Page 28 of A Tartan Love (The Earls of Cairnfell #1)

SEVEN YEARS EARLIER

Pettercairn, Scotland

I sla had never suspected that her eldest brother harbored such rage. It glowed, incandescent, from the red tips of his ears to the furious growl of his voice.

After discovering her with Tavish, Gray marched her across the fields, through the front door of Dunmore, and into his private study.

He motioned for Isla to sit in a chair beside the fire before kicking the door shut behind him with a crash that caused her to jump.

She had meant what she told Tavish. Gray would not physically harm her. Even now, he hadn’t laid a finger on her.

But . . . she had never met this Gray. This towering thundercloud of wrath that set her limbs to shaking.

He stared down at her, chest heaving, nostrils flaring.

“You are just like her,” he spat. “Her face. Her voice. Her eyes.”

“Her?” Isla whispered.

“Yes, her ! Our whore of a mother!”

Isla recoiled. Whatever she had expected him to say, it wasn’t that.

“P-pardon?”

“Our mother. A whore.” He enunciated each syllable with brutal precision. “And you, her bastard get.”

The disgusted curl of his lip said it all.

Isla simply stared at him, unable to comprehend the horror of his words.

Whore? Bastard?

Surely, he didn’t mean . . .

“G-Gray—” Isla hiccupped.

“Silence!” He swiped an arm through the air.

On a grunt, he clawed at his neckcloth, tearing it from his neck and tossing it atop the mess of papers and books on his desk. His coat and waistcoat soon followed.

He stood over her in shirtsleeves, chest heaving.

“Father told me much on his deathbed. Before then, I merely thought our mother a bit of a flibbertigibbet. A flighty woman who shirked her duties as wife and mother. However, the truth is much darker. Our mother was disgusted by my birth and the deformity of my foot that soon became apparent.” Gray paced before his desk, limping badly.

“Then, Matthias was born. Mother—No! I refuse to even refer to her as my mother!— that woman refused my father his matrimonial due entirely. ‘Never again will I come to your bed,’ she told him. ‘I have borne you two sons with deformities of limb. I refuse to bear a third.’ My father was devastated, as he had thought their marriage to be a love match. The more fool him.”

Isla panted in terror, palms pressed to the arms of her chair. Every word out of Gray’s mouth altered a piece of her childhood and her place within their family .

“Eventually, that woman sought the comfort of other men, reveling in the arms of anyone but those of her rightful husband. You —” Gray lifted a scathing hand in her direction. “—are the unwanted result.”

Unwanted.

Bastard.

Tears blurred the room.

Isla’s understanding of her existence shifted, coming into sharp focus as if through a spyglass. Each harsh epithet her father—not her father!—uttered. Each well of silence. Each vicious scolding and act of petty tyranny.

How the old duke must have detested her and the betrayal she represented.

“At the time of your birth, our mother begged my father to have mercy on you. To not cast you off to an indifferent fate. Because you were female and could never inherit, Father, in the benevolence of his heart, agreed. He hid the scandal of your illegitimacy as our mother wished.

“But unbeknownst to you, your entire life has been hanging by a thread. At any time, Father was prepared to denounce you as his child and cast you off. All he needed was a reason. You do not know the half of what he endured for you—everything that occurred with our mother—and out of compassion, he stayed his hand.”

Isla struggled to breathe.

She felt as if some giant had scooped up all the facts of her life—mother, father, brother, her sense of belonging—tossed the lot into an enormous jute bag, and then dashed it upon a cliff face. Every last element—each last shred of self—shattering upon impact.

And still, Gray was not done. “Knowing what he had suffered, my father bestowed on me the same power to denounce you. He left a declaration in my keeping—written in his own hand and witnessed by his solicitor—that you are not his daughter. A way for me to divest myself of any obligation toward you, should the task of keeping you prove too high. Little do you know the humiliations I have already suffered for your sake.”

“W-what humiliations?” Isla managed to hiccup. Their mother was dead. What did Gray refer to? What explanation could make sense of this?

He laughed, a single bark of sound. “Hah! As if I would disclose such secrets to you. You, who are no better than the circumstances of your birth, indulging in the lusts of your body with a Balfour , no less. I would rather you had died than take up with the likes of them. Do you not feel a speck of loyalty to our family?”

Isla’s stomach clenched, and she staggered to the piss pot in the corner, heaving into it.

Gray’s manner toward her had cooled over the past two years; now she knew why.

“You should be casting up your accounts,” Gray raged behind her.

“No Balfour would ever love you. They are duplicitous to the core, the lot of them! That boy is using you as a weapon to cut at the heart of Kinsey blood. Little does he know you haven’t a drop of it flowing in your veins.

Maybe I should denounce you and wash my hands of this business. Let Balfour have you.”

Hands shaking, Isla pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, wiping her mouth.

She dared a glance at Gray then.

His anger . . . Isla was prepared for.

But his revulsion . . . this loathing. As if she were of no more significance than a pair of wet, reeking socks he couldn’t thrust far or fast enough from his person.

She had no defense.

In every scenario she had imagined, Gray still loved her.

Yes, he might have become more aloof in recent years, but Isla assumed he hadn’t altered so fundamentally as to become a different person.

He was the brother who dried her tears. The one she had pledged to love and support, and he in return.

Never once had she considered that her loving brother might be gone forever.

But this . . .

This man was the Duke of Grayburn, furious and embittered. Resentful of all she represented—their mother’s adultery and the old duke’s cuckolding. And now her own betrayal with a Balfour.

The trembling started with her fingers before quickly spreading up her arms to her torso, until all of her was wracked by the same horror-stricken emotion .

“Fortunately for you, I am the same forbearing man my father was. I will grant you a reprieve this time, but you will never speak with Balfour again,” Gray said, his voice terrifyingly quiet.

“Let this be one thing in your teetering life that you do not doubt, Isla. Should you so much as nod at a gentleman without my approval, I will see you cast from this family. You will associate with whom I tell you to associate. You will marry whom I tell you to marry. Am I clear?”

Isla simply stared at him, too shocked to speak.

“AM I CLEAR?!” he roared.

She nodded, tears dripping down her neck.

“Get out.” He jerked his chin toward the door.

Isla raced to her bedchamber, the crackle of Gray’s temper nipping at her heels.

Her life had just been shredded to tatters.

But one powerful truth still remained—

Tavish and I are married, and there is nothing Gray can do about it.

Hallelujah.

Isla grasped onto that thought with both hands, holding it as the lifeline it was.

She didn’t have to stay here and endure the edge of Gray’s bitterness. His vitriol for their mother’s heartless betrayal of the old duke. The humiliations that Isla’s very existence caused.

Tavish would save her. He would enfold her in his arms and promise all would be well, vowing she never had to see Gray again. Together, they would steal away, leaving her brother and all his terrible words far behind.

Isla merely had to reach her husband.