Page 56 of Highland Fire

Caitlin reverently unwrapped the layers of tissue paper and removed the ball gown from its box.

To little feminine oohs and ahs around her chamber, she shook out the soft folds of the creation she had spied in the shop window of Tunbridge Wells’s foremost mantua maker.

With only slight alterations, the gown of primrose satin had been made to fit her like a second skin.

“The color becomes you. It does something for your complexion.” At the shy compliment, Caitlin flashed the speaker a grateful look.

“I am indebted to you for your advice, Frances. I know little of fashion. If it had not been for you and Dorothy, I would have had to make do tonight with the gown Rand picked out for me.”

This brought mingled groans and hoots of laughter from all the ladies.

“Did you really allow Rand to choose your wardrobe?” The dowager’s eyes gleamed with laughter.

Caitlin made a rude sound. “How was I to know that all the Randal men are notoriously inept about ladies’ fashions? I am not experienced. And it always seemed to me that Rand was immaculately turned out. I thought he was a fop.”

This last brought a scream of derision from the twins.

“My dear,” said the dowager when the uproar had subsided, “he has Hobbes. If it were not for their valets, Rand and his brothers would go about looking like scarecrows. It’s the Randal women who keep them right.”

As the chatter went on around her, Caitlin sat back in her chair and surveyed her companions with a degree of satisfaction.

In the space of only a few days, all her reservations and misgivings were laid to rest. These were the Randal ladies, either by birth or through marriage, and they were as close as any clan in the Highlands of Scotland.

If it had not been for the unfortunate circumstances surrounding her arrival at Cranley, she would have known it sooner.

Fearing her reaction to the dowager’s ill-advised scheme for Rand and Lady Margaret, the Randal ladies had approached her with caution.

When it appeared that their fears were groundless, that she had not taken umbrage, they had welcomed her as one of their own.

When she thought of it, there was no family in England that could have suited her better.

These were not toplofty English sophisticates who thought themselves superior to other people.

They were a collection of oddities, something like herself.

Guided by their own inner lights, they felt if the world judged them and found them wanting, the world knew what it could do about it.

Her eyes touched on the various ladies present, and it was all she could do not to shake her head.

Only the twins had not been touched by the taint of some scandalous event.

Not that the English Randals ever admitted their conduct was anything less than scrupulous.

In their view, if they flaunted society’s unwritten codes, then either society or its codes—or both—were far off the mark.

Contrary to appearances, they had their standards, and these were high.

They had nothing to do with the minutiae of correct etiquette, everything to do with loyalty and looking out for each other and closing ranks when any one member of the clan came under attack.

In Caitlin’s own case, she had had occasion to be grateful for this family solidarity whenever she and Lady Margaret had exchanged the odd word over the last number of days.

For some reason known only to herself, Lady Margaret had turned downright spiteful.

The Randals had soon got wind of it, and were there in force to carry Caitlin off or to distract Lady Margaret.

It was mainly Rand’s doing. She had seen with her own eyes how, at a slight nod from him, one of his brothers would casually drop what he was doing and close with the enemy.

Nor was Caitlin the only person to benefit from her husband’s shepherding.

In particular, the dowager’s two daughters-in-law also come in for shares of his attention.

As she’d heard tell, these gently bred, respectable girls had done the unthinkable.

Each, in her turn, had gone against a guardian’s wishes and had eloped with a Randal man.

Had they not done so, one of them would have been a marchioness today and the other a countess.

Whatever Rand may have said to his brothers in private, and she’d wager it was plenty, in public he’d adopted the view that in choosing Randal men, his sisters-in-law had demonstrated the superiority of their intellect.

In such company as this, Caitlin had no fears that her own background would excite pity or disgust or more than a passing interest. She was a Randal who had married a Randal man. What could be better than that?

That evening, when she took her place in the receiving line with the other members of her husband’s family, her heart swelled with pleasure. These long-limbed, lean, fair-haired Randals had the appearance of a pride of tawny lions. She felt quite dainty beside them, dainty and soignée .

She hadn’t known she had it in her to be so vain, but since she had donned her yellow satin ball gown and Rand had fastened a necklace of diamonds and pearls at her throat, she had hardly been able to tear herself away from the looking glass in her chamber.

