Page 99 of Go, Rogue

Chapter39

McGann looks around the room wildly. All eyes are on him, and he doesn’t know what to do.

Catherine said duke. That he’s the Duke of Barclay. Of all the preposterous shite.

Except—

The way she looks at him, with some mixture of pity and sympathy and incredulity and shock, tells him she isn’t being preposterous. She’s being honest and what she’s said is true.

He reacts the only way he knows how; he turns on his heel and limps out of that room as quickly as possible.

“Andrew,” he hears Catherine say behind him, but he keeps moving, back to the carriage that’s conveyed him and Rogers here.

“Wait!” she calls. “Please!”

He makes it to the carriage and opens the door before he finally stops and turns back to her. “Get in, lass.” He gestures inside. Catherine clambers up and he follows, leaning his weight back on the squabs.

“I’m sorry,” she says and reaches for his arm.

He feels like stone beneath her touch and wishes he didn’t. He wishes, so much, that everything could be now like it had been before. Before he’d ever asked for that cursed box back.

“I shouldn’t have announced it aloud like that,” she says. “I should have—I wish I’d—”

He puts his hand on top of hers and pulls her in closer to him so that her head fits between his shoulder and his jaw. “Shhh,” he murmurs to her. “It isn’t your fault. It’s my father’s, that bloody arsehole. I wish he’d just left me here with my gran instead of hauling me back to Scotland.” He rests his head on top of hers. “I don’t understand why he didn’t. It would have been so much better. So much easier for everyone.”

Catherine nuzzles into him slightly. “I don’t know,” she says and sighs. “Why do fathers do anything? You might choose to believe the best of him, that he married your mother and brought you back to Scotland because he wanted to do his best by both of you. But the peerage—and Barclay’s mother, when he remarried—made that impossible.”

She pauses briefly. “But you don’t have to. You might believe he was a weak-willed, selfish man who made a series of discordant decisions that have made your life very hard.”

“Hard,” he snorts. “How about hell?”

“Alright then, that made your life hell.” She squeezes his arm. “My father insisted I marry but left me no provision to see it done. He married my mother for her money and then disallowed her to even mention the family company it came from. The only truth of it is we had rotten fathers,” she says. “And whether that was because they were spiteful or weak-willed or just heedless doesn’t much matter. To me anyway. They’re dead now, Andrew, and we’re here. We’ve lives to live; ones they no longer control, and we get to choose how we think of them. And how we think of ourselves. What we leave behind and what we carry forward is up to us.”

The carriage comes to a stop outside his little cabin. The wind has begun to whip and clouds obscure the sky. A storm is coming; he can feel the threat of it raising the hairs on the back of his neck.

“Will you stay with me awhile?” he asks as they alight from the carriage.

“Of course,” she says and follows him inside.

He knows he ought to go and see his gran, but he doesn’t. He’ll have to tell her he’s the goddamned Duke of Barclay and he doesn’t want to. Not until he can come to terms with it himself.

He’s avoided his relation to the duke and that side of his family for his entire life. He hated that part of himself. Reviled it and kept it a secret as best he could. And that was when he was only a duke’s bastard son.

Now—

Bloody hell.

Catherine may be right that he gets to choose how he thinks of his father and how he thinks of himself, but he knows it won’t be as easily done as said. Banishing the thoughts of himself, the ones he’s absorbed from his father and his brother might very well be the hardest thing he ever has to do. And it’s not a thing done only once; he’ll have to do it over and over again for the rest of his life.

How does he even begin, when turning his mind to the thought that he might be the duke—the actual Duke of Barclay—is like looking directly into the sun. The idea of it scorches right through him, leaving only a crumbling ash in its wake.

“Would you like to talk about this further?” Catherine asks when they’re safely inside the cabin.

“Nay.” He sits at his table while she perches on one of the stacked fruit boxes.

“It might help to devise a plan,” she says. “A lot has happened, Andrew. And there will be a great deal to do. The House of Lords has a special Committee that oversees titles, even Scottish ones, and I’ve no doubt Barclay—” she pauses, “or whomever he is now, will challenge you. Good heavens,” she goes on, “the entailment must reset to you, and there is Scotland to consider. They’ve their own court, I believe. The Court of Lord Lyon? Yes, I think that’s it. I wonder why—”

“Menace,” he cuts her off. “I’m tired. And my damned leg hurts. And while it delights me to no end to see you planning, lass, what I really want to do right now is hold you in my arms.”