“Sounds a right dull stick.” Jamie made a mollifying gesture when she puffed up like an indignant hen. “My apologies, McKnight. You know how to stir up my fractious side. Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials.”
Even as he spoke, Jamie had a curiosity to meet this Mr. Atherton. Was he as polished and perfect as she implied? Good enough for the fiery Evie McKnight? Would Mr. Atherton tame her fire, or would she pry him from his boring stupor?
“Thank you.” Evie’s air of condescension was incongruous with the windblown curls trickling from under her hat. “What are you doing here? Besides ogling heiresses, I mean? I saw Miss Carmichael onboard. She’s lovely, but a bit vague.”
“I was not ogling …” Jamie growled. “Never mind. Here to meet my cousins—Danny and his wife and bairns. They were racing cars and risking their necks in America. I told him I’d assist in the unloading.”
A gleam of interest lit her eye, but everyone was fascinated by motorcars. “Ah yes, I saw them during the voyage. I wasn’t able to meet them—my mother kept us herded together. They seem a warm family. You at least have kind relations, Mackenzie.”
“Ha. I wouldn’t call any of them kind,” Jamie retorted. “Some more interesting than others, maybe. Why have ye strayed then, from your herd?”
Evie darted her gaze about, as though debating what to tell him. He wondered very much what she’d been in a hurry to do when she’d nearly knocked him down.
“I saw an unusually tall Scotsman in danger of falling from the pier,” she said glibly. “I thought I’d warn him.”
Not at all true. She hadn’t noticed Jamie until she’d run smack into him.
“Very amusing. Warn me? Or push me over?”
Evie rubbed her chin, leaving a smudge from her sooty glove. “Actually, I hadn’t quite decided.” She scanned the pier once more but this time, she grinned. “Oh, dear, Mackenzie. Your heiress has gone.”
Jamie turned his head to see that, yes, the lovely Miss Carmichael had disappeared into the sea of brown and black coats, likely whisked off by her parents to a train or a posh hotel. Ah, well …
He abruptly realized that as soon as the radiance of Evie McKnight had entered his sphere, the pale beauty of Miss Carmichael had faded to nothing.
“There he is!” a voice floated to them. “There’s Jamie!”
A straw boater hat on a young lady bobbed up and down in the morass of disembarking passengers, and a thin arm waved frantically.
“Your family at last,” Evie said with a touch of relief. “I must dash. So nice to have caught up with you, Mackenzie. Do be careful while leering at young ladies near bodies of water.”
She whirled in a flutter of practical wool and dashed down the pier. Jamie watched her go, in the opposite direction of the ship, white petticoats flashing around dark boots.
Who was she racing to meet? The fiancé? And if so, why had he not been at the foot of the gangway, ready to lift her into his arms? Jamie would have grabbed her the moment he saw her and smothered her in kisses.
But if not the fiancé, then who was she meeting? Jamie gazed after Evie until he lost her in the crowd, his curiosity aroused in a way it hadn’t been in a long time.
The journalist, whose camera Jamie realized was now pointed his way, clicked one last frame then began folding up the apparatus.
“What the devil?” Jamie growled at him.
The journalist answered with a grin. “Mackenzies are always good for copy.” He shouldered his camera and marched away, unmindful of Jamie’s glower.
“Who was that delicious man you were speaking to, Evie?” Clara McKnight settled herself into the second-class train compartment amid boxes and bags that the ladies had not wanted to entrust to the porters. The porters, already burdened with the bulk of their baggage, had relinquished the extras with relief.
“Speaking to?” Marjorie repeated in delight. Evie’s younger sisters, Marjorie and Clara, were seventeen and nineteen respectively, and held the energy of youth Evie fondly remembered in herself. “Evie was speaking to a man? What would Mr. Atherton say?”
Evie dropped into her seat across from her mother, who regarded her too shrewdly. Mrs. McKnight’s soot-black hair was styled in a soft pompadour that suited her slender face, her body poised on her seat. Clara had inherited her looks, Clara who’d turned heads in the hotels and public spaces of New York. Evie’s mother had turned plenty of heads in her day, so said their besotted father, and still did.
“Do tell, Evie,” Mrs. McKnight said, her dark blue eyes watchful.
Evie found herself flustered. “He is an old friend. I met him at Cambridge.”
“Cambridge?” Marjorie asked with interest. “Where you were locked into your ladies’ college down the road and never spoke to the gentlemen?”
“We did see them from time to time.” Why was Evie so disconcerted? Her encounter with Jamie today had been a harmless one, old acquaintances chatting about past times. Distracting, though, as she’d not been able to send the telegram to her friend Iris she’d hastened down the docks to do, before her mother and sisters had called her to them. “They came out to cheer our rowing team.”
“I’m certain they did.” Marjorie collapsed into mirth, sagging into the piled up bags at her side.
“What nonsense.” Evie did her best to be haughty while Marjorie went off into gales, and even Clara, more composed than her younger sister, smiled knowingly.
“You haven’t told us his name, dear,” Mrs. McKnight said gently.
“Jamie Mackenzie.” The words came out in a rush. “I mean, Mr. Mackenzie. He is nephew to the Duke of Kilmorgan.”
“Duke, eh?” Marjorie crowed.
“Hush, darling.” Mrs. McKnight could rebuke without raising her voice. Marjorie stifled her giggles, but her eyes danced. “I am certain the young man is perfectly respectable,” Mrs. McKnight went on.
“He is,” Evie answered with a straight face.
Had Jamie always been so tall? There’d been a hardness about him he’d not had as a youth, his skin bronzed from a sun far from English shores. Evie was suddenly curious about where he’d been and what he’d done. Would he laugh as she’d seen him do, throwing back his head and roaring without abandon when he heard something hilarious?
His handsomeness was altogether different from her fiancé’s. Jamie had a slightly crooked nose—from a scrap in his first year at Cambridge, she’d heard—red-brown hair, brilliant blue eyes, and as she’d observed, a hardness that lent him an air of danger.
Hayden Atherton, by contrast, had a chiseled face that any sculptor would wish to capture, a warm smile, golden blond hair, and fine brown eyes. He’d recently grown a trim beard that made him quite distinguished.
Ladies regarded Evie with envy whenever she appeared on Hayden’s arm. General opinion was that Evie and Hayden would produce quite beautiful children.
Such statements made Evie contemplate the method for conceiving those children, and there her imagination went hazy. As much as she tried to picture her wedding night with Hayden, something inside her—modesty?—would not allow her to form a clear vision.