But where is the child?he thought.What happened to our babe?
The thought of it nearly broke him. That he had a son or daughter wandering the globe, unaware of Alistair’s paternity. That he had missed so many years of a child’s life.
“Not hearing from you, I assumed the worst,” she continued. “I supposed that you had stopped loving me, that our love had not meant as much to you as it had to me—”
“Lies. I never stopped loving ye.”
“But how was I to have known?!” She pinned him with her gaze, red-rimmed and anguished. “You didn’t write!”
“Again, ye should have written me!”
“Well . . . I didn’t. I hadn’t the courage tobeg. My maid—a gossipy thing from Bristol—began to spread the rumor that I appeared to be increasing. And I simply . . . I panicked. What was I to do? I understood only too well the fate of women who bear children out of wedlock. It was unbearable to think that all my dreams of archeology would be dashed. That my father would be shamed. Not to mention the child itself, born a bastard. Dr. Stephen Newton—a family friend who I had always viewed as a sort of kindly uncle—stopped in on a particularly bleak day. I ended up confessing the whole sordid tale to him, and he offered to marry me. His wife had passed a few years before, and he longed for companionship. And so I accepted—anything to give myself and my unborn babe a normal life.”
Alistair stared at her, part of him surprised that she hadn’t morphed into a different woman—one he had never known—the words and sentiments coming out of her mouth were so foreign.
“Ye married another man, knowing he would claim paternity of my bairn? Ye denied me a relationship with my child?!”
“I d-didn’t—” Chris pressed shaking fingers to her forehead. “I don’t know if I would have truly gone through with the marriage had I—”
He stalked toward her. “Chris, where is my child?”
Her palm, flexed outward, stopped him.
“I m-miscarried.” She licked tears off her lip. “A week before the wedding, I began bleeding. The midwife said it was likelydue to nervous attacks from . . . everything. Our babe was born months too early to survive.” She stifled another sob. “A boy.”
A son.
He had nearly had a son.
Pacing away, he walked from one side of the cairn to the other.
“And then ye married Newton anyway,” he said, tone scathing.
“Yes,” she gasped. “I didn’t know what else to do. I was ruined and—”
“Were ye ever going to tell me?” The question emerged nearly at a shout. “If ye hadn’t accidentally ended up here, would ye have ever told me?”
Her crumpling expression was his answer.
No.
She would never have told him.
In fact, she had already hadweeksto disclose the truth.
And she had remained silent.
He didn’t . . .
He couldn’t . . .
He and Chris had made a bairn together.
And instead of writing him, instead of permitting him to step into his rightful place as her husband and father of her child, she had cut him out.
Excised him as precisely as she wielded the sharp edge of her trowel.
Yes, he had betrayed her, but this . . .
