There it was again, that ghost of grief in her eyes. He frowned as he followed her example and looked ahead. Why grief? She could not possibly regret what they had lost. She had been the one to leave him, after all, proving what he had always known, that he was beneath her and would never be worthy of her.
Anger attempted to boil up in him, to burn away the worry and compassion he had begun to feel for her. But it was a weak thing. After the past week, she was no longer the evil woman who had betrayed him and broken his heart. At least, he reflected ruefully as he sidestepped a rut in the road, not completely. He had seen too much of the residue of pain and fear in her eyes to compartmentalize her so severely now.
Which, of course, only made him furious at himself. What did it matter what had happened to her in the intervening years since leaving him? After all, she had been theone to throw their future away. There should not be a single part of him that cared what had befallen her since.
Yet that hadn’t stopped him from panicking when he had woken and found himself atop her in the carriage. The very idea of her being injured had revived something in him he had thought long dead, a need to protect her as he had always wanted to. And then after, when they had been looking over the carriage and she had paled and swayed on her feet, his certainty that she was in truth injured, his concern for her well-being, had overtaken everything else. It was the main reason he had not wanted her going off alone to fetch a blacksmith. Head injuries were stealthy things, after all, and he did not want her to be alone should something occur.
Now that he had a moment of quiet to think, however, something tickled the back of his mind, unrelenting. Something about the timing of her reaction, right after mention of Durham…
In a flash it came to him, just why Durham was so important: it was close to Lord Farrow’s seat.
At the reminder of that man, Iain’s anger sizzled and sparked back to life. How could he have forgotten? Farrow Hall had been the place Lord Farrow and his family had called home for the majority of the year, the place where Seraphina had grown up.
Common sense, of course, told him that something horrible indeed must have happened since their separation for Seraphina to have run away with her sisters and changed their surname and hidden from their sire. Yet common sense could not get through his blind anger at the thought of that man who had destroyed Iain’s one chance at happiness.
“You do nae wish to take a detour from our travels tovisit your father?” he snapped before he could call the words back. Not that he wished to call them back. The dam of emotion that had begun to crack from the pressure of his arrival on Synne seemed to crumble, and he knew, with a focused clarity, that this moment was the culmination of thirteen years of tension and pain. It was time to have things out, here and now.
She stumbled, and it took everything in him not to reach out for her. But her moment of shock was quickly gone as she turned to face him. Even in his fury-fueled mind he recognized that an anger almost equal to his own blazed from her eyes, the clear blue at the center of a flame.
“Visiting my father is the last thing I wish to do,” she bit out. “Though perhaps you don’t feel the same. After all, a trip to see him could prove beneficial to you. It is not as if you’re a stranger to such tactics.”
He narrowed his eyes. It felt, quite literally, as if every piece of his body stilled and focused to a pinpoint. “What the blazes are you talking about, woman?” he growled.
“Only that mayhap the money you took from him all those years ago needs to be replenished. And giving me up to him could do just that.”
Money? Was she blaming him for accepting payment for his job in Lord Farrow’s stables now? “I never took a penny from that man that wasn’t owed me.”
“Owed you.” Her voice seemed to strangle in her throat, and again that look of hurt in her eyes.
But he would not be drawn into feeling pity for her again. “Aye, owed me,” he replied. “Though even that was a paltry amount. But men of his ilk are forever underpaying—”
Her hand connecting with his cheek cut his words off. The parrot spread its wings in its agitation, and for amoment, with the bright feathers framing her face, Seraphina looked like an avenging faerie about to wreak havoc on his head.
“I’ve known all these years you were a bastard,” she choked. “However, this is low even for you.”
But he hardly heard her. The slap, as little as it had hurt him, had jarred something troubling in his brain, and he suddenly had the very uncomfortable feeling that they were talking about two very different things.
“Seraphina,” he said, his voice slow and cautious, as if he feared she might tear him limb from limb should he speak too loud, “you do recall that I worked for your father, dinnae you? And I was paid a wage by him?”Until he went and sacked me for caring for you.But that was something else altogether.
The harsh laugh that escaped her lips was grating to his ears and altogether unexpected. “As if that was what I was referring to.”
More confused than ever, he threw up his hands. “I never took a penny from him otherwise.”
Again that sharp laugh, almost manic. “You must think me stupid.”
“On the contrary, I’ve always believed you to be one of the smartest people I know,” he replied without thinking. A moment later he cursed himself for showing even that small bit of feeling for her. But he would not linger on it.
“Are you saying,” he said, his voice sounding distant to his own ears, “that you believe I took money from your father for something other than my position in his household?”
“You think to deny it?” she asked, her voice threaded with equal parts disbelief and contempt. “Do you honestlybelieve that I would not find out? That I would remain ignorant of the reason why you left me?”
His jaw dropped to his chest. “WhyIleftyou?”
But she seemed not to have heard him.
“I should have known,” she spat, stalking toward him, her willowy form vibrating with rage, “that your need to revenge yourself on my father for letting you go without a reference would be paramount to you, that it would even overshadow anything we might have had. And I, stupid girl that I was, fell for it. I let you dupe me, let you make me think that you loved me, gave myself to you body and soul—”
Her voice cracked, and she pressed her lips tight. The bird, visibly agitated, lifted off from her shoulder and flew to a nearby tree.
