Page 25 of The Tartan Trap

“No surprise there,” Callum said lightly. “I could set my timepiece to your stomach.”

His eyes still roved the green space before them. He had been so hopeful at the start of their outing, but it had been nearly an hour with no sign of any of the Preston ladies, let alone the only one who interested him. Apparently, Ellis had been mistaken, and not all of the fashionable young ladies would be out in the park today just because it was one of the first pleasant days before the Season.

Perhaps the Preston sisters had been invited to a garden party or some such. Still, Callum wasn’t about to give up just because he was sweating a bit beneath his jacket.

“Are there only two parks in London, then?” he said, canting his voice to sound far more jovial and energetic than he felt. Truthfully, he was beginning to feel like some sort of strange scientific display with the way the ladies stared at him.

“I always thought you were a humble fellow, but this parade has me reconsidering,” Ellis grumbled. He put a gentle heel to his horse. “Follow me, then.”

The third park was smaller than the others, more private, with small lawns enclosed amongst stands of trees. Callum’s hopes weren’t high as their horses crunched in the gravel path. It was not the sort of place Callum would have expected to find ladies who wanted to see and be seen—and such was the nature of the fashionable promenade, or so Ellis had explained.

It had taken them a quarter of an hour to reach the place, and Ellis’s grumbling had grown more pointed all the while.

“Finally,” he said in a gust when they rounded the corner to see a few colorful quilts spread out on a grassy knoll near a charming pond. “There’s the last of the ladies in London, Callum. Let’s charge our horses through their midst so that they might admire you like all the others did.”

Callum sighed and wished, for the hundredth time, that he’d thought to put a dinner roll or a piece of fruit into his jacket so he could offer it to Ellis—or at least shove it into his mouth to shut him up. His cousin’s mood had deteriorated swiftly as the luncheon hour approached.

“Those ladies have a picnic,” Callum pointed out with an arched eyebrow. “Would you like to stop and see if they’ll offer you some sustenance?”

Ellis scowled. “Those are the Prestons. And that large gentleman watching over them in a hawk-like fashion is their brother, Lord Cavendish. Were he not present, I might try to play the part of a picnic beggar, but it’s well known the man is little better than a pirate. Heaven help the gentleman who treads unwelcome upon that particular blanket.”

Callum barely heard what his cousin was saying, for once Ellis had uttered the name Preston, all coherent thought fled from his mind. The picnic blanket in question held four young ladies and a gentleman, with a line of lady’s maids standing at attention nearby. Their picnic was among the most robust Callum had seen, with a little low table cluttered with cheerful china dishes and an assortment of sandwiches and biscuits as well as a tea service. How the servants had managed that, Callum had no clue.

But his gaze snagged on each of the ladies in turn, his heart pounding, the tension in his back ratcheting tighter and tighter with each passing moment.

Which of them was Margaret? There was only one blonde amongst them, but it couldn’t possibly be her. In her journal, Margaret had called herself ugly in comparison to her sisters. There was nothing remotely unattractive about the blonde on the picnic blanket.

Callum’s shoulders sagged. To think that he’d come so close to seeing her, but she wasn’t in attendance!

To cover his disappointment, Callum feigned interest. “Who are the ladies present?”

“I just told you,” Ellis said huffing an impatient sigh. “The Preston sisters—Claire’s the one who looks like she’ll turn you to stone if you meet her gaze. Lily’s the prize of the Season as far as gentlemen are concerned, for obvious reasons, Beatrice is the one who’s almost as pretty as Lily, and the other one’s Margaret.”

Margaret.

Callum’s head whipped back toward the pretty tableau so fast it was a testament to Ellis’s hunger-induced curmudgeonly state that he didn’t notice.

Callum had braced himself. He’d known that a young lady with Margaret’s depth of moral fiber and keen intelligence, with such a burden to serve the poor—not just to be seen in doing so but to do so privately, in such a way that would actually lift them up—was bound to be a plain woman.

Callum didn’t care—he was more than half in love with Margaret already. As long as she was willing to be wooed, he was determined to have her.

Callum’s eyes latched onto the blonde on the blanket again; he drew a sharp, silent gasp. This couldn’t possibly be correct. That was Miss Margaret Preston? If he’d thought Ellis to be at all the sort to play a cruel joke on another fellow, Callum would have instantly been convinced that was the case.

Yet, Ellis didn’t even know of Callum’s preoccupation with the lady. Certainly he couldn’t have named another lady as Margaret Preston for a lark.

The contrast between Callum’s dreary imaginings and the stunning reality couldn’t have been more stark.

Miss Margaret Preston had blonde hair. That part of her self-evaluation in her journal was true. But now Callum could see that the description had also been woefully inadequate. In the next tight breath, Callum called himself an idiot—of course Margaret’s humility and tendency to think more highly of others than herself would color the words in her journal!

She sat upon the blanket with her three sisters. Her bright halo of wavy blonde hair was barely constrained by two straining barrettes. Her lips were full, her lashes two dark fans beneath handsome eyebrows. The modesty of her blue gown couldn’t hide the generous abundance of all the best kinds of curves.

Callum would never have dared pray for such a woman—it would have been too scandalous to ask heaven for that level of beauty, that figure. He wouldn’t have been able to put such a want to words without stuttering and blushing furiously.

Callum gave up his goal of surreptitious peeking instantly, settling for goggling at her open-mouthed. As he watched, Margaret tipped that lovely head back and laughed—exposing straight white teeth and better displaying the cream-smooth skin of her neck. Callum nearly steered his horse off the gravel path into a tree.

The artist Rubens would have bit his knuckle and wept in ecstatic agony if he’d seen such a woman. Then he would have fallen at her feet and begged to paint her, certain that her appearance would have been enough to secure his position in the annals of history forevermore.

That was the young lady who donned a drab cloak and brought stew to St. Alban’s Home for Children every week? That was the secret patroness of the hospital for war veterans? That was the young lady who had lowered herself to working as a washerwoman to support her sisters?