Free Charlotte Boyett-Compo- WayWard Wind by Unknown Page A

look. “If I were to ask you to go with me to Scotland, would you be inclined to think on it?”
    Peyton’s brows drew together. “How would we get there?”
    “By clipper,” he said. “Out of Tampico.” He frowned. “We’d have to take the old woman with us. I couldn’t leave her here.”
    “Of course, you couldn’t,” she agreed. “She loves you.”
    “I wouldn’t go that far,” he grumbled.
    “She does,” Peyton stated.
    “The law will always be after me here,” he said.
    “I’m sure they would.”
    “Over there, I’d be a free man, not having to look over my shoulder all the time.”
    Peyton thought of her father, worrying the situation over in her mind.
    Harper was silent a long time then asked her again if she’d consider going with him.
    Peyton met his gaze. “I’ve been doing just that for the last ten minutes.”
    “And?”
    “And yes,” she said. “I would go with you.”
    “You’d leave all you own behind to do that, wench?” he asked, his generous lips working as though trying to smile and he kept them from doing so.
    “Yes,” she said and took another sip of the wonderful lemonade. “I would leave everything behind to be with you.”
    Harper gave up his struggle not to smile. “Then I’ll arrange it,” he said.
    “The sooner, the better,” she said, a picture of her father’s scowling face flashing across her mind.
    “Aye,” he said. “That would be best. It’ll take me a few days, maybe even a week, to get my things in order then we can head for Tampico.” He looked about them as though eager for the sun to lower so he could get on with his life.
    “What kind of things?” she asked.
    “I have money in a bank on the other side of the border. I’ll ride up and get it. We’ll need money to travel on.”
    “Can I go with…?” she started to ask, but he was already shaking his head.
    “I can make better time alone, wench, and you know how much you like horseback riding,” he said with a rueful grin. “When we get home to Scotland, you’ll have time to become an expert with a horse. There are acres of beautiful land where we’re going.”
    “So you have land in Scotland, then,” she said.
    “Hearthridge, the hunting lodge where I grew up,” he said. “There’s the lodge and about a fifty acres of land surrounding it. It belonged to my grandfather’s side of the family and since his wife wouldn’t allow me at the mansion ....”
    “Your father’s mother kept you from your ancestral home?” she asked.
    “She hated me,” he said. “She couldn’t have bairns of her own and knowing another woman gave her husband an heir provoked her something fierce. She never let me forget I was born on the wrong side of the blankets.”
    “But you didn’t inherit the family estate?”
    He shook his head. “She kept me from it, but she had no care for the hunting lodge and at the advice of her solicitor agreed not to fight me on that. There was nothing she could do about the yearly allowance my grandfather left me and it’s just been sitting in the bank accumulating interest while I was rotting in that damned prison.”
    “Is she still alive?”
    “Don’t know, don’t care,” he said and his brogue was so thick she had a hard time understanding his answer. It finally occurred to her that she was hearing more and more of that accent as time went on and wondered why he had been deliberately tamping it down. “There wasn’t no love lost between us. If she’s alive, I’ll venture to say I never cross her mind.”
    “So she wouldn’t have heard of your arrest.”
    “I doubt it. Who’d have told her?” He stood and shoved his hands into his pockets, began pacing. “Never have understood this sleeping in the middle of the day. Seems counterproductive to me.”
    Peyton smiled. He was nervous, anxious to get the wedding over with. His spurs jangled against the wooden planking as he paced. Every minute or so he’d looked to the church at the end of the