Romancing Mister Bridgerton (Bridgertons 4)

He blinked in surprise.

"I would think you've already read all this before." At his blank stare, she added, "So you don't need to read it now." She waited for a reaction and got none. "So you don't need to hover over my shoulder," she finally finished.

"Oh." He inched away. "Sorry."

Penelope eyed him dubiously. "Off the bed, Colin."

Looking much chastened, Colin pushed himself off the bed and flopped into a chair in the far corner of the room, crossing his arms and tapping his foot in a mad dance of impatience.

Tap tap tap. Tappity tap tap tap.

"Colin!"

He looked up in honest surprise. "What?"

"Stop tapping your foot!"

He looked down as if his foot were a foreign object. "Was I tapping it?"

"Yes."

"Oh." He pulled his arms in more tightly against his chest. "Sorry."

Penelope refocused her attention on the journal.

Tap tap.

Penelope jerked head up. "Colin!"

He planted his feet down firmly on the carpet. "I couldn't help myself. Didn't even realize I was doing it." He uncrossed his arms, resting them on the upholstered side of the chair, but he didn't look relaxed; the fingers on both of his hands were tense and arched.

She stared at him for several moments, waiting to see if he was truly going to be able to hold still.

"I won't do it again," he assured her. "I promise." She gave him one last assessing stare, then turned her attention back to the words in front of her.

As a people, the Scots despise the English, and many would say rightfully so. But individually, they are quite warm and friendly, eager to share a glass of whisky, a hot meal, or to offer a warm place to sleep. A group of Englishmen—or, in truth, any Englishman in any sort of uniform—will not find a warm welcome in a Scottish village. But should a lone Sassenach amble down their High Street—the local population will greet him with open arms and broad smiles.

Such was the case when I happened upon Inveraray, upon the banks of Loch Fyne. A neat, well-planned town that was designed by Robert Adam when the Duke of Argyll decided to move the entire village to accommodate his new castle, it sits on the edge of water, its whitewashed buildings in neat rows that meet at right angles (surely a strangely ordered existence for one such as I, brought up amid the crooked intersections of London).

I was partaking of my evening meal at the George Hotel, enjoying a fine whisky instead of the usual ale one might drink at a similar establishment in England, when I realized that I had no idea how to get to my next destination, nor any clue how long it would take to get there. I approached the proprietor (one Mr. Clark), explained my intention to visit Blair Castle, and then could do nothing but blink in wonder and confusion as the rest of the inn's occupants chimed in with advice. "Blair Castle?" Mr. Clark boomed. (He was a booming sort of man, not given to soft speech.) "Well, now, if ye're wanting to go to Blair Castle, ye'II certainly be wanting to head west toward Pitlochry and then north from there."

This was met by a chorus of approval—and an equally loud echo of disapproval.

"Och, no!" yelled another (whose name I later learned was MacBogel). "He'II be having to cross Loch Toy, and a greater recipe for disaster has never been tasted. Better to head north now, and then move west."

"Aye," chimed in a third, "but then he'll be having Ben Nevis in his way. Are you saying a mountain is a lesser obstacle than a puny loch? "

"Are you calling Loch Toy puny? I'll be telling you I was born on the shores of Loch Toy, and no one will be calling it puny in my presence." (I have no idea who said this, or indeed, almost everything forthwith, but it was all said with great feeling and conviction.)

"He doesn't need to go all the way to Ben Nevis. He can turn west at Glencoe."

"Oh, ho, ho, and a bottle of whisky. There isn't a decent road heading west from Glencoe. Are you trying to kill the poor lad? "

And so on and so forth. If the reader has noticed that I stopped writing who said what, it is because the din of voices was so overwhelming that it was impossible to tell anyone apart, and this continued for at least ten minutes until finally, old Angus Campbell, eighty years if he was a day, spoke, and out of respect, everyone quieted down.

