The rather damning sort.
“I thought not,” she nodded. “Well, let’s start easy. Why did ye end up in my father’s care at such a young age? How old were ye?”
“Nine.” He shifted on his feet. “I wasnineyears of age when Charles Fyffe took me under his wing.”
“And where was your family?”
He swallowed, eyes darting over the sea and then coming back to her.
“Ye think tae call my bluff, lass, but I will not keep secrets from ye. When ye were Jamie, ye didnae know much about my past because ye didnae ask, and, to be fair, I was a bit of an arse and didnae bother to tell ye. You’re a finely-bred lady from a genteel family. No need tae remind ye that ye married beneath your station.”
“I was a woman pretending to be a boy aboard a merchant ship. Hardly a paragon of ladylike femininity.”
He smiled at that. “That was your circumstance, lass. Not your identity.”
“You’re stalling. Answer my questions, if ye please.”
He shook his head—more rueful than frustrated, she thought—and motioned for them to continue walking. “Very well. My father was a sailor. He died when I was eight. My mother took in sewing and washing, but it was never enough tae see us through. I spent time in the harbor, begging for what work I could get. Your father took pity on me. I’m sure I chattered his ears off and looked pathetic for long enough that he eventually took me aboard. My mother died soon after, and I was essentially in your father’s care after that.”
Eilidh looked at the rippling ocean.
A memory surfaced. Not one lost to her injury, but a scene simply . . . buried by time.
Eilidh stood on the deck of her father’s ship while it was into shore, her hand tucked into her mother’s. She pulled her new cloak around her, feeling pretty in the red wool. She turned her head and met the gaze of a dark-haired boy, glaring at her. He seemed to be all lanky limbs and was dressed in only a thin jacket, despite the cold. He turned his head and spat into the ocean before stalking off.
He didn’t look back.
Kieran. Or, rather, the angry boy he had been.
“He was a good man, your father,” Kieran said. “I would have done anything for him.”
“The best of men,” she agreed. “It’s why it stings that ye didn’t visit during those final years of his life. It was unkindly done.”
He said nothing for a moment. Had she offended him then?
“It was fear, I ken, that held me back,” he finally said. “I wanted to remember your father as the strong, capable captain he had been.”
“Not the weak, crippled man he became? Thatwascowardly of you.”
“Aye. It was. I valued my own emotional comfort higher than supporting your father through the last months of his life.”
“Is that your deepest shame then?” she asked. “Give me an honest answer.”
He said nothing for a minute. Then two.
Her heart sank.
He would not answer, would he? He was willing to let her into his heart, but only so far—
“My deepest shame . . .” he repeated slowly. He stopped and turned to look at her. “My deepest shame is my behavior after thinking ye might have lived.”
“What do ye mean?” Eilidh frowned. “Your behavior when I might have . . .lived?”
Eilidh stared upat him, her silvery eyes holding hints of the blue sky in them.
In her fashionable bonnet and expensive pelisse, she looked as far from his Jamie as possible.
And yet . . .
