She stopped dead at the threshold as if she had run full-tilt into a pane of glass.
A low-burning fire flickered softly, and nearby was a well-worn chair pulled close. Sitting in the chair was Ragnall—the man who had ridden through her gate and changed her life forever.
He was holding a baby against his shoulder. A thick, dark-haired, red-cheeked little bundle. He was gently rocking her from side to side, murmuring softly and nonsensically into her fuzzy hair. As the cries turned to wet hiccups, he tilted his head and smiled at the child. It was a smile of such open, helpless tenderness that Olivia, watching from the doorway, did not recognize the man wearing it for even a moment.
He looked up.
The smile vanished as if it had never been. For one frozen instant, they simply stared at one another across the warm little room. The baby gurgled wetly into the silence between them,and a hundred ugly explanations flooded into Olivia’s head all at once, each one of them worse and colder than the last.
A child. He had a child. He had stood in her room not three hours past and spoken to her so calmly of heirs, and all the while he had a child of his own hidden away behind a quiet door at the end of a gallery that no one in this keep had meant for her to walk down.
“Excuse me,” Olivia said, her voice sounding distant and foreign to her own ears.
And before he could get a single word out, before her face could betray the precise and terrible shape of what was breaking apart inside her, she turned on her heel and walked back the way she had come. Fast, and then faster, until walking had become almost running.
Behind her, Ragnall rose from his chair, calling her name, but she did not once look back.
CHAPTER 6
He reachedher at the top of the stairs and grabbed her arm gently, just enough to turn her around.
“Let go of me.”
“Olivia.”
“Do ye think me a fool?” She rounded on him, and all the hurt came pouring out of her as fury, because fury was all she trusted to hold her upright. “Ye stood in me room this very mornin’ and spoke to me of heirs, of givin’ ye a son, calm as a man orderin’ up his dinner, and ye’ve had a bairn of yer own tucked away behind a quiet door the whole while? Were ye ever goin’ to tell me? Or did ye mean to make a fool of me in me own marriage, in front of the whole of yer clan, and let them laugh at the Blythe lass who didnae even ken her husband had a child?”
He flinched. “She isnae mine.”
“Do ye think me simple as well as foolish?”
“She isnae mine,” he said again, and there was a weight to it the second time that stopped her tongue mid-breath.
He let go of her arm and stepped back, giving her space.
“Ye’re right that I’ve kept the truth from ye. Nae all of it, and nae out of any cruelty, but I’ve kept it close, and that was wrong of me. Come with me now. I will show ye everythin’, all of it, and then ye can decide for yerself what manner of monster I am, with the facts in yer two hands instead of yer fear.”
He held out his hand to her.
She stared at it. A scarred, broad, dangerous hand, a hand that had held a claymore in her father’s yard, that not three minutes past had cradled a baby as if it were the most fragile and precious creature God had ever made. She did not want to take it. She told herself, very firmly and several times over, that she did not in the least want to take it.
She took it.
A warmth went straight up her arm at the contact, sudden and unwelcome, a tingling she had no business feeling for this man of all the men alive, and she snatched her hand back as if he had scalded her.
“Lead the way,” she said, far too quickly. “I will follow ye on me own two feet, thank ye.”
He led her down a different corridor, narrower and dimmer than the rest, to a plain door that he opened without knocking, like a man opening a door he had opened a thousand grieving times. And there, in a still room that smelled of dried herbs and stale air and long sorrow, sat a young woman in a chair drawn up to the window, staring at the bare stone wall.
She had been bonnie once. Olivia could see the ghost of it clearly, like a fine drawing left out in the rain. Dark hair, unbrushed now, hanging lank about a sweet pale face. Green eyes, deep as peat water, and not one single spark of life burning behind them.
She did not turn her head when the door opened. She did not blink. She did not seem to know there was another living soul in the room with her at all.
“This is me sister,” Ragnall said very quietly, as if loudness might break her. “Kate.”
“What happened to her?”
“Yer braither.”
