Chapter One
“I said he was in the doorway,” Aden MacTaggert stated, eyeing his older brother on the great black Friesian warhorse Coll rode. “He walked in, opened his gobber, and started yapping like he always does, and I threw my boot at him.”
“And cracked him in the head,” Coll MacTaggert, Lord Glendarril, finished, scowling. “With ye being still half drunk, woke from a sound sleep, and nae more than a peep of light in the room? I think maybe ye did throw yer boot at him, and it scared him when it hit the wall or someaught, so he fainted.”
“I knocked him cold,” Aden protested, slowing his chestnut thoroughbred, Loki, as they reached Grosvenor Street and the front of Oswell House. “Ask Oscar. He’ll even point ye to the lump he says he still has on his skull.”
“I’d nae admit to fainting in fear, either,” Coll grunted, swinging to the ground. “Ye cannae throw a boot with any accuracy.”
“I cannae speak for ye, but ten pounds says I can,” Aden returned, dismounting to hand Loki’s reins over to Gavin, the groom they’d brought with them when they’d all been ordered down to London.
Had that only been five weeks ago? It seemed a century had passed since Lady Aldriss, their estranged mother, had revealed the existence of that damned agreement she and their father, Angus MacTaggert, had signed back when the three MacTaggert sons had been bairns. If they didn’t wed English ladies before their only sister—Eloise, the youngest—married her own beau, Francesca Oswell-MacTaggert would cease funding Aldriss Park—and thereby the lives of all the cotters, farmers, shopkeepers, servants, and her own sons.
“And how do ye mean to win that wager?” Coll retorted. “We’re in damned London. Ye cannae go about hitting valets with boots, or the pretty people will frown at ye.”
Aden looked around. “Gavin, go take that bucket down the street.”
The groom eyed him. “I’ll nae have ye pelting me with boots, Master Aden. Oscar claims his eyes still cross when the weather turns foul.”
“I’ll wait till ye’re clear. Go.”
With a sigh the groom picked up the bucket and went trotting up the street. Twenty or so feet away he stopped and looked back at them. “Here?”
“Nae. Keep going.”
When Gavin had to wait for a carriage to pass before he continued up the street and then motioned at them from fifty or so feet away, Aden nodded. “That’ll do. Get out of the way.”
Beside him, Coll sat on a mounting block and pulled off his boots. “Ye’ll go second,” he said. “And if I get closer, ye owe me twenty pounds.”
That had escalated quickly, and predictably. “Then throw it, before ye end up losing yer hide.” Leaning back against the wrought-iron railing that enclosed the front drive of Oswell House, Aden crooked a leg and yanked off his own Hessian boots. Their mother would no doubt be dismayed to see her two oldest lads walking about the streets of Mayfair in bare feet and kilts, but then she’d demanded they hie themselves down to London for no damned reason but to find wives. There were consequences to such rash orders. “And likewise. Twenty quid when I thrash ye.”
Standing again, Coll hefted a boot in his hand, cocked his arm back, and hurled it toward the bucket as if the finely crafted leather footwear were a rock. A horse carrying its dandy of a rider up the road skittered sideways as the boot bounced beside him and then skidded to a halt about eight feet short and two feet wide of the bucket.
“I say!” the rider chastised, trotting toward them. “This is not how—”
“Move, ye peacock,” Aden said, taking Coll’s place. “Dunnae get in the way of a Scotsman’s wager.”
With a squeak the dandy paled, yanking the gray’s reins sideways. “Heathens!” floated back on the breeze as the fellow vanished down the side street.
“He’s wearing more colors than a stained-glass window,” Coll observed.
“Aye. That’s a lad ye could spy in the dark.” Aden took his own boot by the top, letting the heavier heel hang. Swinging it back and forth, he opened his fingers and let fly near the top of his arc. The Hessian boot did a slow loop end-over-end, clanging against the bucket before landing straight up and down directly beside it.
Whistling, Gavin stopped an ice wagon. “Go around, ye fool,” the groom ordered. “We’ve a wager to settle here.”
“Why are people shouting in front of my h … Oh,” Francesca Oswell MacTaggert, Lady Aldriss, began as she descended the short, half-circle drive. “Barefoot? Really?”
“I cannae throw a boot while it’s on my foot,” Coll grunted, shouldering Aden out of the way to line up his second throw.
“Why are you throwing your boots?” the countess asked, a faint line furrowing between her brows.
“Coll claims Oscar fainted and hit his head when I tossed my boot at him, and I’m proving that ye can hit a valet from across the room well enough to knock him cold.”
“You—I will not have you hitting servants, Aden.”
He kept his attention on Coll. “It was eight months ago. And he might’ve ducked. I did warn him.”
Beside him the oldest MacTaggert brother had adopted Aden’s underhand swing. Coll was nearly six-and-a-half feet tall, all muscle and no subtlety, though, so Aden wasn’t surprised when the boot sailed up toward the clouds and past the bucket, past the curve in the road where Grosvenor Street turned up Duke Street, and landed in the shrubbery of the Duke of Dunhurst’s hedgerow.
“Ha!” his brother chortled, slapping his hands together. “Beat that.”
“The wager was over whose throw is closer to the bucket, ye lummox,” Aden reminded him. “Nae who can fling their footwear all the way back to Scotland.”
“Bah,” the viscount growled. “Give me another throw, then.”
“I willnae. Two feet, two boots.”
“Then yer second boot has to land closer than the first.”
Aden lifted an eyebrow. “I’ve already won twenty pounds. I may as well put this boot back on my foot.”
“Yes, please do,” their mother muttered from behind him.
He grinned at that, keeping his face turned away from her. “Unless ye’ll double the wager,” he went on. “Forty quid that this boot lands closer to the bucket than the first one.”
“Ye’re on,” Coll said on the tail of that, as if he thought Aden might change his mind. “Since ye’d have to get it inside the bucket to win.”
So be it. Half closing one eye, Aden swung the boot once, waited for a trio of bairns to cross the street with their nanny, swung again, and let go. The boot’s heel hit the rim of the bucket, tipped it over, and landed half inside as the thing rolled in a slow half circle. “Forty pounds,” he said, straightening and keeping his own surprise to himself. A time or two he’d benefited from luck over talent, but only a fool counted on the fickle lass.
“Gavin, bring my damned boots back here,” Coll bellowed.
As the groom dove into the shrubbery, a knee-high black dog dodged around him into the street and grabbed up one of Aden’s boots. Aden scowled. Damnation. That wouldn’t do. Those Hessians were his only pair of boots fit for wearing in proper Sassenach company. Stepping forward, he whistled before Gavin could give chase.