy what is between my legs. Take them all back. They’re here in this box. I never wanted them to begin with. You—”
“You damned whore. I—”
Glass shattered. Before he’d quite settled on what he was doing, Coll slammed open the door and stepped into the room. It was smaller than he’d expected, with bare walls, a table and a chair, and a single full-length mirror, but he only noted that peripherally as he grabbed Claremont by the collar and yanked him backward from where he loomed over the lass, his hands on her shoulders.
He caught a quick glance of Persephone’s wide blue eyes and the neck of a broken bottle in her hand before he returned his attention to the sputtering earl. “The lass said nae,” he growled, flinging the other man into the near wall.
Claremont went down onto his knees and immediately struggled to his feet. “This is none of your affair, Highlander. Leave this room before I have you thrown out.”
“Well, while ye’re searching about for someone who can toss me, I’ll go ahead and see ye out myself.” Moving quickly, Coll wrapped one arm under the earl’s shoulder and cupped the back of his head in the same hand, bending the tall fellow nearly double as Claremont tried to avoid having his arm broken.
“You have no idea who you’re dealing with,” Claremont sputtered, staggering out of the room as Coll half-dragged him toward the rear of the building. Charlie Huddle and a few of the remaining actors and stagehands stood by the back door, and with a quick intake of air, Huddle pulled it open and stepped aside.
Coll shoved Claremont outside, following that with a hard stomp to the earl’s backside with the bottom of his boot. “The next time a lass tells ye nae,” he rumbled, “and I imagine that’ll happen to ye often, ye’d best listen.”
With that, he shut the door and latched it for good measure. When he turned around, the assembled men began clapping.
“I never liked that Lord Claremont,” Huddle intoned with a crooked grin. “Glad to see him gone. But he could make some trouble for you, my lord.”
With a shrug, Coll straightened his coat. “It’s nae the first time for that, and it’ll nae be the last.”
“Perhaps,” a female voice sounded from the shadows, “but now you’re going to have to see me home.”
Persephone Jones stepped forward as the lights toward the front of the hall began to flicker and go out, leaving her in a halo of candlelight surrounded by murky darkness. She carried a small portmanteau in one hand and wore a deep purple, low-cut silk gown, a silver shawl, and a purple hat decorated with wee white flowers perched at a jaunty angle on her head. Her hair was no longer brown, but rather a long, flowing ivory curled into ringlets about her face, an angel descended from heaven to tease the mortals.
“I reckon I can do that.” A lass who turned into a different lass every time he looked around—that could be either very arousing or exceedingly frustrating. But it would damned well be interesting, either way.
* * *
Coll MacTaggert, Persephone Jones reflected, could have been mistaken for a mountain, if mountains were made of muscle and bone and were possessed of a very attractive, if severe, face softened by a deep Scottish brogue. Turning her gaze and attention from the towering Highlander, she tucked her shawl a little closer around her shoulders and took a deep breath as Charlie Huddle pulled open the rear stage door. She’d requested the helpful mountain’s assistance. It remained to be seen whether he was as efficient at disbursing crowds in public as he was at ousting earls in private.
The second she stepped outside, men young and old pressed in around her, cheering and complimenting and offering flowers or begging for locks of her hair. At least the earlier rain had tapered off.
“If you’ll excuse me, good gentlemen,” she said as she always did, her own private play performed at the back door every night, “but I’ve had a very long evening and I’m quite tired.”
“Thou art the fairest damsel in the land,” one young man shouted above the volume of the others, a bouquet of red roses aimed, weaponlike, at her head, “I should swoon if thee would but give me thy hand.”
That caused a round of booing, which she mentally joined. She performed Shakespeare. Why that made some men think they should recite bad poetry written on the back of a betting slip, she had no idea. “Make way, gentlemen, if you please.”