Witnessing Viola struggle to breathe had filled him with an almost unholy terror. His heart had raced and his hands had shaken until he had all but chased after her and Leah, unable to sit still a moment longer.
And that had been only five harrowing minutes. Imagine a lifetime of watching a woman he loved battle such an infirmity.
Because even if a person seemed hearty and hale, none was robust enough to escape death.
Malcolm had well-learned that bitter truth.
He ran a hand over his nose and beard.
Viola took another lungful of air, the lovely pink of her cheeks brightening a wee bit.
“Well, I fear I have officially used up my allotment of histrionics today,” she said on a sigh.
“Nae, lass. Give yourself more credit than that. The day is yet young, and I’m sure Kendall has another barb or two tae lob in your direction.”
She smiled at his gentle teasing.
Malcolm held out a hand and helped her to her feet.
She stared at their joined hands for a moment, at her gloved palm resting in his bare one. Turning her head, she studied the path leading upstream away from the folly.
“Does this path wind to somewhere lovely?”
“Aye. It follows up the river to a ravine with stately steep cliffs on each side and a waterfall tumbling down from a wee burn. The Rocks of Solitude, it’s aptly called.”
“I think I have recovered enough to be equal to it. May we?”
Malcolm nodded and tucked her hand into his elbow, the slight weight already familiar . . . as if it should always belong precisely there.
He took in a slow breath, fighting the dread coiling under his sternum.
It was one thing to contemplate climbing out of the comfortable walls of his grief.
It was something else entirely to ponder love and marriage—in both sickness and health—with a woman who was not Aileen. To stow, once more, his heart in another’s fragile body.
If only Viola didn’t feel like a missing piece of him, a lost bit of a puzzle, just waiting to be slotted into place and kept at his side.
Assuming she evenwishedto be kept, that was.
Och, what afanklehe had gotten himself into.
“I can practically hear the heft of your thoughts,” Viola said.
“That obvious, am I?”
“No. But I feel I am coming to know you.”
The truth of her words landed hard.
Shewascoming to know him.
And the thought filled him with . . .grief, of all things.
Why was that? Was he so used to dwelling at the bottom of his pit, that the very essence of hope felt like a loss before it could even draw breath?
“And what do my thoughts say?” he had to ask.
“That I, Viola Brodure, am a hypocrite.”
