He kissed me on both cheeks, continental style, and stood waiting for me to invite him in. I blinked at him a few times, unable to believe the vision before me.
Iain’s brother?
I made a frantic effort to get a grip on myself. Iain’s brother ? “I was just making some lunch… dinner… lunch. Whatever you call it. If you’d like to… um…
join us—”
“Sounds delightful, my dear. Lead the way.”
This couldn’t be his brother. This man sounded as English as the Prime Minister. Upper class plummy sort of English. And he looked like something off a suntan lotion commercial. Maybe I was confused. Maybe Iain had more than one brother. Maybe he had a younger, English brother, who was the secret shame of the family, and thus wasn’t spoken of.
I stopped in the middle of the kitchen doorway and turned back to him.
“You are Ewen, aren’t you?”
“In the flesh. Ah, Mrs. Harris, how nice to see you again. You’re just as lovely as I remembered.”
Huh? I looked at Mrs. Harris with a speculative eye. She was as big as Ewen, and probably a bit stronger. Her red hair frizzled out around the kerchief she always wore when cleaning or cooking. She wasn’t ugly by any means, but lovely?
“Teh, MacLaren,” she said coyly, and I swear she blushed. Mrs. Harris!
Blushing? She waved a half-peeled potato at him. “Get on with yourself, I don’t have time to waste words with a scoundrel the likes of you.” I stared at the two of them bantering—no, flirting —and I upped my prior impression of Ewen’s prowess. Any man who could make Iain’s char blush and giggle girlishly was a man with serious virility wattage. I stepped back a bit, lest it splash over onto me. I could easily imagine that if I weren’t heels over ears in love with Iain, I’d probably be drooling like a spaniel over Ewen.
He took an appreciative deep breath. “Something smells delicious. Could it be whatever is bubbling there so enticingly on the Aga?”
“Ack!” I’d forgotten the leftover lentil soup I was warming up for our lunch.
“Um, soup. Lentils.”
Great. I sounded like a raving idiot. Ewen was probably making a mental note to grill Iain about his choice of women. I dragged my eyes off the personification of manly beauty and picked up the cheese. It wasn’t easy to continue grating cheese while Mr. Handsome insisted on being of assistance.
He was too distracting, slathering Mrs. Harris and me with compliments, stirring soup, slicing bread, and generally making me worried silly that he’d get something on that gorgeous suit. I could swear it was raw silk.
“Damn,” I muttered as my hand slipped for the third time, grating my knuckles instead of the cheese. I just hoped no one minded a bit of skin in the rarebit.
“Problems, my dear? I wish you’d let me do that, I’m an old hand with the cheese grater. Isabella insisted I be properly trained.” Ewen took my hand in his, and flicking off a piece of cheese, examined the scraped knuckle. “There, nothing to work yourself up about, it’s just a little scrape. Shall I kiss it and make it feel better?”
There was no mistaking that roguish twinkle in his eye. He was Iain’s brother all right, and a right flirty one, too. I tried to remember what Iain had told me about Ewen’s marital status as he kissed my hand. He was separated or divorced—which, I couldn’t remember. Either way, he was trouble.
“I might have known you’d be in here trying to seduce Kathie,” Iain rumbled as he strolled into the house, dumping his wellies in the corner.
What? Seduce? Him? Me? Never! I snatched my hand away from Ewen and hastened over to Iain to fling myself in his arms.
“Iain, darling!” I never call Iain darling , not since I heard that word on Bridget’s lips. “You’re back. I’m so happy! Look who’s here, it’s your brother!
Isn’t that lovely? He’s early. I’m making you Buck Rarebit for dinner. Are you hungry? Did you bring Mark? How was the sick ewe? Did you get the rams shifted? There’s leftover soup, too.”
I was babbling like an idiot, and I knew it, but I couldn’t seem to shut up. Iain peeled me off his chest, kissed me soundly, whispered in my ear that it was all right, he understood, and greeted his brother with a hug and a couple of thumps on the back that would have brought down a lesser man.
