15
SEVEN YEARS EARLIER
August 25, 1810
Pettercairn, Scotland
Isla had never suspected that her eldest brother harbored such rage. It glowed, incandescent, from the red tips of his ears to the furious growl of his voice.
After discovering her with Tavish, Gray marched her across the fields, through the front door of Dunmore, and into his private study.
He motioned for Isla to sit in a chair beside the fire before kicking the door shut behind him with a crash that caused her to jump.
She had meant what she told Tavish. Gray would not physically harm her. Even now, he hadn’t laid a finger on her.
But . . . shehad never met this Gray. This towering thundercloud of wrath that set her limbs to shaking.
He stared down at her, chest heaving, nostrils flaring.
“You are just like her,” he spat. “Her face. Her voice. Her eyes.”
“Her?” Isla whispered.
“Yes,her! Our whore of a mother!”
Isla recoiled. Whatever she had expected him to say, it wasn’t that.
“P-pardon?”
“Our mother. A whore.” He enunciated each syllable with brutal precision. “And you, her bastard get.”
The disgusted curl of his lip said it all.
Isla simply stared at him, unable to comprehend the horror of his words.
Whore? Bastard?
Surely, he didn’t mean . . .
“G-Gray—” Isla hiccupped.
“Silence!” He swiped an arm through the air.
On a grunt, he clawed at his neckcloth, tearing it from his neck and tossing it atop the mess of papers and books on his desk. His coat and waistcoat soon followed.
He stood over her in shirtsleeves, chest heaving.
“Father told me much on his deathbed. Before then, I merely thought our mother a bit of a flibbertigibbet. A flighty woman who shirked her duties as wife and mother. However, the truth is much darker. Our mother was disgusted by my birth and the deformity of my foot that soon became apparent.” Gray paced before his desk, limping badly. “Then, Matthias was born. Mother—No! I refuse to even refer to her as my mother!—that womanrefused my father his matrimonial due entirely. ‘Never again will I come to your bed,’ she told him. ‘I have borne you two sons with deformities of limb. I refuse to bear a third.’ My father was devastated, as he had thought their marriage to be a love match. The more fool him.”
Isla panted in terror, palms pressed to the arms of her chair. Every word out of Gray’s mouth altered a piece of her childhood and her place within their family.
“Eventually,that womansought the comfort of other men, reveling in the arms of anyone but those of her rightful husband.You—” Gray lifted a scathing hand in her direction. “—are the unwanted result.”
Unwanted.
Bastard.
Tears blurred the room.
