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“No! ’Tis my father. No!”

A fact he had realized the moment before she spoke. When the man reached for Graeme, he allowed it. The sting that followed his punch was well deserved.

“Stop. Father, stop it,” Gillian screamed behind him while voices yelled from the other direction.

Her father wasn’t alone, it seemed. They had an audience. And a rather large one at that.

It was the last thing he remembered.

* * *

“Father, please . . .”

“Lord Lyndwood.” Geoffrey continued to restrain her father, who refused to listen to reason.

“That bastard defiled my daughter. Unhand me, Waryn,” her father yelled, the words spitting from his mouth like venom.

“I will not allow you to assault my guest.”

“Assault your . . .” He tried to shrug out of Geoffrey’s grip. She’d never seen her father this angry.

“Father,” she tried again. “I’ve not been defiled. I—”

“Be quiet,” he yelled at her.

Which was when Graeme opened his eyes and stood. His expression, venomous. And directed at her father.

“I deserved that,” he spat. But she”—he nodded toward her—“does not.”

“Unhand me,” her father repeated, though Geoffrey continued to hold him back. Everyone, it seemed, was here. Her mother, Allie, Sara . . . how had they come to her so quickly? How could they have known? Her cheeks burned with shame. This exposure was her worst nightmare.

“You will not tell me how to handle my own daughter, Scottish scum.”

“Father!”

The skin around the chief’s eye was starting to swell. Not surprising since he’d not even defended himself. Gillian suspected if he had, her father would be the one with the burgeoning black eye instead.

“You would marry your daughter to an old man, one with a more than questionable reputation, and yet I am scum?”

If her father was furious before, he was downright livid now.

“Graeme,” Geoffrey warned. And then he said to her father, “I am going to let you go, and you will not”—he emphasized the last few words—“lay another hand on a guest in our home.”

Her father’s grunt was the only answer he’d give, but he did remain still when the earl took his hands from him.

Geoffrey turned toward the garden’s entrance.

“Go,” he said, presumably to the Kenshire guards gathered there. Gillian didn’t dare move—she barely dared to breathe. She caught Sara’s wide eyes, and quickly looked away.

“I’m sorry, Father,” she finally whispered. “Mother.”

She bowed her head, unable to look at them. She had never disobeyed them before, in anything, and it felt exactly as shameful as she’d imagined it might. Gillian wished she could walk deeper in the garden and escape all of it. But of course, this was her doing—there’d be no escaping from it.

What Allie must think of her.

“How could you?” her father asked. “You’ve jeopardized everything.”

She could not bring herself to look at him.