She’d been a sparkling girl. That vivacity was one of the things that made him fall in love with her. This austere, spectacular woman who stared back at him as if she loathed him didn’t sparkle. Instead she had the icy glitter of a perfect diamond.
Malcolm could already see that maturity lent her a strength that had only been a promise in her younger self. He burned to discover what had made her into the woman she was today. Curiosity ate at him like acid, but he reminded himself to be patient. In time, he’d find everything out.
He was using the bread to mop up the last of the gravy when she spoke again, her voice uncompromising. “What do you want, Malcolm?”
He looked up with a frown. “I wanted to find my son.”
“Why?” The question was as deadly as a bullet.
Baffled, he frowned. “Because he’s my son.”
“That’s a surprise. You weren’t so eager to claim him when I told you I was pregnant.”
Every word she spoke made less sense than the last. “What do you mean? I asked you to marry me.”
“Then you set your father and a pack of the castle’s brawniest servants on me, with an offer to pay me to go away. Your father was adamant that Dun Carron’s heir could look higher for his lady than a slut of a crofter’s daughter. A slut who already carried a bastard in her belly.” Old bitterness weighted her voice.
Malcolm winced, even as he recognized the tone. Since he’d lost her, he’d lived with bitterness every second. It had a habit of souring and distorting even the slightest hint of good. “You can’t believe that I had anything to do with that,” he said, appalled.
He’d known what had happened to Rhona that day. His father had been proud of what he’d done. He hadn’t hesitated to crow to his son about how he’d banished the presumptuous tart with ambitions to marry above herself.
Malcolm found Rhona’s dismissive shrug unconvincing. “You weren’t there to offer any argument otherwise.”
With shaking hands, he set his empty bowl aside. He’d enjoyed his dinner, but now the hearty food formed a rancid, uncomfortable lump in his stomach. “I wasn’t there, because my father had chained me in the dungeons.”
A silence crashed down. Her mouth dropped open with astonishment. Then doubt shadowed her remarkable eyes. “That doesn’t sound likely. It’s the nineteenth century, not the twelfth. And your parents doted on you. If they hadn’t held such high hopes for you, they wouldn’t have been so furious that you’d sullied the Innes lineage by consorting with a humble creature like Rhona Macleod.”
“Nevertheless, it’s true.” His voice was hard. As hard as hers. Ridiculous so long afterward to feel stinging hurt, but hurt he felt. Although if Rhona had believed in his perfidy all these years, it explained her anger. “But even more shocking to me is that after everything we were to each other, after all the promises we made, you’d believe that I’d wrong you like that.”
“Young men tell pretty lies to make stupid girls lie down with them.” More of that bitterness that sliced at his soul.
She’d once been so bright and joyful. It pained him to see how the years had scarred her. Although what else could he expect? Especially if she believed, as it was so obvious she did, that the man who took her virginity had deceived her.
“You weren’t a stupid girl.” He’d always delighted in her cleverness.
Her lips turned down. What he’d give for her to smile at him as she once had, as though he was her whole world and she found that world a complete delight. But those sweet days were gone, never to be reclaimed.
“The evidence would suggest otherwise.”
“Actually I’ll rephrase that. You were a stupid girl to believe that I’d turned my back on you. You knew I loved you.”
The mention of love made her flinch. “At least that’s what you said.”
He regarded her steadily, willing her to remember the strength of the bond between them. “You didn’t trust it was true?”
“Your father was scathing about my chances of becoming his daughter-in-law, and my father was sober enough that night to be furious and humiliated. He wasn’t pleased to hear that his daughter was with child and no wedding ring on her finger.” She spoke in a heated rush. “And there was not one peep from you to say that they were wrong.”
Jimmy Macleod had still been angry when Malcolm tracked him down, drinking himself into oblivion in Aberdeen. It turned out that Malcolm’s father had offered the man money as well. In return, Jimmy had to leave the Dun Carron estate and never return.
“So you took the money and left without a fight?” He couldn’t help being disappointed. They might have both lost, but at least he’d gone down fighting.
He should have known better than to doubt her.
Her glance was contemptuous. “As if I would. At that stage, I still thought you were Sir Galahad and you’d come galloping over the hill to my rescue.”
If only he’d been able to. He’d raged, he’d sworn, he’d even damn well wept, but nothing had persuaded his father to unlock the chains. Chains that as far as he knew had last been used when the English penned a dozen Jacobite rebels in the dungeons after the ’45 Rebellion.
And all the time he’d been aware that despite his good intentions, he was the one at fault. He was responsible for this disaster. Malcolm had been so catastrophically stupid. So trusting. So sure that the whole world would view his love with kindness.
He’d gone straight from learning that Rhona expected his child to telling his parents he intended to marry her. His parents had taken the news that their only son was about to wed a penniless nobody with what he’d soon realized was suspicious composure. Later that night, a gang of servants had rousted him from his bed and shackled him in the dungeons. He guessed they were the same men who had descended on the Macleod croft with his father to bully Rhona.
His parents had always indulged him, so it never occurred to him that they’d resist his will in this, the one thing in his life he really wanted. It should have. Both his mother and father were implacable in insisting that marriage to Rhona would ruin his future.
While he was trapped in the depths of Dun Carron Castle, the father he’d always loved was making sure that Malcolm’s unsuitable sweetheart disappeared from the glen forever. Malcolm still hated to think back to those long hours of incarceration, as disbelief and anger gradually turned to soul-devouring despair. He still woke shaking and sweating from nightmares about it. Nightmares where he was back in that dungeon, helpless to stop his life from shriveling into a desolate wilderness.
By the time his father let him go three days later, Malcolm already knew it was too late. Which didn’t stop him from rushing to the Macleod croft to find Rhona. But the tumbledown cottage was empty, with no hint left behind of where its inhabitants had gone.
“I let you down,” he said grimly. “Not on purpose, but we should have run off together before anyone could come between us.”
She observed him with a troubled gaze. At least she didn’t look like she loathed him anymore. Mention of the dungeon seemed to have earned him a scrap of leniency. Was she starting to believe his story? “We were young. I was just seventeen. You were just eighteen. Perhaps your parents were right, and we were too young to think about marriage.”