“Anger mostly. I want to know why you let such a fine lass go off with that good-for-nothing. He’ll only make her miserable and well you know it. I canna believe you would do such a thing. Saints preserve me, but I thought I had raised you up better than this, and now I find out just how wrong I was.”
She crossed herself and started praying for his lost and wayward soul.
Ewan gaped at her, unable to believe her. “You of all people would have me come between them?”
She broke off mid-prayer to glower at him for a full minute.
Then, his mother sighed wearily and sat down on his bed. She sat there for several heartbeats, not moving or speaking.
He couldn’t tell if she were really gathering her thoughts, or getting ready to hit him again.
When she spoke, he leaned away from her just in case her madness should again possess her.
“Ewan,” she said as if the weight of the world were upon her, “I have tried all your life to bring happiness to you and it saddens me that I have failed you so miserably.”
“Mother—”
“Nay,” she said, holding her hand up as she interrupted him. “Let me say my piece.”
A far-away look came over her as if she were remembering his childhood.
Ewan gave an involuntary shudder. If she remembered too much of his errant childhood, he really would be in trouble.
“Unlike your father and your brothers, I know why you are withdrawn. I’ve always known. Do you think I don’t remember the way you looked when at age four you were too large for me to pick up and carry? You used to stare at me holding Braden and I could see the hurt in your eyes.”
He opened his mouth to deny it, but she silenced him by placing her hand over his lips.
“I would sit for hours and weep, wishing that I had been born larger so that I could take you in my arms and carry you about as you wanted. But it was too late. From that day forward, you pushed me and anyone else away from you. It broke my heart that you decided you had no use for me.”
“That’s not true,” he insisted, even though in his heart he knew it was. He’d always been wounded that his brothers seemed to get everything else while he was left on his own.
That was why Kieran had meant so much to him. Their father had taken up with Lochlan to the exclusion of the rest of them. Braden was favored by their mother and Kieran had always doted on him.
Braden had always picked at and harassed Ewan while Lochlan lost patience with virtually everything he had ever said or done. Kieran alone had taken time to befriend him.
“Aye, it is true,” his mother said. “Any time I have ever reached out to embrace you, you have tensed up and immediately moved away.”
She stared intently at him. “You don’t tense when Nora touches you, Ewan. When the two of you were in the hall below and you were fighting, I saw the way you looked at her. The need you had in your eyes when she reached for you.”
Ewan stared at the wall as her words sank in and the pain of the past and present ran rampant through him.
“I know you were never happy when you lived here with us. Your father was ever cruel while you tried so hard to please him. He judged you harshly and I won’t make excuses for him. But he did love you, Ewan. The last words he spoke on this earth were about you.”
“Because he didn’t think I could care for myself.”
“Nay, that was not what he said.”
Ewan looked at her.
“He knew there at the end that he’d been too demanding on all of you. He’d tried so hard to make Lochlan strong enough to be laird, to make Kieran shoulder the burden of family. Braden to stand up to the rest of you so that the rest of you didn’t run over him. Your father wanted me to find Sin and make amends to him for what we’d both done to him and you...”
Ewan held his breath as he waited.
“He wished that he had never let you hear his cruel criticisms. He regretted the times he wounded you with his words. The times he told you you disappointed him. You didn’t disappoint him, Ewan. He was proud of you.”
Tears filled his eyes as he remembered what his father had said to him when he had come home to find Kieran dead.
His father had viciously backhanded him. “You disgust me. You stole what didn’t belong to you and you killed your own brother by doing it. Never again will I welcome you into my sight. You deserve nothing but my scorn.”
