“I know!” she cried, still fighting hard to control her emotions. “I hadn’t before, but now…” She took a deep breath and released the bedpost. “Now, I know.”
“But I will pay for your come out,” he repeated. It was an extravagant offer. He had already agreed to pay for Sadie’s gowns, not to mention the gold coins he’d promised to Mairi, but he could not leave a woman to face Baron Bain alone. She needed help, and he could afford it, though it might pinch his ready coin. “Iseabail, you are as much a catch as I. A lady for all that you’re Scottish.”
“Not as good a catch,” she said bitterly. “I am a woman and therefore powerless.”
“No Scotswoman would say such a thing. You have strength, Iseabail. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here now. You’d be married to—”
“Enough,” she snapped. “I know where I am and what I have to do.” She lifted her chin and gave him a shallow curtsy. “Thank you, Your Grace, for the coin.” Then she fled the room.
He stared at the doorway where she had disappeared and cursed himself for not being a god. He was a Scotsman and a future duke, but he was unable to find and punish the man who had killed her father. And while he cursed himself for his failures, the one person he’d wanted to see stepped into the empty door.
“Connall,” Mairi said. “I didn’t know.”
“No one knows,” he groused. “That’s the problem.”
She nodded as she crossed to his bedside and pressed her hand to his cheek. It wasn’t a tender gesture. She was checking for fever, but he gripped her fingers nonetheless. “I cannot help her,” he said as failure pressed in on him.
“You’re paying her bills,” Mairi returned. “I’d say that’s more than anyone else would do.”
“And if my father helped to—”
“Do you truly think that?”
He swallowed and shook his head. “Not on purpose. Not knowing what would happen.”
She curled her hand beneath his chin, lifting his face to hers as she settled on the coverlet beside him. “Then the fault lies with her uncle,” she said. “It always has.”
There it was. The one thing Mairi did better than any other. She cut through chaos to do what must be done. And when there was naught that could be done, she cut through the emotions to say what was true.
“The fault is with the poisoner,” he said. “Whoever that is.”
“Which is not your father, and it is not you.”
How freeing to hear those words spoken aloud. “I still feel bad for her.”
“Ach, Connall, you feel all manner of things all the time, and none of it makes more than a piss in the wind’s difference.”
Her crude words startled a laugh out of him. Trust Mairi to find the right way to pull him out of his darker mood. “What I feel,” he said catching her wrist and using it to pull her forward, “is a great deal better than I did yesterday.”
“That’s thanks to my nursing, I’ll have you know.”
“I do,” he grinned. “And now I mean to reward you.” Which he did by pulling her close for a kiss.
