Devil in Tartan (Highland Grooms #4)(10)

“Diah,” Lottie groaned.

“And the laird, he said, well has it worked out precisely when the rents will be paid?” Her father laughed as he poured tots of whisky around for them all.

“And?” Lottie pressed him.

“I said we’d have them in a month.”

Lottie’s belly had sunk. A month was bloody well impossible.

Her father had waved his hand at her crestfallen expression. “Calm yourself, Lot. We’ll think of something. Anything will be a wee sight better than what Campbell suggested, aye?”

“What?” she asked. “What did he suggest, then?”

“Och, he believes I ought to consider MacColl’s offer to take my daughter to wife.”

Lottie had gasped. She’d felt a little faint.

“Well of course he did! I’ve the bonniest daughter in all the Highlands, I’ve heard it said more than once. Why, there’s no’ a lad on Lismore who’s no’ pined for her, eh, Robert?”

Mr. MacLean’s face had reddened at once and he’d turned his attention to his tot.

“But as I told the laird, while they’ve all pined for her, she pays none of them any heed at all, on account of her broken heart.”

“Fader!” Lottie exclaimed, and felt the heat of humiliation creeping into her neck. “My heart is no’ broken.”

“The laird insisted I ought to do as MacColl had offered, and give you over as his wife, and in exchange, MacColl would pay our rents and oversee the Livingstones and thereby solve a host of problems from one end of the island to the other.”

“That’s quite a lot of problems,” Duff mused.

“I feel rather ill,” Lottie had said, and had sunk onto the old settee.

“I am an admirer of Edwin MacColl, that I am,” her father had blithely continued. “He’s a right smart fellow, I’ve always said. But I’ve as good a plan as MacColl.” He’d downed his whisky.

The only problem was that when her father had a good plan, disaster almost always loomed. “What plan?” Lottie had asked weakly.

“I’m coming round to that,” he’d said, holding up his hand. “The laird was no’ yet done with me, no,” he’d continued as he poured more whisky for himself, clearly enjoying the retelling of his encounter. “He said I was bloody impractical.”

“He didna,” Mr. MacLean had said flatly, sounding quite offended in spite of the obvious truth in the laird’s statement.

“He mentioned the limestone kilns, and the flax weaving,” her father had said with an airy wave of his hand, as if dismissing those two disastrous endeavors that had each ended badly and at considerable cost to the Livingstones. Bernt Livingstone was a whimsical man, scattered in his thoughts, impractical, and was easily gulled into schemes that fleeced their coffers. Once, when Lottie was a girl, there had been some talk of a new chief. But in the end, the Livingstones revered the code of the clan—Bernt was the grandson of Vilhelm Livingstone, A Danish baron, who had fled Denmark during the war with Sweden with a sizable fortune. He was their undisputed founder, and therefore, Bernt the rightful heir and chief.

Lottie could still recall how her father had stood in their salon that afternoon, his legs braced apart, his eyes gleaming with his plan. She lifted her head from her arms and looked at him. He was sleeping deeply with Morven’s tincture, free from the pain of the hole in his abdomen for the moment. She adored her father, but if there was one thing that sent her into fits of madness, it was his impetuosity. He’d squandered his inheritance on fantastic plans that had never come to fruition.

It was times like these that Lottie missed her mother the most. She’d been good ballast for her husband. She’d been gone for more than ten years, alas, death taking her and the infant daughter she’d given birth to when Mathais had been but a wee bairn, and Lottie only thirteen years old herself. But her mother, Lottie had realized years later, had been prescient on her deathbed. She’d known she was dying, and in those final hours, she’d called Lottie to her, had clutched her hand with a strength that belied her frail state. “Your father will need you, leannan, as will the boys, aye? Heed me, lass—it will seem your life is no’ your own, but you must swear to me now you’ll no’ forget yourself, Lottie.”

“What?” Lottie had asked, grief-stricken and confused.

“Swear to me now you’ll no’ forget your true desires and what you want, aye? You deserve the best of life. It will seem impossible to you, it will seem as if there is no room for you, but you will have that life if you donna lose sight of what you want. Do you see, lass? Do you understand me?”

“Aye, Mor,” Lottie had said, but in truth, she hadn’t understood her mother at the time. She’d been overwrought with grief, had considered her mother’s plea a fevered one. But her mother was right—from the moment of her tragic death forward, Lottie had been mother, daughter and mistress to her family. She’d tried to be the ballast her mother had been to a father who desperately needed it, but God in his heaven, her father made it difficult.

And now? She was sitting at the table of a captain she didn’t know, in his private quarters on a ship she’d taken from him, all because of that damnable whisky, another of her father’s bad ideas.

On the day of Sankt Hans, the laird had accused her father of illegally distilling spirits.