“I didn’t realize you were a Graham before you were a Campbell,” he finally said to Cait.
Cait decided there was no reason now to keep anything secret. Not that she’d kept it secret before. It had just never been something she’d wanted to talk about.
“When John and I decided to wed, we went to Grandfather to ask for his blessing,” she said.
Graham’s eyes narrowed in warning. Cait lifted her chin. His opinion hadn’t mattered to her in a long while.
“I see,” Iain said, clearly uncomfortable. He was probably regretting asking her to dinner. She definitely regretted accepting the invitation. If she had known Graham was going to be here, she would have stayed very far away.
“We’d known Graham wouldn’t be pleased but had hoped he would see how much we were in love and give us his blessing. He refused in a most spectacular display of anger.”
“Catherine,” Graham warned.
She turned to Iain. “All because John was a Campbell.”
At the time Cait had argued that love didn’t care about ridiculous feuds, and Graham had said love was blind and stupid and his granddaughter was not marrying a Campbell. She and John had left and married anyway, and she’d been very happy with her choice, although she regretted the rift it had caused with her family.
Cait’s throat closed up and she looked away, blinking. Her grandmother had died five years ago, months after Cait had given birth to Christina. It had been her greatest regret that she had not been able to mend the breach with her grandmother.
“I’ll understand if ye don’t want me to dine with ye,” Cait said to Iain.
“Nonsense. We’re all adults here,” Iain said.
Cait raised her brow at her grandfather, who had the good grace to look away.
“Of course,” he said. “What’s past is past.”
She wanted to argue that he was the worst offender of not leaving the past in the past, but she kept her mouth shut. She’d learned long ago that arguing with Alasdair Graham was pointless. Besides, what did it matter anymore? John was gone. Christina was gone. Her grandmother was gone.
They made their way into the informal dining room, laid out with three place settings, one on either side of Iain, who was sitting at the head of the table. They waited while the footmen served them. Nothing but the clink of silverware on the china broke the thick, tense silence.
“It’s sorry I am about yer field, Campbell,” Graham said. “It’s a nasty business, that. Have ye figured out who was responsible?”
“Unfortunately, no. Have you heard anything?”
“Nay. Ye think it’s MacGregor?” Graham asked.
Cait and her grandfather’s gazes clashed and she held her breath, waiting for the inevitable, but it didn’t come. At least not this time.
“That would be my guess,” Iain said, unaware of the silent conversation that passed quickly between Cait and her grandfather.
Graham grunted. “The man is a sheep-shagging bugger.”
Cait smiled. She’d almost forgotten how humorous her grandfather could be. Graham held no love for MacGregor, even though his daughter had married MacGregor’s son and produced Cait. The marriage had been an alliance between two of the oldest clans as well as a love match. Her parents had been so deeply in love that when Cait’s mother died giving birth to her, Cait’s father had taken his own life.
The MacGregors and the Grahams had fought over who was to raise Cait. MacGregor had claimed that since she was the only child of his only child, she would one day rise to become chief and therefore should be raised as a MacGregor. Graham had hotly disagreed, saying she was half Graham and should be raised as such.
So Cait had lived a strange life, half as a MacGregor and half as a Graham, traveling between the two houses, loved by two gruff men who couldn’t seem to like each other and two wonderful women who’d been devastated over the loss of their children. And then she had met John and fallen in love, and if Alasdair Graham had been vocally against the marriage, that was nothing to Wallace MacGregor’s reaction. He’d instantly and ruthlessly cut her out of his life. She’d heard that he banished anyone who even mentioned her.
“What have you learned about the droving?” Graham asked.
“Nothing so far,” Iain said. “I’ve posted more men and increased my patrols. It’s slowed the thieving down but not stopped it.”
Graham pointed his fork at Iain. “That has the mark of MacGregor all over it. It’s him, I’ve no doubt. It’s the type of thing he’d do.”
“He needs to stop this ridiculous feud,” Cait said.
Graham shrugged; being an old Highlander himself, he understood the MacGregors’ way of thinking. “Campbell’s grandfather murdered his father after the man asked for sanctuary. That’s wrong, and it deserves retribution.”
