She cried until she could cry no more, and when the last sobs had ebbed, she looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes and tears on her lashes. “Oh, James, it was horrible.”
“Tell me,” he said gently.
And she did. She told him of the joy at discovering she was carrying their child, and how she meant to tell him first that day on the hill, and then the next when she’d caught him just as he was about to leave. She told him how scared she’d been, how she had wished the babe away right before she’d fallen. And then she confessed her guilt, the fear that her prayers had been answered. “I hadn’t even felt the baby move yet,” she said. “I know I was only a few months along, but it felt so real to me.”
“Of course, it was,” he said, stroking her hair. “It was real to me, too.”
She gazed up at him uncertainly. “It was?”
He nodded. “I was stunned when MacGowan told me, but so damned happy—for a moment at least.”
“Thommy told you?”
“Aye.” James explained how he’d run into his old friend at camp. He left out their fight, but he could tell from the worried pinch of her brows that she guessed what had happened.
“He didn’t do anything foolish, did he?”
James’s mouth hardened. “Nothing that wasn’t deserved.”
She sat up a little in his lap. “You didn’t hurt him?”
He eased her back down against his chest with a gentle rub of her back. “I didn’t touch him.” She frowned up at him, and his mouth twisted. She knew him too well. James had never backed down from a fight. “It’s the truth, Jo—I swear it.”
She made a sharp harrumph sound, clearly not sure whether to believe him. “Thommy acts like an overprotective brother sometimes, but I love him and wouldn’t want to see him hurt on my account.”
I love him. Though James knew she didn’t mean anything by it, hearing the words he so longed to hear fall so easily from her lips provoked a rather unpleasant spark of jealousy. “Aye, well your champion is perfectly hale. And I don’t think you need to worry about him.” Unconsciously, he rubbed his jaw where MacGowan had hit him. “With some training, he’ll be able to take care of himself quite well.” Too well, probably. But next time his old friend threw a punch at him, James wouldn’t just sit there.
He cupped her chin and tipped her face back to meet his gaze. “MacGowan was right, Jo. I was an arse. Your honor should never have needed defending. And he shouldn’t have been the one to tell me about the babe. I should have been there, and you don’t know how much I wish I’d done it differently.”
She held his gaze and something twisted in his chest. A longing so acute it stole his breath. God, he loved her. How could he have been such a fool? He would never have been happy living two lives, and what he’d proposed would have destroyed them both.
After a long moment, she nodded and snuggled back against his chest.
There in the sunshine, bundled up in the plaid and seated on a rock by the edge of the pool, they mourned the loss of the child who should have been theirs together. It was months later than it should have been, but James knew they’d just taken the first step toward the future.
Something had changed. They both sensed it. After her breakdown by the pool with James, Joanna didn’t feel quite as empty. The darkness that had enfolded her heart was not quite as black. She could feel herself opening again, like the petals of a flower with the first rays of spring sunshine after a long, bitter winter. She felt the warmth of hope—and possibility.
The love she’d felt for James as a girl was gone, but in its place something new and stronger had grown. Their shared memories and the love they’d once had became their new foundation to build upon—a foundation based not on blind, girlish illusions but on reality. A foundation not between the vassal’s daughter and the young lord but between a woman and a man.
James Douglas was not the perfect demigod she’d once revered with a love akin to worship. He was all too human. A man who made mistakes—sometimes egregious ones. Yet somehow she loved him all the more for it. His fallibility made him real and put them on equal footing.
But that was here, in this false world he’d created for them. This temporary paradise of gallivanting across the countryside—laughing, swimming, riding—as the drums of war banged on around them. She was all too aware that it would have to end soon. Every day she expected banners to appear on the horizon with a messenger, or worse, soldiers to take him back to Bruce.
She probably should have sent him away, knowing what he was risking, but the thought of him leaving again tore her apart. How could she be sure he would return and feel the same way? What if his duty called to him again? Though she might think of him as her equal, the rest of the world would not. Would ambition rear its ugly head again, cut off once only to grow back like the mythical hydra?