by Aileen Adams
There was no room in his thoughts for pity at that moment.
Hamish was the one with pity, pity which shone from familiar eyes that looked so much like those of Rufus’s father. “I arranged for his passage. He sailed to the New World. It’s been months since he left.”
19
Davina could not hear what they were saying.
She did not need to.
Everything she needed to know, she read in the way Rufus’s shoulders fell. In the way he lowered his head. For one heart-aching moment, she thought he might have learned of his brother’s death.
At that moment, she hated her brother worse than she’d ever hated anyone or anything in all her life. He had brought this about. His sword, his dirk, whatever he’d used to kill those people—including Kenneth, who had not died that night but had undoubtedly died later as a result.
Whatever he’d happened to use, it was not the weapon that had killed them. It was Ian.
Damn him to hell for all eternity. She stared at Rufus, watching as emotion played over his face, tears stinging behind her eyes. Damn Ian, damn all of them. They had brought him pain which somehow seeped into her as though it were her own pain.
And she realized something then, there was something worse than even the worst physical pain. Watching him, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease what he suffered, made the tears she’d shed over her swollen ankle, and the certainty that she would die in the woods seem like a mere splinter in comparison.
“Can ye hear what the man is saying?” Tyrone muttered to Alec, who sat closer.
He shook his head. “Nay. I ask myself who he is.”
“He looks a bit like Rufus,” Davina observed aloud, if only to take her mind from the hateful, bitter thoughts and images there. “The eyes, mostly.”
“Ye do a lot of looking at Rufus’s eyes, then?” Alec teased.
She shot him a withering glance and did not deign to answer. They were all beginning to suspect her feelings for Rufus. It mattered not, as the ride to Moray Firth would take no more than another few days. If she was still with them by then, their time together would come to an end soon thereafter.
For now, rather than wishing for nothing more than to escape them, she wished to stay with them long enough to watch Rufus get his revenge. Nothing could have torn her away.
Let them think what they wished, so long as they did not order her to leave their presence.
Drew looked back at them, Alec raising his brows in silent question. He slipped away from Rufus and the familiar-looking stranger and joined them. “Bad news?” she whispered, hands clenched tight beneath the table.
“It could be worse,” he admitted. “But it comes as quite a blow. It seems Kenneth MacIntosh sailed for the New World months ago.”
This hit all of them as a cannonball might. Davina reeled backward, gasping for breath.
“Without leaving word?” Tyrone gaped.
“Allowing his brother to fear him dead all this time,” Drew snarled. “I dinna know that I would not like to strangle him with my bare hands for what he put Rufus through.”
“He ran away,” she murmured, thoughtful and angered and embittered all at once.
Drew’s growl pulled her back to the present moment, and she regarded him both with surprise and dismay as he glared at her with an expression one normally saved for a rodent. “If he ran away, he did it because of your kin, and dinna forget it.”
“I know this,” she whispered. “But it was none of my doing. Ye might do well to remember that.”
“And if I do not remember?” he sneered. “Do ye believe ye happen to be in any place to teach me how to behave?”
“Someone should have done so long ago,” she spat. “I was merely upset over this for Rufus’s sake. That is all.”
“That’s enough,” Alec murmured. “No use fighting among ourselves.”
“Among ourselves?” Drew laughed. “Ye make it sound as though she were one of us. She is no such thing, nor will she ever be. Thanks to her brother, my cousin fled the country. The land of his birth. He was so deeply wounded and hopeless after losing his birthright that he saw no recourse but to flee the only home he ever knew—then again, he had no home, did he?”
Davina remained silent.
He sneered again at her. “He had no home. I suppose it made just as much sense to cross the sea and make a new home in the colonies. Knowing no one, knowing nothing about the land. All alone. No friends or kin to aid him in building a new life.”
“Enough, I said,” Alec reminded him. “We are all well aware of what Kenneth faces in the New World.”
Drew scoffed, pushing away from the table with a shake of his head. “I could murder a man right now.”
“I’ve no doubt,” Tyrone grinned. “See to your thirst, lad, and you’ll see this is not as serious as ye believe it to be now.”
“Not as serious,” Drew muttered, still shaking his head as he stormed away from them. He would like as not drown his sorrows in a flagon of ale. More than one, perhaps. She would not begrudge him his ale at a time like this.
Especially if it meant him leaving her alone.
“Dinna listen to him, lass,” Alec advised. “Kenneth is his kin as well, so he takes it hard. Nothing more serious than that.”
“Is that not serious enough?” she snorted, and neither of her companions had anything to say to this. Knowing Drew and his reputation, he had just as likely drawn blood over much less than this.
Rufus still sat with the man, the two of them leaning in and murmuring in conspiratorial tones. What were they saying? What was Rufus suffering? She forced herself to keep her seat, the desire to go to him and do anything in her power to lessen his pain all but overwhelming.
What could she do? Hold him? Stroke his hair, bid him rest his head on her shoulder? None of that would do, and it would not do even if he were hers. Which he was most certainly not.
