“Miss Seraphina Athwart says she’s waiting for ye in the private dining room.” And with a quick, clumsy curtsy she was off.
Iain wasted no time, hurrying down the narrow stairs, making his way through the busy dining room to theprivate room at the back. He threw open the door, certain he would not be able to stop himself from going to Seraphina and pulling her into his arms.
Until, that was, he saw the two women standing beside her.
His boots skidded to a halt on the polished wood floor, the breath sucked from his body. He had not seen his grandmother and his cousin since he’d left Balgair months ago, had not written to them or received word from them.
But after the conversation with Seraphina yesterday, he found he no longer saw these women through a filter of resentment. His anger was still there deep in his gut, of course. But as he stared at the anxious faces of the two women before him, he realized that his anger was no longer directed at them.
As jarring as that was, however, it faded once he realized what their presence here meant. He looked to Seraphina, saw the new knowledge in her eyes, and silently cursed himself. He had been a fool, a damn fool, for holding on to his embarrassment and pride and fear for so long and keeping the truth about himself from her.
“Seraphina—” he began.
But she was already moving toward the door. “I’ll leave you three to talk,” she said. Then, with a bracing smile Cora and his grandmother’s way, she slipped from the room.
He stared after her helplessly, muttering a quick “Excuse me a moment” to the other women, before he followed her. By the saints, she was quick. She was already out on the street by the time he caught up to her. He didn’t dare grab her arm to stop her—after her reaction on Synne, as well as all he’d begun to guess about her past, he was not about to cause her further strain. But he did call out to her, sendingup a silent prayer that she would stop and hear him out. Not that he deserved it.
“Seraphina, please let me explain.”
By some miracle she stopped and turned back to face him. People hurried to and fro on the pavement, weaving between and around them, but he paid them no mind as he stepped up to Seraphina, just barely stopping himself from taking her hand in his.
“There is nothing to explain,” she said, hands clasped tight before her. Phineas, on her shoulder, gave a few low, trilling sounds of what appeared to be agitation, but she paid him no heed, the very fact that she was not automatically consoling her pet proof of her own mind’s disquiet. And suddenly his reasons for keeping the truth of his title from her seemed pathetic.
“But you deserve an explanation,” he rasped. “You deserve to know why I dinnae tell you I am a duke.”
She held up a hand, stopping his words in their tracks. “I know why you didn’t tell me, Iain,” she said, her voice achingly quiet and yet all the more powerful for it. “I used to know you better than anyone; do you think I would not understand your motivation for keeping something so important from me? No, I know you did it because you believed it would endanger your quest to see this marriage dissolved.
“But you do not know me as well as you may think,” she continued. “And while much of that can be blamed on the fact that the past years have changed me in ways you can never imagine, I can only blame myself that no one knows my heart. I have kept it bottled up for so long, I even wonder if I know it myself.” Here she gave a pained twist of a smile, which caused an answering twist in his chest.
But she was not through driving the stake of truth through his heart. And he deserved every bit of it.
“I don’t care that you are a duke, Iain,” she rasped, her beautiful eyes dull with pain. “I never would have cared. The only thing that matters to me right now is that you go back there and make things right with those two women, who would very much like to give you what you needed all those years ago: a family.”
And with that she turned and walked off.
Several long, painful minutes later Iain returned to the private dining room, half expecting to find Cora and his grandmother gone—and not knowing if he would prefer to find them gone or still there waiting for him. While Seraphina wanted him to somehow make things right with these women, he did not know if he had the heart for it after watching her walk away.
But no, his cousin and grandmother had remained, looking as brittle as Seraphina had. And suddenly her words from yesterday at the beach came back to him:But don’t you see how extraordinary this all is, Iain? You thought you were alone all those years. Now you have a family.
Heaving a sigh, he motioned to the seats that circled the table. “Won’t you sit?”
They did, sinking into chairs as far from him as they possibly could. It would have grated on his nerves just months ago, proof of their dislike of him, the rough and uncultured brute who had come unwelcome into their lives no matter that they had searched for him. Now he saw it for what it was: uncertainty with him, with where theystood with him, and with their place in this world. He was a stranger to them, as surely as they were to him. But worse, he had control over their lives. They didn’t know him or what he was capable of. They only knew he was the son of a man who had caused grief wherever he had gone, a man who had cut ties with his family when his addiction had become too great. And, he was forced to admit, he had not exactly helped matters by his own unwillingness to open up to them. They knew nothing about him, and he knew nothing about them.
Perhaps it was time to repair that.
Leaning forward, he said in as gentle a manner as he was able to—which was so much gentler a tone, now that Seraphina had burrowed back into his heart—“I would verra much like to learn what my pa was like before he left your home. And I would like to tell you about what few years I had with him, and my life after he passed away.”
His grandmother gasped, her trembling hand going to her mouth, and tears began to form in her large gray eyes. Eyes the same shade as his own.
Cora, too, looked as if she were about to cry. But, strong lass that she was, she swallowed the tears down and said, a tentative smile on her lips that he had never seen before, “We would like that very much.”
Chapter 24
Seraphina didn’t know how long she wandered the streets of Edinburgh. All she knew was she needed time to come to terms with the sudden developments that had been thrown at her head in the space of minutes, first with believing she and Iain had a chance at a life together, then meeting his relations, learning he was a duke, and realizing that she could never be with him. She felt as if up was down, right was left, light was dark.
The one thing she was certain of, however, was her feelings for Iain. In fact, she was so certain, she was surprised she had not realized the truth before: she had fallen back in love with her husband.
Her husband, who was now a duke. Iain finally had status and respect. There would be no more people looking down on him for the supposed lowness of his birth, no one treating him like offal beneath their boots. No, he was a duke, a peer of the realm. And she was so happy for him, she wanted to cry—if she were capable of crying.