The two chatted nonstop through lunch, ragging and teasing one another as well as exchanging news and gossip. Feeling myself at a decided loss when I heard about what sounded like an extremely glamorous lifestyle, I apologized later to Ewen over the plainness of our lunch. He seemed to be genuinely surprised by apology. “My dear Kathie, don’t think of apologizing for that delicious rarebit! I don’t remember when I’ve enjoyed such a nice one.”
“Aye, love, don’t let Ewen’s fancy feathers mislead you. He’s put away more neeps and tatties than any man alive.”
Ewen tried to look modest, but had little success.
“I find it difficult to believe you’re brothers.” I couldn’t help but mention this.
They sat chatting comfortably over the kitchen table, sipping ale and mopping up the last of the rarebit with leftover bread.
“Oh, aye, it’s because Ewen speaks like a bleeding toff. It’s the public schools he went to that are to blame.”
“No, little brother, surely she’s thrown by the fact that you’ve a face like a horse’s arse while I…” he ribbed Iain good-naturedly, and flicked an imaginary piece of lint off his immaculate suit.
Iain responded with what I assumed were like-minded insults in Gaelic. Ewen just laughed.
I looked from one to the other. They were so dissimilar, and not just in their speech. “You didn’t go to the same schools?”
“Good lord, no,” Ewen laughed. “I was not cut out for the life of a farmer, my dear, and that’s all Iain thought of from the time he could walk. He always had his hands, and usually his bum, in the mud.”
The two grinned at each other. Even their smiles were different. The only resemblance I could see was around their eyes.
They finished catching up on each other’s lives while I cleared the table and did the dishes, and soon turned to reminiscing.
It was fascinating to watch Iain with his brother. He treated Ewen almost as he did his sons—with a fond tolerance, but definite authoritative air. I wondered how the two could be so different in personality, and why Ewen, the elder brother, put up with being treated as he did.
The last thing I want to do is to give the impression that Iain was not the handsomest man alive. He was, but I recognized the fact that he was probably the handsomest man alive only to my eyes. I was willing to admit that he would not be deemed overly droolworthy by conventional standards, especially not when compared to the perfection of face his brother bore.
Iain had brown eyes, brown hair shot through with a few threads of silver, a nose that was a wee bit too big, and a very stubborn jaw. Ewen had honey blond hair that waved back from his brow in a manner I knew many women would kill for, hazel eyes that changed color depending on the lighting, eyelashes so thick I’m surprised he could see past them, a perfect nose, perfect mouth, perfect jaw… he was just perfect. As if that weren’t enough, he also had dimples. It was almost enough to make you swoon on the spot, or throw yourself on him, and from what Iain said later, both were fairly common occurrences.
I stood next to Iain—my Iain, the Iain who had swept me off my feet not with a handsome face, but with warmth and character that sent me reeling in love—
and stared back and forth between the two of them. The curiosity was driving me nuts.
“Uh… which one of you favors your father? Or mother?” I was still half convinced that one of them was a changeling.
Ewen laughed. “I told you, brother. It’s that homely bit of muck you call a face that’s thrown her.”
Iain grinned and pulled me down onto his lap. “If it helps, love, we’ve different mothers.”
“Oh.” It did help. At least it explained why they looked so very different from eac
h other.
I had just decided to do a little gentle prying about their relationship when Iain booted me off his lap and they went out to bring in Ewen’s baggage. We settled him in the boy’s old room and warned him he would be sharing his accommodations with Nate, Joanna’s father. I left them joking and insulting one another while I ran back downstairs to greet the just arriving Joanna and David.
“So, how’s the campaign going?” Joanna asked when we were alone in the kitchen. I put the kettle on for tea and settled down for a quick gossip. I had told her a short time before that I had hoped that Iain and I would marry sometime within the next year. She fully supported this idea, and went out of her way to assist me in my hint-dropping plan.
“Is Dad still being thick as a plug?” she asked now, ferreting out where I had hidden the cookie jar. Iain discovered a hitherto unknown passion for my Moravian Spice Cookies a few weeks back when I was trying out the recipe, and since then I had to hide any batches from him lest they were consumed in one sitting.
