Devil in Tartan (Highland Grooms #4)(47)

She shrugged.

He leaned across the table and made her look him in the eye. “Drink,” he commanded her. “The Lord knows when you might have another opportunity this day.”

Lottie glanced at the tankard.

He pushed the tankard closer. “Drink, Lottie.”

She picked it up and sipped, but the ale tasted sour.

“Och, now is no’ the time to be petulant,” he said.

She put the tankard down. “Petulant,” she repeated irritably. “Should I leap for joy? Sing songs for you?” She shook her head. “You’ve no idea how hard it’s been.”

“You’re right,” he agreed. “Perhaps you ought to tell me.”

She clucked her tongue. “You donna really want to hear it.”

He gestured for her to continue.

“Verra well,” she said. All at once, it felt inexplicably imperative that she explain to this man, of all men, why she had dragged him through this horrible, awful journey. “I love my father with all my heart.”

“Aye. We all love our fathers,” he said. He drank more ale and glanced absently about the room, studying the crowd, as if he expected this to be the whining of a female with no sense.

“No, I...” She found it difficult to put into words her complicated feelings about her father, about the role she’d assumed in her family, about the heavy responsibilities put on her shoulders at a very young age. “I mean that I love my father, but he’s made life verra difficult. He squandered everything, all of it! He has made us this desperate.”

He turned his blue eyes back to her, curious now. “What do you mean, everything?”

“His inheritance, aye? It was quite generous, enough to have kept us all his life.”

Mackenzie looked baffled. Lottie was not surprised—the Livingstones did not present as a clan who had ever possessed more than a few coins to their name, when in fact, they had possessed quite a lot of them at one time. “His grandfather was a Danish baron, a landowner. There was war with Sweden, and he escaped with his wealth and settled on Lismore Island. When my father came into his inheritance, he had many ideas of how to increase it. Wretched ideas.”

“Ah,” he said. “What ideas?”

She couldn’t possibly name them all, but one of her earliest memories was of an argument between her mother and father over his purchase of a carriage. The island was only four or five miles long, and there was no need for a carriage, not to mention the expense of keeping horses to pull it those few miles. “Many,” she said. “Many implausible ideas.”

The captain glanced down at his tankard. He was probably imagining the many ways a man could waste an inheritance. He was probably thinking how absurd was this clan, these Livingstones, squandering their fortune, stealing ships, believing liars. He was probably right in all his assumptions, and Lottie wished she could disappear. She didn’t really know the Mackenzies, but she knew of their reputation. They were a powerful clan, a smart clan, who had weathered the rebellions and the economic troubles better than most. The very opposite of the Livingstones.

But when he lifted his gaze, Lottie was startled by the compassion she saw in his eyes. She had not expected that. “I should have paid more heed,” she said. The admission of guilt that constantly pricked at her conscience spilled out of her. If only she’d not been so determined to ignore the sudden responsibilities she assumed after her mother’s death and live outside of it. If only she’d stayed closer to home instead of running wild over the island, racing on her horse, taking up a lover. If she’d not done any number of things, if she’d done other things, but above all, if she’d paid her father more attention, she might have stopped him from losing it all.

“Paid heed to what?” the captain asked.

“My mother died when I was just a wee lass. Mats was only just walking, and Dru, he needed quite a lot of minding and always will, and I...I didna want the responsibility of it,” she admitted. “God forgive me, but I didna want to be a mother or mistress of the house.”

“Of course no’,” he said, nodding as if he understood her. “As you said, you were a child.”

Yes...but even at that age, she’d understood how reckless her father was. One winter, her father had come back from Port Appin with three geese. He’d been convinced to purchase them by a stranger and was excited for his plans to fatten them for a Christmas Day feast. “We’ll feed the entire clan, we will, Lottie, and the flavor of it, you’ll no’ forget it,” he assured her.

He’d prepared his own concoction to fatten them, based on God only knew what. For a full fortnight, the geese had wandered about among the rabbits. But then something began to change. They began to wobble like three drunken sailors. Their feathers molted. The first goose died a few days before Christmas and the other two were dead by Christmas Eve.

It was much later that Lottie discovered her father had included gooseberries in his concoction. Morven’s grandmother, upon hearing this, had cried for the poor geese. Gooseberries, it seemed, were poisonous to fowl.

There had been many other instances like that in Lottie’s life.

“I was a child, but I knew him,” she said darkly. “I knew how he thought, and still, so many times I turned a blind eye and let the consequences fall where they would.”