There were certain situations in which even a woman’s most fervent desire to provide balm to a man’s soul were not enough. This was one of them. He had lost his brother just as surely as he would have had the man died. They would never see each other again, so the outcome was the same.
She tried to imagine what it would be like to never see her brothers again and found herself unable to muster a stirring of sadness or regret. Perhaps for Ronald, the only one of the bunch with whom she’d ever gotten along. The one closest in age to her own, with the softest temperament of all the men.
Soft temperament or no, there had been no recourse for him but to feign a hardness he did not possess. He had certainly not spoken on her behalf in the woods, where she might have died. He’d spared her but one single look of regret before riding away.
Hardly what she’d needed at the time.
Rufus all but leapt from the bench, marching straight for the door and continuing through it without a look in their direction. Before she could stop herself, Davina was on his heels, following him outside. “Rufus, wait.”
“Stay back there, lass,” he growled without turning back. “I have nothing to say to ye at the moment. Nothing ye shall wish to hear.”
“I’m not afraid,” she called after him, matching her stride to his, swinging her arms as violently as he did. “Nothing ye could say would frighten me.”
“I dinna happen to agree with ye,” he snarled. “Leave me alone!”
“I do not want to!”
He stopped suddenly, whirling about, causing her to fall back just short of crashing into him. He reached out, taking hold of her arms and steadying her before she lost her balance completely, but was quick to release her once she’d found her feet again.
She wished he hadn’t. Wished that he had enfolded her in his embrace instead.
The fire in his eyes, the way he bared his teeth, told her there would be no such embrace coming. The last thing he wished to do just then was to enfold her in his arms, and if he had, he might tighten them until he robbed the air from her lungs.
“This is no one’s fault but your brother’s,” he spat. “Ye are the last person I wish to see at the moment. Every time I look at ye, I think of him. I see him. I imagine him.” He raised his hands in front of her face, clenching them tight.
A sob threatened to break out of her chest, one which she just barely managed to hold back. “I am not him,” she whispered. “I am nothing like him. I hate him for what he’s done. I hate him for leaving me to die in the woods, as if I were nothing but useless, one he saw no sense in dragging along behind him. His blood, his sister, someone he ought to have protected. I hate him for what he did to your parents, to your brother. No matter what you do to him, he deserves worse.”
The village moved on about them, carts and wagons and oxen passing in both directions, voices coming from inside the cottages and huts and places of business—yet they may as well have been the only two people in the world as he stared at her and she stared back.
“It was he who left ye there,” he sighed. “Why did I not see it?”
She blinked, surprised at the fact that he seemed to care. “What difference does it make to ye how I came to be there?”
His shoulders rose in a shrug, his rage forgotten for the moment. “I have asked myself all along who left ye, why they would do it. I thought it might have been him, but even then, I could hardly make myself believe it—with ye being his sister and all. And he left ye because ye injured yourself.”
She nodded, the memory of that terrible day too much for her to speak of. For some reason, her brother’s actions brought shame to her, though she had not been the one to behave so cruelly. He was the one who ought to be ashamed, was he not?
He glowered at her from beneath lowered brows. “Ye need to go inside.”
“Why? I do not wish to.”
“Ye need to,” he ordered, pointing to the tavern. “Or find an inn that suits ye. Whatever ye do, go inside now.”
“And if I say no?”
He tensed, mouth opening as if in preparation for a stinging barb—then stopped himself. A wealth of emotions washed across his face, his jaw tightening and releasing, nostrils flaring, eyes narrowing. He wanted to tell her to go to the devil, she feared. To get lost in the village and never return. To forget she ever knew him.
Because he ached inside. Which made her ache. Which made anything he could have spat in her face forgivable, as she would have forgiven a wounded child.
Finally, he spoke. “I dinna care what ye choose to do,” he decided as he backed away. “Truly, nothing could matter less to me.”
There was a note of finality in his voice which went straight to her heart. Somehow, this was worse than being ordered to leave him forever.
She’d always thought hatred was the opposite of love, but that was not the case. Indifference was the opposite, and it was far more crushing than even the hottest, most brutal hatred.
This time, she did not follow. She merely watched with a sinking heart as he walked away, losing himself in the throng of villagers who went about their daily business without taking notice of her grief.
The fact that he did not want her was clear. She’d been the worst sort of fool to believe the moments of warmth between them were anything more than a lapse in judgment, the exception to the rule.
There was no one to blame for the ache in her chest and the stinging behind her eyes but herself.
She had to leave him.
20
The fact that Rufus had no notion of where he was or where his path would lead him did not occur until he’d walked well beyond the busiest part of the village and into what became farmland. The road cut a swath through green, rolling hills which stretched out as far as the eye could see, the earth freshly furrowed by the farmers and their hands.
He stopped at a stream which cut across the road. Several large, flat rocks made what he supposed was intended to act as a footbridge, though the water was only ankle-deep at worst. He crouched there, allowing the water to run over his hands before splashing some on his overheated face.
He would never see Kenneth again.