“No, leave them out,” I said when she went to stash the cookies back in behind a bag of rice. “Iain wouldn’t dare eat them all when other people are here to witness such gluttony. And yes, he’s still either stringing me along, or not taking my hints, which, I must admit, have gone beyond the hint stage and are now pretty much outright demands.”
She snickered and dipped a cookie in her tea. I suppressed a shudder at that and was about to go into a mini tirade about Iain’s refusal to take a hint when it walloped him upside the head, but the men came down just then.
Ewen was stunning in a gray-and-green tweed hacking jacket, gold V-neck sweater, and a pair of jeans that I doubted had ever seen the light of day. They had a crease on them that could slice bread. In his hand he held a pair of spotless wellies. I swear they were polished—even my wellies, when brand new, never had that sort of a shine to them.
It brought to mind all of those Regencies I had read where the poor valet sat for hours polishing a pair of Hessians with nothing but champagne and elbow grease. The image of Ewen polishing his wellies with champagne amused me, so I snared it in an undertone with Joanna, who promptly broke into peals of laughter.
The men eyed us with a collective jaundiced eye. “Well, they’re off again,” David pronounced, and with a disgusted shake of his head (and lips twitching in a smile—he really was a good guy), he suggested they be on their way before we went completely loony.
All three men snagged a handful of cookies on their way out the door.
“They are to provide sustenance,” Ewen said as he flashed his dimples at me,
“in case we should be attacked by wolves while out viewing the wilds of Iain’s farm.”
“Ah, is that so?” I asked with a smile of my own while Joanna snorted, and watched the men march out to do whatever it is men do when they look at livestock.
I suspect a lot of it is exactly what Joanna and I had planned—to have a good gossip. They just did their gossiping in a harsh, manly man sort of environment. Women have more sense. We do it in the kitchen over beverages and sweets.
“So what do you think of Ewen?” Joanna asked, corralling another cookie. I’d have to make another batch at the rate they were disappearing.
I smiled. She grinned.
“I know, isn’t he the end?” She giggled and dunked. “I almost dropped my teeth when David introduced me to him at our wedding. Imagine that—me standing there in my wedding gown, staring like a spotty teenager at my new husband’s uncle! Melinda—my maid of honor—tried to seduce him, but he wouldn’t give her a second glance.”
She thought for a moment, munching the cookie. “Even my mother was a bit giddy around him.”
Giddy. Good word to describe the effect the MacLaren men had on women.
Iain made me giddy, David made Joanna giddy, and Ewen made a good seventy-five percent of the heterosexual female population giddy. “What I can’t understand is how they can have the same father and look and sound completely different. Archie and David don’t look too much alike, and yet they are clearly brothers.”
“Well, you know Ewen and Dad have different mothers.” I nodded.
“David told me that Ewen’s mother was some sort of heiress. Oh, not an heiress heiress,” she reassured me as my eyebrows shot up, “just an only child whose father had a bit of the ready. Quite a bit, actually. Anyway, she married Alec and had Ewen, but decided she didn’t like living in Scotland, or being married to an engineer, so she took Ewen and went back to Daddy.”
“Daddy, I presume, was living in England?”
Joanna nodded and took another cookie. “Somewhere near Cambridge. She got a divorce, Alec married Iain’s mother, and that’s why they don’t look alike.” I popped a cookie into my mouth. “Well that explains a lot,” I said around the cookie. “It’s nice to see they have such a good relationship despite growing up in separate households.”
“David says that Ewen’s mother didn’t really enjoy having a child, so she sent him to Alec for the summers and such.” She contemplated this for a moment.
“Still, it takes your breath away when you first meet him. Not that Dad isn’t nice-looking!”
I smiled again and patted her hand. “He may not be gorgeous to anyone else, but he is to me.” I remembered the question niggling in the back of my mind.
“Iain said Ewen was divorced?”