Smoothing her hands in their white kid gloves over her skirts, she chanced a quick look down.

There wasn’t a furbelow or a piece of piping to be seen.

Nor was there one bow in her hair. The simpler the better when one is as dainty as you .

How right the dowager had been. And how Caitlin treasured the word “dainty.” She wasn’t small.

She was dainty. What a difference a word could make to how one felt about one’s self.

It did not hurt either, that Rand’s eyes held a special glow whenever they chanced to alight on her, which was often.

“You are lovelier than moonlight on Loch Morlich,” he said.

Eyes downcast, she bobbed him a curtsy. She was becoming a little more comfortable with the extravagance of English compliments. “Thank you, kind sir,” she said.

A moment passed. He huffed, he coughed, then said in a mock sorrowful tone, “Don’t I rate the courtesy of a compliment too?”

Her smile flashed. “What I think of you dare only be said in the privacy of our bedchamber.”

His eyes flashed, then darkened. “I’ll remind you of that when this deuced ball is over.”

“However, I will say this: you, sir, have the mien of a great chieftain. Your proper setting should be the Highlands.”

“What’s this about the Highlands?” Robert Randal had arrived late, and was edging into line between the dowager and his wife.

Caitlin obligingly elaborated. “Rand is the chief of Clan Randal. You might not know it to look at him now, but when he wears the ancient Highland dress, he is quite the Scottish laird.”

“Rand in a kilt?” Robert slapped his thigh and let out a great shout of laughter. “Did you hear that, Harry? Peter? Our big brother, the baron, has taken to wearing skirts. I say, do tell! Is he a true Highlander or does he, you know, cheat?”

Caitlin’s dainty nostrils were quivering. “There is nothing to laugh at in the ancient Highland dress. If you English Randals would only condescend to show your faces to your clan once in a while, you would know it.”

No one paid the least heed to Caitlin’s umbrage.

“I’ll bet he scared all the girls with those hairy legs of his.”

“Not to mention his bony knees.”

“Can he toss the caber?”

“The what?”

“You know, it’s a felled tree. That’s the test of a true Highlander, not the…hmmm…other.”

“I don’t dispute that tossing the caber is the test of a true Highlander. Where you are wrong, Harry, is when you say that it is a felled tree. Madam Caber, as I understand, runs the local…ah…hostelry.”

The dowager was beginning to look quite distracted.

The receiving line had disintegrated entirely, and this when her footmen were waiting for the signal to open the glass doors to admit their guests.

From the sounds of the banter, which was becoming louder by the minute, she very much feared that before long her sons would be embroiled in a vulgar brawl. She knew the signs.

She flashed a look of acute apology at Caitlin.

Rand’s young wife had taken it into her head that they were a close-knit family, and she had done nothing to disabuse her of that notion.

In point of fact, she had basked for a little while in the girl’s adulation.

The sorry truth of the matter was that she wasn’t much of a mother.

She was a bit of a shatter-brain, and had never been able to enforce discipline.

There was hardly a time she could remember when her children were not at each other’s throats.

They weren’t just naughty. They were beastly .

And now that they were grown up and beyond squabbling, they had invented new ways to torment each other.

Though she loved them all dearly, sometimes she wished they lived at the end of the world.

The pity of it was, no sooner did she get her wish than she was pining for their return.

“Children!” she scolded, to no effect. She had just opened her mouth to ring a peal over the lot of them when a sudden silence descended.

“What did you say, Kate?” she asked in amazement.

Caitlin tossed her head. “I said that I’ll wager anything you like the Scottish Randals can outmatch the English Randals in any test of skill or strength you care to name.”

“Those are fighting words,” murmured Robert, looking a question at Rand. “Do we go to Scotland to find out?”

Rand’s eyes were narrowed on Caitlin. “Which do you consider yourself?” he asked in a tone of voice that made his brothers shift uneasily.

“Beg pardon?”

He spoke pleasantly, and his posture was relaxed. “Come now, Caitlin. I think you understand me. Are you a Scottish Randal or are you one of us?”