"What he needs to do," Angus wheezed, "is travel south to Kintyre, turn back north and cross the Firth of

Lome to Mull so that he can scoot out to Iona, sail up to Skye, cross over to the mainland to Ullapool, back down to Inverness, pay his respects at Culloden, and from there, he can proceed south to Blair Castle,

stopping in Grampian if he chooses so he can see how a proper bottle of whisky is made."

Absolute silence met this pronouncement. Finally, one brave man pointed out, "But that'll take months."

"And who's saying it won't?" old Campbell said, with the barest trace of belligerence. "The Sassenach is here

to see Scotland. Are you telling me he can say he's done that if all he's done is taken a straight line from here

to Perthshire? "

I found myself smiling, and made my decision on the spot. I would follow his exact route, and when I returned to London, I would know in my heart that I knew Scotland.

Colin watched Penelope as she read. Every now and then she would smile, and his heart would leap, and then suddenly he realized that her smile had become permanent, and her lips were puckering as if she were suppressing a laugh.

Colin realized he was smiling, too.

He'd been so surprised by her reaction the first time she'd read his writing; her response had been so passionate, and yet

she'd been so analytical and precise when she spoke to him about it. It all made sense now, of course. She was a writer,

too, probably a better one than he, and of all the things she understood in this world, she understood words.

It was hard to believe it had taken him this long to ask for her advice. Fear, he supposed, had stopped him. Fear and worry and all those stupid emotions he'd pretended were beneath him.

Who would have guessed that one woman's opinion would become so important to him? He'd worked on his journals for years, carefully recording his travels, trying to capture more than what he saw and did, trying to capture what he felt. And he'd never once showed them to anyone.

Until now.

There had been no one he'd wanted to show them to. No, that wasn't true. Deep down, he'd wanted to show them to a number of people, but the time had never seemed right, or he thought they would lie and say something was good when it wasn't, just to spare his feelings.

But Penelope was different. She was a writer. She was a damned good one, too. And if she said his journal entries were

good, he could almost believe that it was true.

She pursed her lips slightly as she turned a page, then frowned as her fingers couldn't find purchase. After licking her middle finger, she caught hold of the errant page and began to read again.

And smiled again.

Colin let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding.

r /> Finally, she laid the book down in her lap, leaving it open to the section she'd been reading. Looking up, she said,

"I assume you wanted me to stop at the end of the entry?"

It wasn't quite what he'd expected her to say, and that befuddled him. "Er, if you want to," he stammered. "If you want to read more, that would be fine, I guess."

It was as if the sun had suddenly taken up residence in her smile. "Of course I want to read more," she gushed. "I can't

wait to see what happened when you went to Kintyre and Mull and"—frowning, she checked the open book—"and Skye and Ullapool and Culloden and Grampian"—she glanced back down at the book again—"oh, yes, and Blair Castle, of course, if you ever made it. I assume you were planning to visit friends."

He nodded. "Murray," he said, referring to a school chum whose brother was the Duke of Atholl. "But I should tell you,

I didn't end up following the exact route prescribed by old Angus Campbell. For one thing, I didn't even find roads

connecting half the places he mentioned."

"Maybe," she said, her eyes growing dreamy, "that is where we ought to go for our honeymoon trip."

"Scotland?" he asked, thoroughly surprised. "Don't you want to travel someplace warm and exotic?"

'To one who has never traveled more than one hundred miles from London," she said pertly, "Scotland is exotic."

"I can assure you," he said with a smile as he walked across the room and perched on the edge of the bed, "that Italy is

more exotic. And more romantic."

She blushed, which delighted him. "Oh," she said, looking vaguely embarrassed. (He wondered how long he'd be able to embarrass her with talk of romance and love and all the splendid activities that went with them.)

"We'll go to Scotland another time," he assured her. "I usually find myself heading north every few years or so to visit Francesca, anyway."

"I was surprised that you asked for my opinion," Penelope said after a short silence.

"Who else would I ask?"

"I don't know," she replied, suddenly very interested in the way her fingers were plucking at the bedcovers. "Your brothers, I suppose."

He laid his hand on hers. "What do they know about writing?"