“Mmm… separated, I think. He had his latest wife, Isabella, with him at our wedding. Stunning woman, she is— all blond hair and long legs and chat about her villa in Majorca. I don’t think they’ve divorced yet, but since she’s not here with him, they’ve probably called an end to the marriage.” There’s just nothing so fascinating as the intimate details of another person’s life. “His latest wife? He’s been married before?” Joanna’s tea went down the wrong passage. She coughed it up and sputtered,
“Oh, lord, yes! He’s had… let me think, I’ve known David for three years…
he’s had at least four wives, and there may be others. I know David’s talked about four, including the glorious Isabella.”
“Who’d have guessed?” I murmured, before turning the topic to the upcoming MacLaren family Christmas. “I’m a bit worried about Archie, but I think everything else is well in hand.”
“You’ll be fine,” Joanna said comfortingly, and slid another cookie out with a wink at me. “It’s Christmas! Nothing will go wrong, you’ll see!” Chapter Thirteen
On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…
… news about the arrival of his firstborn.
Iain popped his head into the sitting room. “Eh, love, Archie’s here.”
“Lovely,” I smiled at him, thinking all sorts of foul things about this news bulletin. I held the smile until he went out to greet the prodigal son. Joanna, sitting next to her mother, grinned as if she could hear my inner thoughts.
“If you’ll excuse me a moment, Bev, I’ll just go out and say hello to Archie.
You’ve met him, right?”
“Oh, yes, at Jo’s wedding. Nice boy, very quiet.”
“Er… yes.” I gritted my teeth and marched out to the kitchen, where the men had just come in from a visit to the barn. Archie and his lady friend Susan were removing their coats.
Iain told me he had a little talk with Archie prior to inviting them up for Christmas. While I’m sure he did, I didn’t have the slightest confidence that it would do any good, not after witnessing the venom Archie had poured out at me in Manchester. I was instantly wary.
“Susan, how delightful to see you again. I hope you had an easy drive up? Yes?
Good. Archie, welcome.”
OK, maybe using the word welcome was the wrong thing to say to a man arriving at his childhood home, but the stickup-his-behind manner in which he turned and surveyed me set my teeth on edge.
He opened his mouth to say something, something incredibly nasty, I was sure, but slammed it shut when Iain moved up behind me and put an arm arou
nd my waist.
Ha! The little twerp. I kept the smug out of my smile and explained the sleeping arrangements. Archie immediately took umbrage at being assigned the attic lumber-room.
“Sorry,” I said with a rueful smile. “We’re full up, that’s the best we can do.
You’re welcome to find digs in town if you think you’d be more comfortable.” Iain’s hand tightened around my waist. Damn. I guess I wasn’t allowed to bait Archie, either. I patted the hand and added, “But I’m sure you’ll be just fine.
Your father unearthed an electric heater for you, and there are plenty of blankets.” And a whole lot of damp, as well as spiders the size of golf balls, but I wasn’t about to mention them. Given Archie’s character, it was the spiders I was worried about.
On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…
…two requests to stop sniping at Archie.
“He started it, Iain! The little bast… blighter made a snotty reference to the Yorkshire pudding thinking I had made it. Then when he found Joanna and Bev had, he made a snide comment about Joanna not knowing any better, given her training.”
I was sitting on the edge of our bed, my feet tucked under me, watching Iain disrobe (to my mind, always an exciting event, and one worthy of my full and undivided attention). The look on Iain’s face was enough to shut me up. Poor man, he was so pleased to have his family here, and I was making things worse by allowing Archie’s barbs—never muttered in Iain’s presence—to get to me.
I held up my right hand and stopped Iain before he could say anything. “I’m sorry, Iain. I promise, I won’t take potshots at Archie anymore.” He kissed the palm of my hand. “It’s just tomorrow, love, then Christmas and Boxing Day, and he’ll be on his way. I’ll have another talk with him.”
“No, don’t, it’s not necessary. He’s just being testy with me, not outright nasty. I want you to enjoy your Christmas.”
“Would you be letting me unwrap a present early, then?” He eyed the belt of my bathrobe.
“That depends.” I smiled my wicked smile, the one I keep tucked away for special occasions. “Will you be leaving me with visions of sugar plums dancing in my head?”