Page 20

“Nay. Though I wish the pleasure had been mine.” Duncan pushed himself from his chair and paced over to the window.

Night had crept across the moors, darkening the waters of the loch to murky gray.

He splayed his fingers on the glass and leaned against it, letting its smooth expanse cool his forehead.

Colin . It hurt Duncan to think of him almost as much as it did to remember Mairi. But he wouldn’t honor his brother’s memory with silence. Better to reveal the whole sordid truth so that no one could deny that Colin was a bastard in action as well as birth.

Pasting a mocking grin on his face, Duncan twisted from the window.

“Colin was my father’s son, born a year before me of an illicit union Da made with a woman from a village across the loch.

Though he was of the wrong side of the sheets, we were raised together like true brothers, and he never gave me any cause to suspect that he resented my legitimacy.

We knew our places: I was to become laird, while he would take a favored position on my council.

In truth, I appointed him to lead the watch on the day I was wed to Mairi, the woman I loved…

an honor he repaid by killing some of our guards—his own kin—to provide your sister and her minions unhindered access past the curtain wall of this castle.

She and others of your clan slaughtered my bride and many of my people on the day that was to be the happiest of my life. ”

He closed his eyes against the dark bitterness that still filled him whenever he allowed himself to think on it.

“Colin stood next to me as I spoke my vows, aware that the enemy was breaching our walls at that very moment. When I finally managed to figure out what was happening—when I understood, finally, that my own brother had betrayed me—it was too late. We fought, and I wounded him before I was knocked senseless, but he escaped with Morgana. When it was all over, Mairi was dead and I’d been sold as a prisoner to the English. ”

He stopped talking, and Aileana just stared at him, wide-eyed, from where she sat before the fire. Finally, she whispered, “Is there more?”

Leaning against the wall, Duncan crossed his arms over his chest and clenched his fists.

“Not much. In the end, Colin chose to follow your sister into banishment and die a miserable death in the mountains there with her.” Duncan lifted his gaze to Aileana, pinning her with intensity and trying to make her understand the consequences to be faced should she or anyone else betray him again.

“My only regret is that I wasn’t there to choke the life from both of them myself. ”

Aileana blanched and closed her eyes, breathing in, and for a moment, Duncan just stared at her, the sight of her sitting with the fire lighting her golden-red hair from behind numbing him, sending a horrible image spinning through his mind.

He tried his best to resist its deadly pull on him, but it swept over him, its ferocity choking the air from his lungs and making his fists clench.

Heaven help him, but at this moment she looked just like her .

With her eyes closed Aileana looked an exact replica of the murderous bitch who had destroyed his life.

Raw animosity rose up in suffocating waves, and it was all he could do to ground out, “Aileana—please, do not sit like that. Look at me, lass.”

Her eyes snapped open then, fear stiffening her features at the leashed anger in his command. But the depths of her tawny gaze dispelled the nightmare from Duncan’s imagination. He felt the rage begin to flow out of him as she uncurled herself from the hearth to stand before him.

Her cheeks looked hollow, her expression that of a child who’s just learned of a loved one’s death. “No wonder you hate me so,” she whispered. Her lips trembled, and he could see the fluttering beat of her pulse in her neck.

“Nay, Aileana. I do not hate you. It’s just that when you were sitting there like that, I couldn’t stop think ing…I couldn’t get it out of my mind that you looked just like—”

“Morgana.” Aileana breathed her sister’s name, and as Duncan watched, her jaw tightened and that terrible, stricken expression slid across her features.

“I know,” she murmured. “I look much like my sister. I was never allowed to forget it. And I cannot blame you for hating me because of it, after hearing for the first time the full truth of what she did.”

She smoothed her hands in a repetitive motion over her skirt, her gaze distant, lost in a world of her own making.

When she focused on him again, he saw in them the ache of old pain…

pain that had taken years to accumulate, but to which he had just added, with his unthinking, gut reaction of moments ago.

It filled him with an inexpressible sadness that was as sudden and violent as his response to Aileana’s appearance had been. But before he could gather his composure enough to do anything, to say anything, she spoke again.

“I cannot promise you perfect obedience, Duncan MacRae. I won’t promise it to you.

” A flash of the defiance he’d seen when he came home shown in her face.

“I cannot go back to the frightened, sheltered woman I was forced to be these many years. But I swear to you that unlike my sister, I do not seek ill for your clan. You have my word on that.”

Duncan watched her, spellbound, as she walked with quiet grace to the door. “I’ve several tasks to finish before I retire for the night. I’ll return when they’re complete. Good night.”

And with that she disappeared through the open door. But not before Duncan caught sight of a single tear that had begun to trickle down her cheek.

It seemed as if he could hear his heart thundering in his ears in the terrible silence she left behind.

Swallowing hard, he blinked to rid himself of the dry, scratchy sensation that lodged behind his eyes.

Then, wordlessly, he closed them and dropped his chin to his chest, feeling as empty as if someone had just driven a dagger through his heart.