It was one of the reasons she’d fallen in love with him. Which also made it the cruelest of all ironies, for it was also one of the reasons she’d left.
“Have you…?” She wet her lips. Averted her gaze as a lump the size of a small boulder formed in her throat. A lump that had nothing to do with anxious mannerisms and everything to do with acknowledging the door she had left open behind her when she’d fled Campbell Castle. A door that she’d given up any right in knowing what was on the other side of it. Still, she had to ask. “With a mistress, or–or a paramour?”
“Nay,” he said solemnly.
“You–you haven’t?” She hadn’t thought about it very much. Hadn’tallowedherself to think about it. But there was no part of her that had expected Lachlan to remain celibate these past eighteen months.
Hoped, yes. She’d hoped. In the way that little girls hoped to be princesses and little boys hoped to battle dragons. But he was a passionate man with a healthy appetite for carnal delights…and she hadn’t expected him to forsake pleasures of the flesh to remain faithful to the woman who had left him.
As she recalled–in detail–some of those delights, her cheeks pinkened. “Not even with–”
“Nay,” he interceded. “I’d never do that tae ye, Bry. Then or now. When I took my vows, I meant them. Every word. I know what ye think ye saw that day–”
“It’s not what IthinkI saw. It’s what I saw.”
“I wish I’d known that Allison was saying things in yer ear leading up tae that moment, or that she was far more conniving than I’d ever thought her capable of being. But that doesna change the fact that when I went tae sleep that night, I was the only one in the bed. I wantedyethere with me. I never once asked for Allison. Never encouraged her. Never wanted tae wake up beside her as I did.” Placing his hand on Brynne’s other knee, he crouched between her legs, her handsome Scot, and met her gaze unflinchingly. “She was a part of my past, it’s true. I willna deny it. I never have. Butye, Bry. Ye have always been my future.”
Brynne had heard all this before. But she had never been able to listen past the roaring in her ears.
No, that wasn’t right.
She hadn’twantedto listen.
Because in listening, she’d have to admit that finding her husband in bed with another woman wasn’twhyshe had left.
It’d just given her the excuse she’d already been searching for.
“I am sorry,” she whispered. Of its own accord, her arm reached out, and Lachlan closed his eyes as he pressed his rough cheek into her smooth palm. “I saw…I saw what I wanted to see, and used it as a reason to break what was already breaking. But you did not deserve to be blamed for something you never did. And for that, I apologize.”
It was the most honest she had been in a long time.
With Lachlan…and more importantly, with herself.
“I love ye, Bry.” His eyes opened, and the light in them was fierce. “I love ye, and I want us tae be together. Tae hell with the solicitors and the courts and the bluidy Judas scepter.”
“Judicial separation.”
“Aye, that.” He grabbed a fistful of her skirts, knuckles pressing into the tender inside of her thighs. “Dinna ye remember how it was between us?”
Yes, she remembered.
She remembered it all.
Chapter Twelve
Two Years Ago
Hawkridge Manor
The Weston’s Annual House party
“Lord Campbell.” Strugglingto keep her quiet thrill of delight at seeing Lachlan contained, Brynne swept the voluminous skirts of her gown out to the side in an elegant curtsy as he approached.
The house party commenced tomorrow, which meant tonight was the grand ball when everyone turned out in their best and were given one last opportunity to rub elbows and make connections and lend an ear to all of the relevant gossip currently making the rounds before they descended upon London for the Season.
For the last three weeks Brynne had rested on pins and needles as she waited like some sort of forlorn lover for Lachlan to appear. With every day that passed and he did not arrive, her disappointment grew, creating a cloud of melancholy that followed after her wherever she went, like mists rolling out across the moor.
She’d not seen him for nearly a year, and even then only in passing. Another chance meeting in the park, but she had been in the company of a suitor whose name she no longer remembered and Lachlan had been escorting a bright-eyed woman with glossy black hair whose brogue had mimicked his own.