His heart cried out for all he had lost, all that would never be again. No more would he join his brother on the hunt, riding in companionable silence all the while. There had not been much need for them to talk, not ever. They’d always understood each other.
Strange, that, since no two men could be born of the same woman and be more different. It was Rufus who’d always fought for what he felt was right. Rufus who had earned a reputation as something of a scrapper—nothing in comparison to Drew, but a solid man in a fight. He was a man of action, while Kenneth was a man of thought and reason.
He had thought and reasoned himself into a passage to the New World, leaving behind everything he should have devoted his last breath to. Had he truly lost hope? Had he not believed his brother would return and stand beside him, make things right?
Damn him for a fool, then. Rufus picked up the nearest stone and threw it, grunting as he did. This did nothing to assuage his anger. Nor did another stone, nor another.
“Are ye tryin’ to build a wall on the other side with all those stones?”
He looked over his shoulder to where his cousin stood, smirking down at him. He’d half expected the lass to follow in spite of his protestations. She enjoyed doing the exact opposite of what he required, after all. “Nay. I’m imagining them going through the skull of a certain brother of mine.”
Drew crouched by his side, sighing as he looked out over the land. “A thing of beauty, is it not?” he asked, admiration clear in his voice. “There’s nothing so beautiful as this. Nothing so lush, nothing so pure. I canna imagine there being anything as lovely as Scotland in the entire world.”
“Och, I agree with ye,” Rufus murmured. This was his homeland, his blood. He would just as soon cut off an arm as he would leave it, and the difference, if he did, would be the same. It would mean leaving part of himself behind.
“I canna imagine it would be easy for a man to leave behind his home. His kin.” Rufus felt rather than saw Drew turn his gaze away from the landscape and toward himself. “I canna imagine it at all. He must have been…”
“Desperate,” Rufus muttered. “Cowardly.”
“Do ye believe that to be the act of a cowardly man?” Drew clicked his tongue against his teeth, settling into a seated position. “I canna say I agree with ye. I believe it would take quite a bit of brass to leave everything one knows behind and begin again. Not knowing how people live their lives over there, having no clan upon which to fall back if times are hard. Not knowing the land itself, how to work it, how to make one’s living. It would be a terrible decision to come to, lad.”
“And yet he did it.”
“Aye. He did. Perhaps he believed ye lost—so many were lost, as ye well know.”
“I know it better than ye do.”
“Och, ‘tis true. They would not take me. But I got word after each battle, same as your brother must have. It spread quickly. One man to another. To taverns and inns, markets. Anywhere men and women gathered, there would be news of what had just taken place. Sometimes two or even three days’ ride away. We heard of the heavy losses. I saw more than one man break down sobbing in the road when he got word of the loss of a son or a brother. All along, I never knew if ye would be the one I was hearin’ about next.”
“But ye never had word of my death.”
“Nay, nor did I have word of ye bein’ alive.”
“This is my fault?” Rufus growled, more incensed at hearing his own thoughts spoken aloud than he was at anything his cousin could have said.
“Nay, I didna say that, nor would I. The fault behind all of this lies squarely upon the shoulders of one Ian MacFarland, and nothing will give me greater pleasure than seein’ ye cut him down like the dog he is. I only mean to remind ye that your brother could only do the best he could do. He was not strong enough to take back the land on his own, and he had not the friends ye have. William Blackheath recommended th
e men for this task, but Kenneth would not know him. He had no one to turn to. And if he had half the pride of the rest of us, I would wager it was a terrible strain, riding about the countryside when everyone knew of his shame.”
“His shame? No shame in losing to one who cheated.”
“That is easy for ye to say, or for myself,” Drew observed. “I canna imagine how it weighed on him. Perhaps I simply dinna wish to imagine it.”
Rufus wanted to disagree, but there was little he could say in protest. There had been nothing for Kenneth to do but leave. Drew was correct in this. Anything would seem preferable to hanging one’s head in shame, knowing that those around him were aware of his defeat. Knowing he could never step foot on his family’s land again. That constant reminder of what would never be his.
Kenneth was not a fighting man. He would not know where to turn or who to trust. It was simpler for him to start again elsewhere.
“To leave in disgrace,” Rufus mused, a sick feeling rising in his stomach at the thought. “A MacIntosh, forced to leave in disgrace. Och, my poor father is turning in his grave at this very moment.”
“I’m certain of it,” Drew agreed with a grimace. “Yet in the New World, there is no disgrace. No one need know. And ye can still make things right here, for your family. Ye can balance accounts.”
And then what would he do? The question loomed large in the back of his mind. What would he do when there was no one to take ownership of the land? No one to tend it or to even make use of the house which he assumed still sat where it always had? What then?
That was something with which he could concern himself later, once he’d dispatched with the vicious creature who had set all of this in motion. How sweet it would be to finally have his revenge, especially now.
“Och, but I am tired,” he admitted, dipping his hands into the water and splashing his face again in an effort to rouse himself. Now that the sudden rush of confusion and dismay had passed, he was more fatigued than ever. “I do need to sleep.”
