Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)(41)

“Would that more people could see me like that.”

“The fact that you admitted to noble blood doesn’t absolve you,” she added. “You kissed me. You touched me—”

“I left you behind on Inishmaan.” His fingers made tracks as he ran them through his hair. “As innocent as when I arrived.”

“Not so innocent as that.”

He raised a dark brow. “Should I have cut your heart in two by telling you about Leana?”

The name made her heart stop for a beat, and then another.

“I determined to leave you behind for your own good,” he reminded her. “But you stowed away on my ship.”

She bruised her forehead with how hard she pressed it against the bedpost.

“And after I found you stowed away yesterday, I made every effort to get you passage back to Inishmaan. But when I asked the captain of that galley—”

“—I branded myself a witch,” she finished, not wanting to listen to the litany of her own mistakes. “I saw her,” she blurted. “As you and I lay in bed together. I saw your Leana, blazing in your mind.”

“What you saw was regret. Regret that the woman I’m promised to marry is not”—he made a sound, like a choke—“that the woman I’m promised to marry is not you.”

It took a moment for the words to seep through the haze of her pain, but when they did, she raised her face to meet his gaze. It would be simple to cross the distance that separated them and press her face in the nook between his jaw and shoulder. But her feet remained flat upon the floorboards, held there by too many weighty certainties.

Oh, Lachlan.

What a bittersweet declaration of love.

And what a fool she had been, imagining that she’d become so good at reading Lachlan’s expressions. The way the little scar by his eye whitened when he was angry. The way his cheek flexed when he wanted something he didn’t dare take. But for all that, she’d failed at understanding his most important message of all.

He can offer me nothing.

She pushed away from the bedpost and wandered to a fire that couldn’t warm her. She didn’t have her mother’s gift, but right now she could see her own future as clear as day. If she chose to stay with Lachlan, she’d be living in a hut on the outskirts of some Loch Fyfe village. A place where Lachlan would visit her now and again, when his wife and other duties allowed him. Cairenn would live in that hut and hear news about the chieftain’s wife bearing him heirs, one after another. Perhaps she’d bear him a child or two of her own, bastards without names. She would tend to them as she waited by the door in the hopes of hearing the hoof beats of his horse coming through the woods. Days upon days passing, months upon months, years upon years, while she lived far away from him, as well as the only family she knew.

Forever an outcast among outsiders.

“I’ll take that berth on Angus’s ship.” The words passed through her throat like sandpaper. “My parents must be missing me.”

She heard his weary exhale. This was the kind of trouble that happened when a woman wrapped herself up in dreams and ignored that which is not spoken aloud. This was what happened to a woman when she couldn’t see into a man’s deepest thoughts.

He said, “I can’t let you go, Cairenn.”

“Don’t say such things.”

“Everything has changed.”

“Yes. I’m finally the wiser.” No more would she stride to the lonely heights and watch the ships sail out of Galway Bay, for Lachlan was the dream she had chased and now that dream was lost. “Tomorrow morning, I’ll be on Angus’s ship before the people of Derry can even think to build the witch’s pyre.”

“You’ll be on a ship tomorrow, lass, but you won’t be apart from me.”

She wondered why he persisted when every word was a plunging knife.

“I’m bound to seize back Loch Fyfe,” he said. “Your gift will help me do that. Willing or not, you’re coming with me.”





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


Cairenn sat in the back of the galley, swathed in a woolen cloak borrowed from the wedding-chest of Angus’s late wife. She gripped the gunwales of the boat against the surge and lap of the sea. There was little wind, so the sailors had furled the sail. Fourteen men worked the oars in a sea dense with fog. None seemed concerned by the fact that they couldn’t see more than a stone’s throw beyond the ship’s curved prow, and the low silhouette of Derry had long been swallowed by the fog behind them. They just kept working the oars, steady and hard, doing their best to avoid looking at the witch within their midst.

And here she was, with the sea wind in her hair, and a ship rolling under her feet, and an adventure waiting ahead, just as she’d once dreamed. Yet all excitement or joy or even fear was subsumed by the numbness of her heart. Lachlan had left her alone in that bedroom last night, thwarted, aching, and flummoxed by a new, disturbing truth. His sense of duty was a far stronger force than the love he’d confessed.

If he truly loved her, he would have sent her home.

Now she couldn’t help but gaze at the man who had broken her heart, for Lachlan stood at the prow of this ship, looking more chieftain-like than ever. As the man most familiar with the crags, islands, and promontories that would make the best approach to the lands around Loch Fyfe, he would search for an anchorage where they could hide the ship in case they had to retreat from enemies. She knew this through the thoughts of the sailors around her, because Lachlan’s mind was battened tight.