A Very Highland Holiday - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,14

I wanted tae read. I’ve read those letters so many times that I’ve nearly memorized them.”

James set down the stack of the letters he had written so that he could focus on the ones Johnathan had written to him. But he made no move to untie the string. He simply sat there and looked at them.

“I-If what you say is true, they were not meant for you,” he said after a moment.

She averted her gaze, ashamed. “I know,” she said. “I dinna mean tae intrude, but I couldna help myself. There’s such a beautiful story in those letters.”

He snorted. “I-I am not sure that’s possible,” he said. “A-Anything I wrote is drivel. I-I don’t even know what my brother’s letters say.”

“Ye need tae read them.”

“I-I am not sure I can.”

“Why not?”

He glanced at her. “I-I am not sure why I should say that to you,” he said. “W-We are strangers, you and I. This is a private family matter and you surely would not care.”

Gaira laughed softly. “We are not strangers,” she said. “I know ye better than I’ve known most people in my life and I’ve never even met ye until now. Do ye want tae know what I know of ye? I know that ye’re brilliant and witty and sensitive, things ye thought yer brother believed were weaknesses, but I tell ye it’s not true. He dinna think that.”

“N-Now you’re making up lies.”

She shook her head firmly. “Indeed, I’m not,” she insisted. “Ye can read them for yerself. There’s a letter yer brother wrote tae ye six years ago after ye attended a fete given by a family named Summerlin. There was a young woman ye had yer eye on but when ye spoke tae her, she shunned ye. Ye ran off and no one could find ye for two days and when your brother finally found ye drowning yer sorrows at a coach inn, ye scolded him and told him tae go away. Do ye remember that incident?”

James was looking at her dubiously. “I-I do, in fact,” he said quietly. “T-The young woman was A-Amy Summerlin.”

“Of Blackstone Castle.”

When he realized she really did know the situation, he became less doubtful. “S-She pretended to be interested in what I had to say when, in fact, I later heard her mocking my speech with her friends and laughing. I-I was humiliated and left the party.”

Gaira nodded her head in the direction of the letters he held in his hand. “Ye never let yer brother tell ye that he had avenged ye,” she said gently. “In one of those letters, he tells ye that he corresponded with Amy for six months after the incident, pretending tae be a great duke, and promised he’d call upon her. On the appointed day, he never showed up and left Amy greatly humiliated.”

James looked at her, incredulous. “I-I think I heard of that,” he said. “M-My mother spoke of Amy Summerlin being made a fool of and how she was the laughingstock of her social circle. A-And you’re telling me that my brother did that?”

“He did.”

“For me?”

“For ye. The man had a naughty streak in him tae be sure.”

James had known that for the most part. But the fact that his brother had avenged him in a situation where he’d blamed his brother for his problems was astonishing. But that astonishment was coupled with growing remorse.

“H-He tried to speak to me about it, a few times, but I shut him off,” he said, thinking back to that time. “I-I never let him speak of it, so he never told me what he’d done.”

Gaira watched the regret ripple across his face. “He wrote ye a letter about it instead,” she said. “Ye wrote tae him because ye couldna speak, and he wrote tae ye because ye wouldna let him speak. I think ye should read the letters, m’laird. I think yer brother was a different man than ye knew.”

James sank down to his buttocks, still clutching the stack of bound letters. There was so much remorse and angst in his heart to realize that Johnathan had written him so many letters he never gave to him.

The question was why.

He suspected he knew.

“W-Was I really so difficult to communicate with?” he muttered aloud. “W-Why would he write all of these and never give them to me? Was he so afraid of my reaction?”

Because he sat down, Gaira sat down. “I dunna have the answers ye seek, m’laird, but I’ll tell ye what I think,” she said.