Chapter Eighteen
They made campthat night on the northern outskirts of Newbrough and sat awake under the stars. Adams rested against the trunk of an old oak tree, while Braya and Torin sat closer to the fire.
Torin thought about what he had told her father to tell Bennett. Torin had taken her away and was going to marry her. He’d said it. He was going to marry her—and now she wanted to know if he meant it. He understood the choices she was giving him and why he believed she was giving them to him. She wanted him to commit to something. At least, that was what Adams had told him.
What the hell did Torin know of love and of a lady’s tender feelings? He would be a terrible husband! He’d thought he’d given her a good answer when she asked him why he’d come for her. But he was incorrect—again, according to Adams. He didn’t know why he’d brought up marriage. She was turning him into a fool.
He would likely marry her if he could. Chances were, the choice would no longer be presented to him.
He didn’t want to have this kind of nonsense clouding his thoughts, affecting his decisions, but he feared it was too late.
“What is Lord Rothbury’s place like?” Adams asked, biting into an apple.
“He lives in Lismoor Castle,” Torin answered. He had never been there. “’Tis a castle just like any other. I should pen a note to him tomorrow and have it sent on ahead so that he can be prepared for us.”
“Is the earl wed?”
Torin looked at Braya and nodded. He hoped so. He hated deceiving her. He knew that the more lies he told her, the harder it would be for her to ever forgive him. Not that she would forgive him anyway.
“What is she like?” she asked in her quiet, honeyed voice.
It was difficult for him to keep his thoughts from trailing off to the delectable dip of her lower lip, the alluring curve of her jaw, a sweet, soft chin that was never haughty…her spun gold tresses falling around her face—around his fingers when he held her.
“She is perfect.” He smiled at her, unable to help himself. “For the earl.
Hell, she was exquisite in the firelight…all the time, making his head spin in every direction. He stared at her purple jaw, feeling the same rage he’d felt while fighting Armstrong.
His life was broken, but he had always held himself together. Somehow. Until now. Until Braya shattered him into pieces at her feet. She had asked him to show mercy. She had no idea what it had cost him to do so. It had torn a great block of his defense asunder. Defense he needed. All he’d known his entire life was revenge. It had darkened his soul, turned him into something savage and hardhearted. It fit the life he led, not a life with her.
And yet, knowing her, caring for her, was making him want to be the kind of man worthy of her.
Hell, he should go to bed before he got into trouble.
He was a Scot. He was one of King Robert the Bruce’s commanders. Did it matter who won the race? She wouldn’t want him at the end of it, and he was sure he would never forget her.
He should have gone to bed, for they stayed awake too long, talking about their families and whom they had lost. Braya told them about Ragenald joining the English to fight at Bannockburn and never returning.
Torin told them about his brothers and the few vague memories he had of them. They were mostly bad memories, ones of terror on children’s faces and crying, memories he prayed he could forget.
One or two others weren’t so bad. He shared those. “I remember my older brother tripping me in the pigpen. My mother found us playing in the mud and tried to scold us while she laughed.” He smiled thinking of it. He hadn’t in years. “The babe of my family was only two when…” He paused as shadows passed across his eyes. Then he smiled again. “He was always on my mother’s hip, even while she read to me. I think of the three of us, she loved him the most.”
“Every mother is most reluctant to let her youngest go,” Braya’s voice soothed him from across the flames. He wanted to go to her and carry her away.
“That may be so,” he laughed softly instead. “But everyone in the village made a fuss over him. I remember me and my other brother being jealous of him.”
“What were their names?” she asked him, looking as if she were aching to go to him, too. Dammit that Adams was here.
“I do not remember their names.”
He noted the glistening tears that lit her eyes. She felt sad for him, sad that theScotshad done this to him.
He looked away. His lie was too big.
Adams told of his dear baby sister, Edith, who had been wed at fifteen to a Scottish laird and taken to the Highlands.
“I remember when she left,” Braya said quietly, staring into the flames. “’Twas the same year Raggie died.”
“Aye,” Adams murmured, then finished his apple. “’Twas difficult for all of us.”
