“Are you Jamie’s father?”
He nearly spewed his wine. He snatched up an edge of her cloak and pressed the cloth to his lips. “Madam,” he gasped. “Please warn me before you accuse me of fathering a child on another woman. I am in danger of strangling.”
“I read the entry of his birth in the Bible. He was born eight months after Julia’s wedding to your father. I know she was with you shortly before that and that you had taken her to a kirk to marry but that she balked.”
His eyes amused, he said, “Then there is nothing else I can tell you. It seems you have mined all there is to know about my life.”
“Can you deny you were in love with her?”
“I will not deny that when I was seventeen, I was willing to elope with her. But please, you cannot hold me responsible for the actions of a rash youth.”
“Then you and she . . . you must have . . .”
Ruark raised a brow. “We must have what?”
He was going to make her say the words. “You must have been intimate with her.”
“I will admit I have not been a virgin since I was fifteen ... but she was different. She and I had known each other since we were both in swaddling. Our mothers were close friends. I loved her, I thought.”
“And did she love you?”
“I thought she did.” He studied the wooden cup in his hand. “But looking back, I know now she was notin lovewith me.
“I had always believed we would one day be wed if only because of our families. I had little respect for most everything else in my life, but I did have respect for her. She was fragile. She reminded me of a delicately painted glass doll and I wanted to protect her from breaking. If I had pressed her into an intimacy, I knew she would have been the one hurt.”
“You must have felt betrayed by both her and your father.”
“Strangely, never by her. My father. Always.” Ruark leaned his head back against the wall. “I can think of no time in my life where he ever reached out to me or my mother. When she died, he was with his mistress. He was not so much physically cruel as he was indifferent and self-involved, except when it came to Stonehaven.
“I rebelled against everything for which he stood. I cared little for the lives of those who lived there. By fifteen, I was a dissolute heir already intent on drinking and gambling away my heritage and forcing him to claim note after note against my markers. I believed in nothing.
“One could say Duncan took exception to the direction of my life when he decided to send me on a new path and rescue me from destroying myself.”
“After you fought your father.”
“I have since lived almost as much time out of this country as I have in it.” Ruark was silent a moment, then his eyes met hers. “I brought a lot of misfortune upon myself and others caused by anger and pride. I have been no better than a smuggler and much-cursed pirate with little difference between Hereford and myself, or my father, ’twould seem. Cunning and ruthlessness kept me alive.”He finished off his cup and set it at his thigh, and as he peered at her some of the cold left his eyes. “ ’Tis only recently I have learned the value of compassion.”
“Yet, you still feel guilty in your failure to save Julia.”
Ruark met her gaze steadily. “How is that, love?”
“You have not spent any time with her son, your father’s son, the brother you worked so hard to save. As if you think that you also failed in saving him. He is home and safe because of you. And he loves you.”
“Perhaps,” he said thoughtfully. “Or it is not knowing quite what to say to a brother I have only known through letters.” After a moment, he asked. “What of you, love? Have you any regrets you wish to rectify?”
The question begged an honest answer even to herself. “I regret not remembering my mother,” she said. “Nor did I treat Friar Tucker as well as I should have. I have never told him I love him.”
She sighed softly. “I think, a part of me blamed him for the choices he made for my life. I do not know why I felt the way I did—he has been nothing but patient and loving. I was never outwardly angry but I must have been angry ... for I have always been searching ... for something. I do not know for what, but it is there on the horizon.” She lowered her head, and her hair fell over her shoulders. “I have learned resentment no matter how small and seemingly insignificant is like a smoldering ember. It burns at the edges of a person’s soul and eventually blackens all that it touches.”
She had not meant to be so honest or allude to her restlessness as if that took away her newfound feelings for him. His arm tightened around her and he pulled her close to his heart.
She looked up at him with a wobbly smile. “Perhaps weare both still looking for a place that feels like home.”
Just then, there was a gust of wind against the slats. Ruark lowered his head took her lips in a kiss, slowly turning her in his arms until she was across his lap. Her fingers slid through the wisp of hair on his chest as he pressed her down into the cloak. He pulled away to look down at her, the expression on Ruark’s face unreadable. But he needed no words, as he loved her.
They remained in the loft until dawn, when the rain finally stopped and she was forced to rouse from her languor. Forced to admit as she smiled up at her husband that if this was what it meant to be in love, this need to be near him, this all-consuming passion, then she wondered how one survived it.
She dressed while Ruark saddled the horses, then climbed down from the loft for a bit of privacy outside. The sun emerged from behind the clouds as Rose pushed open the stable doors. She looked out across the field, empty save for a few brown shaggy cattle, and approached the nearest tree when she spied a horse hobbled nearby. She walked around the stable.
