“Seventeen.”
“You must have been terrified.”
“I was. I’d never been to Inverness, let alone Edinburgh. London was a horrifying monster, full of people I couldn’t understand and who didn’t understand me. Without Samuel, I dread to think what would have happened. I’d never been anywhere that I didn’t know every single person who lived there.”
“Samuel was a good man.”
“He was.”
In the silence that followed, she felt Samuel’s benevolent ghost hover close. He’d loved having all his acting company and friends around him at Christmas. If his soul lingered, it wished her no ill, she knew.
Patrick looked troubled. “Samuel would want you to be happy.”
“I am happy.”
“You’re lonely.”
Rhona was surprised that he’d noticed. She kept busy, and on her good days, she achieved a simple contentment, but it wasn’t the same as having someone she loved to share her joys and her troubles. “I have you.”
“You know what I mean.”
To her regret she did, although Patrick had never been very keen on any of the men who had courted her. “Don’t start knitting up happy endings, Patrick.”
He paid no heed to her warning. “What does my father want? Does he mean to marry you and carry you back to his keep and make you the Lady of Dun Carron?”
Her laugh held an artificial note that she hoped her son didn’t pick up. Because that was exactly what Malcolm did want, as mad as it sounded when they hadn’t spoken a word to each other in eighteen years. It seemed her son’s romantic imagination did indeed come from his long-absent father. “We’re strangers.”
“You didn’t seem like strangers last night.”
“You only saw us exchange a couple of words – and for my part, the words were ‘get out.’”
Patrick didn’t smile, although she’d tried to inject a mocking note into her answer. “It was enough. And you spent a lot of time last night talking to him.”
“Were you eavesdropping, you dreadful brat?”
He shook his head, although he did smile at her calling him a brat. “No. But you were a long time in the stables and even longer in the kitchen, and it was late when you put out the lights.”
“While you were skulking in your room to avoid a stern talking-to.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re never that stern.”
It was true. Thank goodness for the intrinsic sweetness of Patrick’s nature, or else he would have become the brat she called him. He just had to look at her with those bright black eyes and she was putty in his hands. Even worse, he knew it.
He watched her now with more curiosity than trepidation. “My father wouldn’t have made it to the inn through the blizzard. And you’ve forgiven me for asking him to stay anyway. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have taken him supper or let him sleep in the house.”
“We cleared up a lot of misunderstandings last night.”
“I’m glad. You seem…lighter this morning, as though you’ve put down a crushing load.”
Rhona wasn’t sure she liked her son directing this level of perception at her. A lot of her thoughts right now weren’t suitable for him to guess.
He was right about one thing. These last years since Samuel fell ill and died and she’d made the move to Scotland had been full of hard work. She’d started to feel like she was wholly a mother and a farmer. Malcolm’s arrival reminded her that she was a woman as well, and one not past the stage of experiencing a thrill at a handsome man’s interest.
The problem was that the handsome man in question brought a lifetime of complications in his wake. He might look at her with a desire that made her blood pump faster than it had since she was a girl. But she and Malcolm could never come together free from the burden of their history.
She spoke in an airy tone to try and distract Patrick from looking too closely and divining the sinful impulses Rhona harbored toward Malcolm. “That’s because it’s Christmas. I’m always happy at Christmas.”
That wasn’t true. When she’d first married Samuel, Christmas had been a reminder of everything she’d lost when she was banished from Dun Carron. But by the time Patrick was old enough to understand what the festival was all about, she’d come to love her small family and the unconventional theater people who crowded into her house to celebrate this holy day.
Patrick wasn’t to be put off. “No. It’s more than that. It’s like you’ve given up something that has weighed you down all your life.” He paused. “Hating the man who gave me life can’t have been easy. Especially when every time you looked into my face, you must have remembered him.”
Rhona regarded her son in horror. “No, Patrick, I could never hate you.”
His smile was easy with confidence. “I know you love me, Ma.”
Relieved, she felt her shoulders lower to a more relaxed line. “That’s good. Because I do.” She paused. “And you’re wrong about my hatred being destructive. It was far too easy for me to hate Malcolm. It served to keep me from breaking my heart in grief. It’s a long time ago now, but we were very much in love when we were young. It took me years to get over the separation.”
“Now you have no reason to be bitter.”
Oh, the innocence of youth. She remained furious with Malcolm’s parents, and with her father for being so spineless when it came to protecting his daughter. She was still devastated that Malcolm had spent his life searching for them and wasting his remarkable capacity for happiness in sorrow and isolation. She was angry that he’d never had a family and a chance to discover the day-to-day pleasures she’d enjoyed with Samuel and Patrick.
Perhaps she wasn’t quite so angry about that last. Although if she was the sort of woman she’d like to think she was, she should be.
But while in the abstract, she wanted Malcolm to find contentment without her, something in her relished the knowledge that he’d never stopped loving her. That same weak something positively crowed with triumph that he’d never found another woman he wanted to wed.
Oh, dear, it was clear that the Christmas spirit needed to do a bit more work on her unworthy self.
“You know, I do feel better,” she said, which given her turmoil over her reunion with her first lover was an enormous surprise. Perhaps carrying around all that unresolved resentment had affected her more than she’d realized.
Patrick laughed. “I’m pleased to hear it.” The clock on the mantel chimed half past six. He gulped down his tea, although it must be cold by now. “I’d better go. You didn’t say if you’re going to invite my father for Christmas dinner.”
Rhona caught a fleeting glimpse of something she should have expected but which nonetheless startled her. Patrick was avid to know his father.
She supposed she couldn’t blame him. This was his chance to discover where he came from. All his life, she’d done her best to give him security and love. Now she saw that she’d never been able to supply the one thing that he longed for – a father who shared his blood.
Patrick’s pleading black gaze had its usual effect. And today was Christmas. It seemed an act of unforgivable meanness to exile Malcolm to a lonely lunch at the inn, when he’d already been lonely for so many years. “Of course he can stay.”