Page 35 of Victorian Bride

Kayden laughed. “Yes. Indeed. Though sometimes I think that particular bit of good fortune is more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Is McGregor his name, then?” Mya asked.

“No.” Kayden shook his head. “It’s mine. I did not wish to trade it. Even though I can’t remember my family, I would like to keep that connection to them. I am sure you understand.”

Yes, Mya understood. She too knew exactly what it was to have lost a family you couldn’t even mourn because you didn’t know who they were. What they had been like. Whether you shared anything with them beyond a name.

“Would you trade it?” Mya asked.

Kayden's eyebrows lifted. “Trade what?”

“The life that you've had, for the one you might have had with your family? The old man who took you in. Do you think you would forget ever having known him, if you could know the family you were born to, or would you rather keep what you have than go for the unknown?”

Kayden sighed, frowning down at the reins in his hands. “That is not an easy question to answer.”

“No,” Mya said. “That's why I asked it. I want to know what you would choose.”

“I think it's a bit of a moot question anyway, isn't it? It's hardly as though one of the fair folk is going to show up and ask us whether we would make the trade or no.”

“Well, no. But it's still an interesting question. One most people don't have to ask themselves.” She shrugged, and nudged her horse forward. “I still haven't been able to answer it, myself.”

“Haven't you?” Kayden, his horse keeping pace with her own still, looked over at her. “I thought perhaps you'd come up with one and were waiting to see if I gave the same answer.”

Mya laughed. “No. I'm not sure that it's a question anyone actually can answer. On the one hand, you have your family. The people who are meant to mean everything to you. But they mean nothing, because as far as you are aware, you have never met them. You know nothing of them, whether they were good or bad, clever or stupid, kind or not. On the other, you have the people you know, who have taken you in. And though they might still be veritable strangers, you know that they are good, and clever, and kind. That they care for you.”

She looked up at the clouds moving across the sky, here and there leaving patches of blue visible for a moment or two before hiding them again. Ahead of them, something rustled through the heather and away, avoiding the horses' feet.

“Is it better to take the known quantity, with which you are happy, or the unknown, with which you might be happier, but you also might lose what happiness you had?”

Was it better, she wondered, to have a family? Or to have Ella and Lottie and Kayden? And in that moment she knew. If she had ever had to choose, if it ever came to that, she would choose the man beside her. Every time.

“I don't believe I'm quite ready for such questions,” Kayden said finally. “You have bested me with that one.”

“It was not meant to be a contest, you know,” Mya said, letting a little laughter slide into her voice.

“All the same, I am not clever enough for such things,” Kayden answered, turning a smile on her. “You will have to refrain from them, I think, or I may damage myself trying to work it out.”

That was something she rather doubted, but Mya just laughed and let him be. She had no more such questions anyway.

How old had he been, Mya wondered, when he had been taken in by the man who gave him his title? Young, surely, if he had forgotten his family entirely. Or had he skipped some intermediate step? A family who had been meant to take care of him but had used him as free labor? The workhouse? For a moment, she played with the idea that perhaps that was not his story at all. That maybe his was similar to her own and that he had not been young when he lost his family, only lost the memory of them as well.

But that was something of a stretch, wasn't it? Two people in the same circle who had woken one day with no memory of where they had come from and only little idea of who they were. For such a thing to happen would be entirely too much coincidence. Mya shook the idea away.

“Kayden?”

“Yes?”

“When were—?”

She didn't have the chance to finish the question before he was kicking his horse into a canter. Mya sighed and followed. He might have given her some warning, at least.

Over the crest of the ridge, they came upon a group of little hills, all running down into a dip in the landscape where water had pooled, blue and clean and circled with reeds. Down by the edge of the pond, stones stuck up out of the water, green with moss.

“This is the place that I mentioned,” Kayden said, sliding off his horse and grinning at her as he turned a slow circle with arms stretched out wide to indicate the area. “Isn't it lovely?”

“It is.”

Mya thought of asking the question again, and of getting a genuine answer, but Kayden was already pulling the picnic supplies from their place and spreading out a blanket on the heather in view of the pond. He looked so pleased that Mya could not bring herself to drag up the uncomfortable subject of his family yet again. There would be time later to discuss it. For the moment, she would simply enjoy his company.