“How could I what?” she replied. “Reid, I don’t understand.”
“Ye swore to me. Ye swore to me that ye weren’t a Muir spy and I believed ye. I believed ye, Abigail.”
“What? I’m not a spy! What are you talking about!”
But Reid wasn’t listening anymore. He was staring at the painting, the evidence that set fire to all his dreams and sent them up in smoke.
As Laird Campbell ordered his men to take Abigail to the cells, he didn’t move. As Abigail screamed and shouted, calling his name, begging him to look at her, he hardened his heart. After she’d gone, he took a deep breath then lifted his head to look at his uncle.
“I am yers, my lord. What do ye need me to do?”
Chapter 17
Abi’s throat was sorefrom shouting, her eyes were puffy from crying, and her heart was so heavy with dread she could barely breathe. But no amount of shouting brought anyone running, no amount of crying eased the ache in her heart.
She slumped against the heavy wooden door and slid to the floor. She was still wearing the elegant dress that Reid had given her for the harvest feast. God, was it still the same night? How could that be? How could everything have changed in so short a space of time? Only a few hours ago, she’d been Queen of the Harvest and Reid had been her King. He’d been her lover, her rock. But now? Here she was, alone in a cell beneath the castle, and Reid had abandoned her.
She recalled the look on his face as she was led out of the great hall. It had been ravaged, full of hurt and betrayal.
Abi didn’t understand any of it. Why would seeing the photograph of her and Layla affect him like that? Why had he suddenly turned against her and cast her aside the way he had? She’d thought he had feelings for her. Jeez, she had even dared to hope that it might be more than that. Right before Laird Campbell had turned up, Reid had been struggling to tell her something. He’d fumbled with the words, but the expression in his eyes had spoken what his tongue couldn’t. She had thought—hoped—that he was going to tell her he loved her. She’d wanted that more than anything and her response had already been forming on her tongue.
I love you too.
But all that had been shattered by the arrival of Laird Arsehole Campbell, Domnall Scumbag Maguire, and that bloody photograph.
Despair washed through her and she rested her head against the hard wood of the door, trying to piece it all together and failing miserably.
She must have drifted into uneasy sleep because when she lifted her head sometime later, gray dawn light was beginning to leak through the bars on the window.
She blinked bleary eyes, grainy and sore. She heard the sound of keys turning in a lock and then footsteps coming down the corridor. She dragged herself to her feet. If Laird Bloody Campbell had come for her, she would meet him on her feet, damn it!
But it wasn’t Laird Campbell. Her heart nearly stopped as Reid came to stand in front of her cell.
He looked like hell. There were dark circles under his eyes and his normally shining hair looked dull and matted. He too was still wearing his outfit from the feast, a pale mockery of the happiness that had been torn from them.
“Reid?” she said, curling her fingers around the cold iron bars and pressing her face up against it.
