He hadn’t been too young. He’d always known that the only girl he’d ever love was Rhona Macleod, with her passionate soul and vivid red hair.
“It wasn’t just about us. We’d made a baby.”
For one fleeting instant, she looked devastated. Then she made a dejected gesture. “It was all so long ago.”
He frowned at her. “Have you forgotten?”
She stared down into her lap, her shoulders taut as if she, too, relived those harrowing days. His mouth tasted rank with the defeat he’d suffered in that dungeon, and he could still feel the cold, rough weight of phantom chains.
“No,” she said in a low voice. “No, I’ve never forgotten.”
“Neither have I.”
When she glanced up, the gaze she leveled on him was questioning but not hostile. She looked vulnerable and much younger. She could almost be the girl he’d loved so long ago. “Did you come to accept that I’d gone and it was time to get on with your life?”
He responded with another unamused grunt of laughter. “Hell, no. My father kept me in prison for three days and the minute I was free, I headed out to look for you, but nobody on the estate was talking. I didn’t give up. Over the months, I searched for miles around, all the way to Aberdeen. I found your father there, but he said he didn’t know where they’d taken you. Finally, I managed to bribe one of the castle servants to tell me what they’d done. I suppose by then, the fellow thought I had no hope of finding you, so there was little danger confessing all.”
“Because I was in London.”
“My father must have been bloody terrified, if he sent you all the way to England.”
She sighed and regret weighted her gaze. It seemed she was ready to believe him at last. What stung like nettles was that she had ever doubted him. He’d never doubted her. “Your father made it very clear that I was no longer welcome anywhere near Dun Carron. Or Dun Carron’s heir. What he also made clear was that he acted at your behest.”
Grief made his belly clench. Grief, remorse, and guilt. “I’m sorry that I didn’t do enough to make you trust me. I thought I had. I trusted you. When I was with you, I felt invincible. Our love was so strong, nothing could defeat it.”
Her expression was bleak. “Yet a determined parent and half a dozen stalwart servants brought us to ruin.” She paused. “I should have at least absolved you of conspiring to exile me. Everything I knew of you said that you’d give me my marching orders in person.”
She definitely no longer sounded like she hated him. Instead she sounded tired and sad. Malcolm wasn’t sure it was much of an improvement. He answered her with the truth that had lived in his heart for most of his life. “I would never give you your marching orders. You were the reason behind my every breath.”
She still was.
Rhona went back to looking troubled. “You’re right. We should have run away.”
“Even if my father disowned me, we’d have been together. Patrick would have grown up, knowing that his father loved him.”
Malcolm had a vision of what these last barren years might have been like if he and Rhona had married. Then from long habit, he shut down the pictures filling his mind. When he’d first started searching for her, convinced that fate couldn’t be cruel enough to keep such true lovers apart, his fantasies about making a life with Rhona and his as-yet unborn child had spurred his efforts. But as weeks turned into months turned into lonely years, those hopes had become too painful to revisit.
Now, sitting with Rhona, having met the exceptional young man they’d created together, the thought of everything he’d missed was excruciating. He could hardly bear that Rhona had spent all these years convinced of his betrayal. If they ended tonight with her acknowledging that he’d never forsaken her, never given up searching, it would be some consolation.
Malcolm forced himself back to his tale. “So I went to London and did my best to trace you. I tried all the inns. I checked the passenger lists of every boat that had left the port since you’d gone. I put notices in papers up and down the country, asking for news of Rhona Macleod and offering a reward for information. That ended up being a mistake. I and the people I’d hired to help me spent too much time tracing false leads. And all the time, no real information emerged. I started to feel like I chased a ghost. I traveled to Europe. I ended up spending a year in America.”
He’d checked the brothels everywhere he went, too. The idea that Rhona might have ended up selling herself had been torture.
Wondering, she looked at him. Astonishment wiped out her earlier doubt. “You did all that? For me?”
“I would have done more,” he said, his tone grim. “Until five years into my search, I received a letter from your father saying that you’d died in Ireland. He didn’t mention the baby.”
“But I was never in Ireland.”
“Which makes sense because my agents and I combed every inch of the place, finding no trace of you.” Malcolm’s lips twisted in a grimace. “Once I got the letter, I went straightaway to Dundee, where your father was when he wrote, but he was long gone and I never heard from him again.”
Old rancor sharpened her reply. “He’s always been good at disappearing. He disappeared often enough at Dun Carron when he was on a spree.”
“I discovered after my father’s death that he’d continued to pay your father an allowance to stay away.” Pity thickened his tone. “I’m sorry, Rhona, but I think your father has passed away. The papers I found at Dun Carron indicated that the allowance stopped a year after the letter from Dundee.”
She sighed and made a hopeless gesture. Longstanding sadness marked her features. “Any allowance he received would have gone in whisky. He never recovered from Ma’s death. I don’t think he cared one way or the other whether he lived or died. He certainly never cared much for me, even before your father bribed him to turn a blind eye to what happened.”
Jimmy Macleod’s intemperate habits hadn’t helped Malcolm’s case, when he told his parents he wanted to marry Rhona. “You deserved better.”
Her lips tightened. “I’m starting to think we both did.”
“I suspect now that my father paid your father to write the letter saying you were dead, so that I abandoned my quest. He wanted me to take up my duties at Dun Carron.”
“You should have.”
He shook his head. “No, there was a chance the baby had survived. If I couldn’t have you, I could still have my child.”
“Oh, Malcolm…” Her eyes were dark with regret and pity. “I shouldn’t have raged at you all these years. But everything that happened fitted in with my fears. I could never quite believe I was good enough for the heir to Dun Carron. Your father was right about that. You were rich and fine and handsome and highborn. I was an ignorant hoyden of a crofter’s daughter. What could I offer such a paragon as Malcolm Innes?”
For the first time, he managed a genuine smile. “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. You’re smart and funny and brave, and you’ve held my heart since I was old enough to give it. There’s nobody to rival you, Rhona.”
She didn’t seem to notice his use of the present tense.