“Have you seen three and thirty years?”
The man might as well have thrown a bucket of cold water on him, the shock might have been less. He wasn’t one to go about giving people his age, so how the devil did Campbell know it? “The particulars of my life are none of your business.”
“You’d be wrong, lad. I’m thinking I’m your da.”
If Beast wasn’t composed of such sturdy stock, he might have staggered back under the weight of the anger that ratcheted forcefully through him. For the man to show up after all these years and deliver such a striking blow with such calmness as though simply announcing that it might rain. A knife going in his side had hurt less. “Why the devil would you think that?”
“By just looking at you. I see myself when I was younger. Your ma would agree.”
An anticipated rage burst through him at the casual mention of his mother by this man who had not done right by her, who had put her in the unenviable position of giving birth to a bastard and then having to give him away.
Balling his hands into fists at his sides, he took a menacing step forward. If duels weren’t against the law, he’d be meeting the man at dawn. Perhaps he would anyway. “What was she to you? Your mistress? Someone you used and abandoned when she no longer suited you, when you grew bored with her? A servant you took advantage of?”
He saw the anger flare in Ewan Campbell’s dark eyes, and just as quickly it was tamped down. “The love of my life.”
“You loved her so much you left her alone to bring your bastard into the world. I assume she was alone, with no means, and that’s the reason she gave me up.”
“I didn’t know about you at the time.”
He wouldn’t accept the excuse. If this man had truly loved his mother, how could he have not known she was with child? As hard as the words were to utter, he spit them out. “You can forget you know about me now.”
He turned on his heel—
“You’re my firstborn, my only son, my only child, my heir.”
He froze, then barked out his laughter before once morefacing a man he wanted to know everything about while having no desire to know anything at all about. “I’m a bastard. Bastards can’t inherit.”
“Not in England, no. But we’re Scottish. Perthshire is where you were born, and in Scotland if the father of the bastard marries the mother of the bastard—it doesnae matter if it’s years after the bairn is born—the child is entitled to inherit all he would have if his parents had been married when the babe came into the world.”
Most of the words were of no importance to him, but some felt like slices of ice pelting him. “You married my mother?”
“I did, lad, as soon as I found her, but it took me a while to locate her.” He shook his head. “Your granddad, my da, he was a right bastard.”
“Born out of wedlock?”
The laughter was deep but caustic, and Beast didn’t like realizing how familiar it sounded, how much it reminded him of his own laugh.
“Nae. But most likely spawned by Satan all the same. He didnae approve of the woman I loved. Her father was his sworn enemy, though God alone knows why. He didnae want her blood tainting the bloodline he was so damned proud of. He knew how desperately I wished to marry her. When he learned she’d brought my wee bairn into the world, he wanted to make sure you never inherited. He was consumed with hatred for her family. Don’t know if he would have seen you killed, but she wasnae willing to chance it. Shortly after she saw you safely delivered into the arms of another, they found her and had her committed to an asylum for the criminally insane.”
Beast felt another punch to his gut. He’d never considered her fate would be so horrid, and he had an urge to strike out and smash something.
Sadness and anger that mirrored his own marred Campbell’s handsome features. “The cruelty she suffered. Took me five years to find her and when I did, I wanted to kill every cursed one of them who had ever touched her. But what good would I be to her, dancing in the wind? Though I took pleasure in leaving some of them bloodied. Even took my fists to my da. Wasn’t much they could do to fix his jaw when I was done with him. No tears were shed when he drew his last.”
Beast was thinking he might have inherited the man’s temper. But the story he’d told sickened him, made him feel guilty for all the times he’d questioned why his mother had broken her promise and not returned for him.
“Your ma wants to see you.”
He glanced quickly around as though expecting her to emerge from the wallpaper or step out from behind the draperies. “She’s here?”
“Nae. She wanted to come, but I didnae want her disappointed if you turned out not to be our boy.”
“You don’t know that I am. You’re just guessing.”
He gave a quick nod. “What are you hiding beneath all that hair? The same as me, I suspect. Your ma told me you’d taken after me for certain in that one regard.” With a smooth, efficient flick of his fingers, he brushed back the strands on the right side of his head. “’Tis the Campbell curse. Legend has it that one of our ancestors was always pressing his ear to the door, spying on witches. They cast a spell on him and his descendants. Some escape it. You and I weren’t so fortunate. Although there are worse things to befall a person.”
It was an unlikely tale, but what caught Beast’s attention more was the reference toour ancestors. He had his family, bastards Ettie Trewlove had cobbled together into a unit that loved each other fiercely and fought justas fiercely for each other. But that family came with no ancestors—none that could be claimed or acknowledged anyway. Yet, now he was learning he had ancestors, ones who would be proud to claim him, ones with whom he sometimes shared the anomaly with which he’d been born. A heritage. A birthright—although he’d always viewed it as something wrong, not right. A legacy. If he was this man’s son . . .
How could he doubt it when he was gazing into eyes as black as his own, when he possessed the same square cut of his jaw, the same sleek nose, the same high sharp cheekbones?
