She had willingly come to him, seeking solace.
Come back to me,he longed to beg her.Let us be one again. Come be my wife.
But that was the selfish part of him speaking.
Eilidh did not need more guilt heaped upon her.
No, she needed understanding.
He wondered if she had been as gutted as himself, watching Ewan with wee Dahlia. Kieran had never understood how he could simultaneously feel so much happiness for a friend and yet so much sorrow for himself.
“Our babe?” he repeated. “Our bairn?”
“Aye.”
He filled his lungs and released the breath slowly, forcibly telling his hand not to rub circles on her back or caress her upper arm or press a trembling kiss to her head.
Her trust was fragile. He would do nothing to jeopardize it. So even though part of his mind begged him to pull her close and kiss her lips, to feel the press of her soft curves melting into his body, he did nothing.
He forced himself to lie still, to accept what she was willing to give.
“Ye were ecstatic,” he began. “We were on Vanuatu by then, if just barely, and had been married about two months. Ye had missed your menses the month before, but ye waited until the following month tae tell me, just tae be sure. The weeks that followed on Vanuatu were some of the happiest of my life. Ye were a wee bit nauseous from time to time, but not so much that anyone commented. After all, every sailor is sick on occasion. Ye were giddy at the thought of being a mother. Ye kept talking about what we would name the bairn—James or Charles, if it were a boy—”
“I should like to name a boy James.” She snuggled into him.
Bloody hell, he had forgotten how marvelous it felt to simplyholdher.
“Aye, James would be an excellent name for a lad,” he agreed. “Of course, we were both concerned about the baby, too. There was no way we could keep your pregnancy a secret, long-term. But no one besides Ewan knew that we were married, much less that ye were increasing.”
“What did we decide to do?”
Kieran nearly snorted at her question.
“Ye refused to talk about it. Ye just insisted that everything would somehow magically come right.” He jostled her on his chest. “Sound familiar?”
He felt her answering wan smile against his chest.
She said nothing for a few moments, his words lingering between them. Then, she sucked in a stuttering breath and pressed her face to his chest, as if bracing herself.
“We wouldn’t have named our baby James,” she whispered, words muffled. “Because . . . the babe was a girl.”
Oh!
Kieran closed his eyes, allowing the anguish of that simple sentence to wash over him.
A girl.
A wee lassie.
“She was so tiny,” Eilidh continued. “So impossibly small—barely the length of my hand—but still clearly female. After she was . . . born . . .” She paused. Kieran felt her swallow. “. . . Mrs. Gillespie wouldn’t let me see her, didn’t tell me the baby’s gender. Nothing. She said . . . she said it was better to not think of it as a child, but instead as a . . . a trial that had been miraculously taken from me. But . . . my heart couldn’t bear it—” she gasped. “I couldn’tbearthe thought of my cold, lifeless babe not knowing me, not feeling her mother’s hand just one time. Mrs. Gillespie had wrapped the body in a rag to dispose of it the next day, but I sneaked out that night. I took the tiny wee bundle deep into the jungle. How I managed that in the state I was in, I don’t know. I was bleeding and weeping, my head a pounding mass of pain. I remembered nothing before arriving on the island the week before. But something in me knew Ihadto give my babe a proper burial.”
“Ah, lass,” he managed to whisper around the grief lodged in his throat. “I should have been there. I would have done anything tae be there.”
Eilidh squeezed him tightly, but continued on with her story. “I dug her a grave as deeply as I could, kissed her wee head, and said a prayer over her remains. And then I buried her. Mrs. Gillespie noticed that the babe was gone the next morning and that my feet were dirty and scraped. She just l-looked at me with sad, knowing eyes. She n-never said a word.”
Eilidh hiccupped and pressed closer, her body shaking again.
More than anything, Kieran wanted to shine light and love into the battered corners of her heart. To assure her that happiness would come again, that there would be more children, more joy, more hope—not just for her, but for them both.
