“I d-didn’t—” Chris pressed shaking fingers to her forehead. “I don’t know if I would have truly gone through with the marriage had I—”
He stalked toward her. “Chris, where is my child?”
Her palm, flexed outward, stopped him.
“I m-miscarried.” She licked tears off her lip. “A week before the wedding, I began bleeding. The midwife said it was likely due to nervous attacks from...everything. Our babe was born months too early to survive.” She stifled another sob. “A boy.”
A son.
He hadnearly had a son.
Pacing away, he walked from one side of the cairn to the other.
“And then ye married Newton anyway,” he said, tone scathing.
“Yes,” she gasped. “I didn’t know what else to do. I was ruined and—”
“Were ye ever going to tell me?” The question emerged nearly at a shout. “If ye hadn’t accidentally ended up here, would ye have ever told me?”
Her crumpling expression was his answer.
No.
She would never have told him.
In fact, she had already hadweeksto disclose the truth.
And she had remained silent.
He didn’t . . .
He couldn’t . . .
He and Chris had made a bairn together.
And instead of writing him, instead of permitting him to step into his rightful place as her husband and father of her child, she had cut him out.
Excised him as precisely as she wielded the sharp edge of her trowel.
Yes, he had betrayed her, but this . . .
It was simply too much.
Alistair’s feet strode out of the cairn, across the stone circle, past the castle, and into the forest of Scots pine beyond.
His thoughts tied into such afankle, he doubted he would ever untangle them.
CHRISSI LIMPED BACK to the castle and spent the remainder of the day weeping into her pillow.
Never had she hated herself more.
She had been too much of a coward to tell Alis nine years ago. Too hurting over his betrayal—his lack ofseeingher and supporting her most cherished aspirations. And then the misery of his subsequent silence.
But he had deserved to know. And regardless of how he felt about her, he would never have abandoned his child. No. He would have rushed to her side and married her immediately.
But she hadn’t wanted their married life to begin that way, with Alistair essentially forced to marry her. To always wonder if he would have, of his own free will, returned to her.
Of course, she got her answer in time—
