Page 60 of Her Reluctant Highlander Husband

“Her family is there. If she wants to see them…”

“I’m her family and I am here.” Once he’d made himself clear he bowed and left them to their snickering.

Dorie wouldn’t want to travel all the way to London. She only wanted to know the man. Now that he was here, she’d ask her questions and get her answers, and that would be it.

Even as Bryce thought it, he realized that probably wouldn’t be enough for Dorie. Her only remaining blood relative had been found. A caring, kind father who would want to keep in touch.

“Blast and damn,” he said as he headed for the solar. He found them deep in conversation regarding her father’s long trip to Dunardry. Bryce sat silently in the corner, in case he was needed. But it was clear no one had even noticed him enter.

Once the man finished his ale and meat pie, he went to the window. It was another thing he had in common with his daughter. Dorie didn’t like being trapped in a room, either.

“I’d forgotten how beautiful Scotland is. When I was here last, I had other distractions.”

Meaning he’d been busy having an affair with a married woman and getting her with child. Bryce didn’t mention it. Everyone knew.

“Would you like to go for a walk? I can show you my new home,” Dorie offered, still beaming with happiness.

“That would be lovely. It’s a mild day.”

Dorie startled when she finally noticed Bryce. “We’re going for a walk.”

“I’ll have to come along to guard you.”

“No need,” Dorien said. “My guards will be with us. They’ll protect Dorie as well as myself.”

“I’m safe with my father,” Dorie said with a wide smile and left Bryce alone as she strode off.

It was true enough she was safe with the man, but Bryce still felt as if something bad was going to happen with the arrival of their new guest.

He could only hope he was wrong.

Chapter Twenty

“How did you meet my mother?” Dorie asked her father as soon as they sat down on a fallen log. Despite the cool breeze, she was happy to be outside, having spent so much of her life indoors.

Rascal ran off to explore as her father smiled and threw a stick for him to chase. The dog wasn’t so great about bringing it back.

It was a good minute before her father answered, but the silence wasn’t awkward. “It was fate, I’m sure. I stopped to get water while she happened to be sitting by the creek crying.”

“Crying? What was wrong?”

“She was newly married and unhappy. She didn’t tell me that day, but later I found out that she’d gotten her courses and the McCurdy wasn’t pleased about it.”

“He wasn’t pleased about many things,” Dorie agreed with a frown as she remembered the man she’d thought was her father. In the early years, he’d offered a smile here and there to her. Occasionally he’d pull her onto his lap and chat with her as if she had great things to share. But most of the time he was too busy for a daughter. Instead, he gave all his attention to Wallace.

“I planned to see her safely back to her home, but she looked at me with eyes the color of moss in the spring, and I was struck. I’d always thought myself honorable. But I fell in love with a married woman. I didn’t care about the consequences. All that mattered was her.”

“And you saw her again?”

His cheeks turned pink and the blush moved up to the tips of his ears. “Every chance I could.”

Dorie thought she understood what he wasn’t saying. She and Bryce had been seeing a lot of each other over the last few months. And they weren’t even in love.

“Eventually my regiment was called away and I was forced to leave her. But not before I made her promise to write me. We’d talked of running away together. We exchanged letters through her sister so the laird wouldn’t find out. For a decade we went on with nothing between us but words on a page. The letters were all the same. Me begging her to meet me, and her telling me she couldn’t yet. She wanted to come to me as a free woman so we could be wed, so she was waiting for the laird to die.”

Dorie wished it had been the laird who had died. Not that Wallace would have been much better, but at least she and her mother could have left to live with her real father. They might have been happy.

“I was willing to wait for her, only because she never told me about you. I would have come immediately if I’d known we shared a child. When I found myself strapped with a title, our plans changed. I needed to marry for duty. I thought perhaps that was why she’d stopped writing. I didn’t blame her.”