Page 123 of The Scot Beds His Wife

“It’s true,” Calybrid sagely validated her. “She did her best to hate ye.”

“When we married, we didn’t evenlikeeach other. I thought—”

“Ye thought ye could pass off yer dead husband’s child as mine.”

There it was. Her greatest sin in all of this. The biggest lie she’d ever told. The reason he was entitled to never forgive her.

She couldn’t stop the tears now as she looked from face to beloved face, knowing that her eyes pleaded for understanding. Even seeing that they wanted to give it to her…

But her offense was just too vast.

“I wanted to tell you. I was going to when—”

“Ye had every chance!” he roared. “Last night, for example.”

A spear of guilt lanced her quickly shriveling heart.

“Ye deceived me. Ye deceived us all. Ye put my mother, my entire household, nay, every man in my employ in danger. Why? Why do that if your intentions were good? If ye were naught but a desperate, honest woman?”

As queries went, it was a valid one. And in that moment, Samantha promised she’d never again lie to this man. “I wanted my child… to haveyoufor a father, instead of the terrible one I chose. You were offering to protect me, and I didn’t think you would if I was already with child. I meant to tell you a million times. I really did. But I was a coward, because I wasn’t sure you would keep me and… and… I was in love with you. With your family. And Iwanted them to be mine, too. I didn’t want my past anymore. I just wanted a future. With you. With all of you.”

Eleanor made a soft, dare she hope, sympathetic sound, and Eammon let out a low curse. But Samantha didn’t take her eyes from Gavin, lest he disappear.

Lest he strike.

What was he thinking behind that perfect façade? Was he forgiving her? Condemning her? Did he even believe her?

“As family melodrama goes, this is scintillating.” A masculine, cultured, serpentine voice slithered into their midst and Samantha’s pistol found a new target in the doorway.

The man filling the solarium archway could have been the villain of any novel. Swathed in black from head to toe to match his midnight hair, he seemed unaffected by the sight of a gun and two very dead bodies. A strange web of scars reached from beneath the high collar of his coat, tangled down a sharp jaw and up the side of his face.

“Who the hell are you?” Samantha demanded.

“I wish I knew.” His devilish smile would have been handsome, had it reached his fathomless, dead eyes. “But people have taken to calling me the Rook.”

At his odd reply, Samantha paused.

It took the length of the Rook’s quick, calculating scan of the carnage for Callum to surge into the solarium behind him. “I was wrong about the tracks I found in the woods,” he panted. “It wasn’t the Americans. But agents of the crown.”

Gavin snarled a string of Gaelic curses that even turned poor Calybrid’s ears red. “How do ye know this?”

“After searching more thoroughly, I found more than two sets of boot prints, they don’t belong to cowboys. They’re military issue, Gavin. And they’re looking for something.”

“Agents of the crown?” Eammon echoed, and then addressed Callum and Gavin as though they were still witless young lads. “Just what the hell is going on, you two? Why is the most notorious pirate of modern history standing in the middle of our castle?”

Pirate?Samantha stepped forward, keeping her gun carefully trained at the Rook’s substantial chest. The man was thick as a ship’s mast and almost as tall.

His eyes snapped to her, and Samantha had the sense of staring into the abyss, and having it stare back. It chilled her to her very bones.

“Much as I love well-armed women, we haven’t time to deal with… whatever this is.” The Rook waved toward the dead Masters brothers as though they were as insubstantial as a pile of dirty laundry. “I’d a spy on my ship, and the matter has been summarily dealt with, but not before he’d spilled information about our… transaction to the authorities.”

“We need to move everything,” Callum hissed.“Now.”

Eammon’s face mottled beneath his beard, and if he hadn’t been holding Eleanor, Samantha was certain he might have meted out a dire punishment to both the men he obviously considered his sons. “Tell me you’re not smugglers!” he bellowed.

Gavin worked his jaw over a powerful emotion, one she’d never seen before and couldn’t even begin to identify. “How do ye think I acquired the money to offer for Erradale?”

“Gavin,” Eleanor whimpered. “No…”