“Then you and I will ride on, so we can talk of anything you like.”
His matter-of-fact words had an odd effect on her. Although she had been waiting for such an opportunity, now that he was granting it to her…
“What now?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
“I was ready and willing to tell you just what I think,” she replied. “But I did not think you would be so willing to hear it. In troth, sir, your invitation has acted like a damper on the heat of my anger. And I am not sure that I like that any better than other things you have said or done of late.”
“Is that all?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.
That look had another effect, a deeper one. But she fought it, determined to hold her own and have her say. “Faith, do you laugh at me?”
“I am not such a fool,” he assured her. “Now, shall we discuss what Rothesay said to anger you just before we left the hall, or have you another topic that you would prefer to offer first?”
She sighed. “By my troth, sir, I think what angers me most is almost the same thing in every instance.”
“And that is…?”
“You used to listen to my opinions and seem to respect them. But now you either ignore what I say to you or you dismiss it as unimportant. But if I do the same to you, you get as irritated as Ivor does.”
“You will have to explain to me how that applies to what Rothesay said about my having been born at Tor Castle.”
“God-a-mercy, you ken fine that you misled me when I asked you if you knew the place,” she said.
With a wry and rueful look, he said, “I did not tell you the whole truth, but we had met just the day before.”
“Then what about when I asked you yestereve, before I agreed to marry you, if you had told me everything about yourself that I should know? Then, you made it sound as if the only things you had not told me were things that you had not thought of or secrets that belonged to other people. That was not true, sir.”
“I should have told you then, aye,” he admitted. “I do see that now. At the time, I was acting on your father’s orders to persuade you to our marriage. The truth is that I wanted to persuade you for my own sake, sweetheart. But I feared that if I admitted that I was born at the very place over which our clans had fought for decades, you would be as irked as you are now. And our fratching over it would have done nowt to change your father’s mind or that of the Mackintosh.”
His explanation took the wind out of her sails. But she soon rallied, saying, “That is all very well, sir. But when you told me that you had only heard of Tor Castle, that was deception, plain and simple. How can you expect me to believe what you tell me when you do such things?” Tears welled unexpectedly into her eyes and she stared straight ahead, hoping that he would not notice them.
He reached over and caught hold of her hand. “Look at me, lass.”
She ignored him. She would not let him see that her own words had stirred such foolish emotion in her. When he squeezed her hand, a tear spilled over. But it fell from her left eye, and he was on her right, so he could not see it.
“Sweetheart,” he said, “I wish I could promise never to do such a thing again, but I cannot. Sithee, I serve a man who behaves impulsively and holds his secrets close. That means that I often have to keep my activities secret, too. I have spent years keeping personal secrets as well. Sakes, I thought that even Rothesay knew nowt of them. I was wrong about that, as we have seen, but even he knows nowt of one dilemma that I failed to resolve before I met you.”
“You did resolve it then?”
“I did, aye, and I am sure that I chose the right way.”
“Will you tell me what the resolution was, and why it was such a dilemma?”
“A fortnight ago I’d have said that I could never speak of it to anyone,” he said solemnly. “I am still not persuaded that telling you would be the right thing to do. But that is not because I