“Ye should be proud,” he said, the words surprisingly gentle. “It takes a great deal of bravery to face the kinds of odds that ye did, to defend your home even when hope is so scant.”
Proud. Ciaran barely managed to choke back the bitter laugh that wanted to escape him. Aye, he’d been proud then. But there was nothing left in him that was good enough to deserve that pride.
If only they kenned the truth, he thought, his inner voice perilously close to despair.If only they understood that I am no hero but merely a pawn of their enemy. How differently they would look at me then.
How differentlyshewould look at him… He didn’t even dare to think it.
Suddenly, he could take it no longer. He could feel her there, so beautiful andgood, even when he was the most terrible little pest. Christ, how he wanted to be the kind of man who deserved to know her.
But he wasn’t even the kind of man who deserved to sit in the same room as her.
He looked up at Eilidh—he simply could no longer stop himself—and he saw sympathy in her gaze and the bitter determination to bear witness to anything he had to say.
One look from those sea green eyes, and Ciaran felt the walls begin to close in around him.
“I beg your leave,” he managed to grit out in Ewan’s direction as he stood and strode from the room.
Let them think him overcome with the memories of war. Let them think him shattered by his past. They could believe what they wanted. Nothing they might mutter behind his back would be nearly as bad as the truth.
When he burst out into the cool night air, he sucked in a breath like he’d been drowning, the crisp bite in his lungs reminding him that he was alive, for all that he scarcely deserved to be. He let the darkness bathe him in its forgiving shadows, his chest heaving with the exertion of constantly bearing this shame upon his back.
Christ, he could recall the faces of a hundred men who deserved to live more than he had, but who had died in the mud of Culloden anyway. It was the bitterest irony that he was the one who had survived only to now betray everything that he and his fallen comrades had once held dear.
“Ciaran?”
When her voice broke the dark, Ciaran didn’t know whether to laugh or sob. Of course she’d followed him. She had never known when to leave someone well enough alone. She’d nevertreated him as a lost cause, even though he had been one long before he first laid eyes on her.
“Eilidh,” he muttered, not turning to look at her. “Leave me.”
Instead of retreating, however, her light footsteps grew closer, and he had little time to brace himself before a gentle hand was laid on his back.
It almost crushed him, that touch, far more than any fist or blade had ever done.
“Eilidh,” he repeated, the word cracking with emotion.
“It may unburden ye to speak of it,” she said, her confidence suggesting a wisdom that went beyond her years. But that was war, wasn’t it? It made you grow up far too quickly.
He shook his head once, roughly. He couldn’t. He could not confess his sins, not without risking his people. And yet…
He could not send her away, either.
They stayed there for a moment that lasted an age. Ciaran wondered if he would finally break when she removed her hand, when she finally realized that he had nothing to give and gave up on him once and for all.
But the wee sprite surprised him, as she always did. She didn’t remove her hand; she just trailed it over his shoulder and down his arm until she could lace her fingers in his. He would no doubt burn in hell for letting her offer him comfort when he was nothing but a danger to her, but it would be worth the fires of damnation.
“What do ye need?” she asked quietly, and it was such a simple question, but he wasn't certain that anyone had ever asked it of him before.
He closed his eyes tight against the feelings that he simply could not afford to have about this wonderful, wonderful lass.
“Come with me,” he urged after a moment in which his selfishness overtook his honor. He could steal just a few moments with her. Just this one thing that he could take.
And because she was perfect and lovely and light—even in the faint glow of the moon, her golden hair shined like a star—she just let out a laugh and let him tug her along.
“Where are we going?”
She followed before he replied, and God help him if he’d ever done anything to merit that trust.
“For a ride,” he said, guiding her toward the stables.
