“The second most important thing is your children. Should you be a mother someday, you will defend that innocent babe whether they are small enough to fit in the crook of your arm…” Mrs. Grimsby gazed at Brynne with great affection. “Or old enough to run off with a striking Scot. Heavens, dear, and may my Mr. Grimsby forgive me saying this, but your Lord Campbell is a sight to behold, isn’t he?”
“He isn’tmyLord Campbell,” Brynne said automatically. Then the side of her mouth quirked in a reluctant half-smile. “But yes, yes he is a sight to behold.” Lowering her arms, she adjusted a pleat on her skirt that had folded over when she’d sat down on the sofa. “What of the last thing worth fighting for?”
“Yourself.” Mrs. Grimsby clasped her hands together. “You must always fight for yourself, first and foremost. Now finish your tea before it goes cold. I’ll have a maid bring in a platter of fruit to get some color into your cheeks, and then a walk to get some fresh air into your lungs, I should think.”
It was, Brynne noted wryly, nearly the same advice she’d given to Sterling.
“Mrs. Grimsby,” she called out as the housekeeper finally turned to leave.
“Yes, dear?”
“Thank you.”
After spending arestless night in the same room he’d occupied during his first visit to Hawkridge Manor, Lachlan rose with a newfound sense of determination and purpose.
It was painfully apparent that Brynne did not want him here. She couldn’t have made her disdain for him any clearer. A blind man could see it. But then had he really expected anything less, given how things had ended between them?
In tears and torment, rage and wrath. With both saying things they didn’t mean, and holding on to stubborn pride when they should have held on to each other.
He had regrets.
A bloody ocean’s worth of them.
But that was why he was here.
Not to start over. There was too much history to begin anew. But they could go back to their foundation. Build it stronger. Hardier. So that the next time the winds howled and the rain spat, they would be able to withstand the storm.
Brynne thought they were over. She believed they were a thing of the past. Something to be locked away and forgotten, like bloody pantaloons or powdered wigs. Except their love wasn’t a damned fashion statement gone hideously wrong. It was long, and it was lasting, and even now–after all that had happened–he felt the spark of it. And he knew that, deep down, Brynne did as well. Or else he would have been greeted with apathy instead of anger. Because the opposite of love wasn’t fury.
It was indifference.
“Aye, and we’ve none of that, do we?” Asking the rhetorical question of his mare, Aislyn, a chestnut of sturdy build and mind that he’d raised from a wee filly after she was rejected by her dam–he cinched off her girth and drew the reins over her head before swinging himself up and into the saddle.
He wasn’t nearly so fine an equestrian as his brother, Robert, but he enjoyed a daily ride, and Aislyn enjoyed stretching her legs. Holding her to a trot until they were clear of the manor, he set his heels into her barrel once they had nothing but open field in front of them, and crouched low over her neck as they tore off through the tall, rippling sea of grass.
Overhead, the sky was a clear, seamless blue, and the air was crisp with the scent of autumn. The trees were heavy with leaves yet, but some had already begun shifting colors and it wouldn’t be long before the branches clacked and the snow fell.
By then, he hoped to be sitting in front of a roaring fire at Campbell Castle with Brynne by his side, wearing a blanket of fur…and nothing else. He remembered, keenly, their first winter in the drafty old keep of wood and stone. How they’d laughed and played in the snow like children during the day, then warmed each other in front of the hearth by night. Four months of newly wedded bliss in the frozen Highlands…when they were too lost in each other to even notice the cold. Then spring came, and the weather wasn’t the only thing to change.
If he could go back…if he could do it over again…but living in the past was a fool’s errand, and the straightest path forward was always the one untraveled. He’d taken his first steps by coming here. Every day that he remained, he’d take a few more. And eventually, with persistence and truth and a little luck thrown in for good measure, that path would carry him and Brynne home again.
He was sure of it.
He had to be.
“Easy,” he murmured in Aislyn’s flattened ear as the mare’s breaths began to labor and her stride shortened. “Easy now, lass. Ye dinna want tae overdo it.”
He stood in the stirrups, bracing himself against the wind and the pull of Aislyn’s forehead as he firmly guided the mare back down through her paces. A gallop to a canter, a canter to a trot, a trot to a walk. Loosening the reins, he gave her her head, and she guided them to a nearby stream where crystal clear water rushed over smooth rocks covered in moss.
Dismounting, he slapped Aislyn’s sweaty shoulder and then slipped off her bridle so that she could quench her thirst and then nibble at the tender grass shooting up along the bank in clumps of vibrant green. Pulling off his jacket, he threw it on the ground and then sat on top of it, arms looping around his bent legs as he gazed thoughtfully at the bubbling brook.
Further up, shielded from the meadow and the road beyond it by a heavy thicket of wild elderberry, the stream widened into a pool. He had discovered the spot while exploring during his second summer at Hawkridge Manor, and he and Weston had spent many an afternoon drowning worms there.
It was also where he’d caught his first English trout. A pitiful specimen, hardly the length of his hand. But he had still been immeasurably proud of it.
It was where he’d encouraged Weston, far too serious by half, even as a young man, to shake off the responsibilities of an earldom.
And it was where he’d kissed a pretty blonde lass who would one day be his wife.
