Highland Outlaw (Campbell Trilogy #2)(106)

The other man was fast losing his patience. He stood up from the chair and strode toward the bed, all pretense of equanimity gone. But if Campbell thought to intimidate him, he was dead wrong. Patrick stood and met him eye to eye.

“You might make her happy now,” Campbell thundered. “But how happy will she be in a few years after hardship has worn her down? I don't know what my cousin will do, but would you have her risk losing everything?”

Patrick stiffened, knowing he'd argued much the same to himself. “Is this what she wants?”

“She's confused right now. She doesn't know what she wants. But if you walk away now, she will recover.”

Patrick flexed his jaw. “Let me talk to her.”

“You'll only make it harder.” Campbell paused and then said quietly, “If you truly care for her, as I think you do, you'll do the right thing. Doesn't she deserve better?”

Truth twisted like a knife in the gut. Campbell was only saying what Patrick already knew and had tried to ignore. She deserved everything, and a man who could give it to her. But he was so damn tired of trying to do the right thing.

Lizzie …

His heart cried out for her. She was all he wanted.

“Even if I agreed, what makes you think she will accept it?” Patrick was grasping, but if there was anything he'd learned about Lizzie, it was that she had a mind of her own.

“If you know my sister as well as I think you do, you will know the answer to that.”

The land. Jamie would make it look as if all he'd wanted had been the land. Patrick wanted to think that she wouldn't believe it of him, but after their last conversation, when she'd discovered that he'd witnessed her humiliation, she was vulnerable. Maybe even vulnerable enough to believe it. “She'll hate me,” Patrick said dully.

For a moment, he thought he saw a streak of compassion in Campbell's granite gaze. “Aye, but it's for the best.”

It might be for the best, but it didn't stop Patrick from feeling that he'd just had his heart eviscerated from his chest with a rusty, jagged blade.

Never had he felt so empty. It was as if the last light had gone out of him—and the hope that something good might come out of this bungled situation, extinguished.

Chest burning with emotion and not trusting himself to speak, Patrick nodded.

“I'm sorry, lass, but he's gone,” Jamie said.

No. Every instinct rejected what her brother was saying. It can't be true.

Lizzie sat in an upstairs chamber of the drover's inn near Callander, where she'd been awaiting news of Patrick since Jamie's men had pulled her off him on the field near Balquhidder. Stunned, she stared at her brother. “Tell me again—everything—that he said.”

“I offered him the tenancy of the land near Loch Earn and his freedom if he would repudiate the handfast,” Jamie repeated. “He accepted.”

“Just like that?” He wouldn't have left me without saying anything. Though her pride had been wounded by what she'd discovered, his last words had resonated: Can you really doubt my feelings for you? Deep in her heart, she couldn't. Lizzie shook her head, refusing to believe it. “You must have misunderstood.”

Patrick would never give up that easily, unless … No. He cares about me.

Poor, pathetic … She wanted to close her eyes and put her hands over her ears to block out the memories. But there was just enough doubt lingering from the discovery that what he'd seen that day might have caused him to target her as an easy mark.

Jamie gave her a sympathetic look, though he would never understand the pain he'd just unwittingly inflicted. “I'm sure he cares for you, lass, but the land was what he wanted—isn't that what you told me?”

Unable to speak, she nodded. She'd told Jamie what had happened, how Patrick had sought her out for her land. But I didn't mean it. I thought …

She looked to her brother, hoping to find a kernel of hope to hold on to, but the sympathy in his eyes only made it worse.

Jamie loved her too much. He was so overly protective of her. Her eyes narrowed. “You didn't force him to agree to this, did you?”

Jamie arched a brow, a wry look on his face, as if he wanted to be offended but knew he couldn't be. “I didn't need to.”

Her heart squeezed at the blunt honesty. It hadn't been only about the land … had it? To the last, she'd wanted to think she'd been wrong about his motives. But he hadn't stayed to convince her or make her forgive him. “Why didn't he come see me and tell me himself?”

“I'm sure he thought it would be easier this way. A clean break.”

She made a sharp scoffing sound. A clean break? As if it were something as inconsequential as a bone and not her heart that had been broken. “What if I don't want a clean break? I have a year—”

“Is that what you want, Lizzie? To drag this out? To run after a man …”

Lizzie sucked in her breath. She gazed up at her brother, horrified. The blood drained from her face. To run after a man who has made it very clear that I'm not important enough to him. That was what Jamie was trying to say. Humiliation crawled over her in a mottled flush. Was that what she'd been doing, throwing herself at a man who didn't want her?

She'd practically asked him to marry her. Looking back at it now, she saw that her well-constructed argument had been just as much about what she could bring him as it had been about her.