Not that it mattered, Alasdair thought, sending another stone skipping lightly along the water. They had gone, and left him alone. But Duff had come, and together they had—why, they had seized the day.
When he was twenty-three, he’d carried on a delightful flirtation with Lady Rodina Breck that had come to nothing. The year after that, he’d fancied himself in love with his distant cousin Kenna Salmond, but after a while his interest there had also dwindled away, into a tepid sort of friendship. His other amours had been strictly conducted with women who understood that a wedding ring was not in the offing. Marriage, then, had been the last thing on his mind.
Alasdair remembered, suddenly, Fiona turning the tables on him at the Keep o’ the Mòr by saying sardonically, Why aren’t you married?
He also remembered her saying to him, a few days after that, while sitting together in the Great Drawing-room:
I’ve observed how you wear your authority absolutely, but lightly. That you have a nice way with servants. That your clan obeys you without reserve. That you have great material wealth, and you live in a marvelous home in a breathtakingly beautiful part of the world. And yet . . .
She had broken off, on her face a sudden, unguarded look of sorrow, and soon after Janet Reid had playfully interrupted them.
Poor Janet—who, now that he thought about it, reminded him more than a little of Mòrag. But somehow he couldn’t remember either of their faces particularly well anymore. How strange.
Now he found himself wondering what Fiona had been going to say to him that evening. He had, seemingly, everything in the world, and yet . . .
And yet there’s something wrong with you.
And yet you’re missing something.
And yet you’ve never married.
And yet you’ve never found love.
Alasdair now sank down onto his heels, his gaze fixed on the smooth, shimmering surface of the loch. Prior to his thirty-fifth birthday, his life had been for years very much like that: smooth and placid. Easy. He knew the rumors that had been circulating about him all these years, wildly exaggerated rumors of his dissolute way of life, and for these he cared not a whit. He was a good laird, dedicated to the welfare of his clan; what did it matter how he privately conducted himself?
Did he need an excuse for how he’d lived his life?
And yet . . .
Loss had shaped him, there was no doubt about it.
Maybe he’d become a limited sort of man.
In China, so he had heard, there was an enormous wall, stretching for thousands of miles, creating a high impenetrable boundary around its perimeter.
Maybe he was like that, too.
But there wasn’t any point in beating one’s chest and bemoaning the state of things. He hated when people did that. Besides, to complain about his lot would be like feeling sorry for yourself when you’d been given a perfectly practical and serviceable pair of socks for your birthday—and pining in a very silly way for, say, the moon. He was married now, and determined to fulfill his responsibilities.
And he liked Fiona, he respected her—wasn’t that good enough?
It was going to have to be.
You couldn’t, as the saying went, wring blood from a stone.
As if to prove his own point, he picked up one more stone and squeezed it in his fist, hard.
No blood, of course.
He was safe inside his wall.
His old familiar wall.
Alasdair sent the rock skipping across the shining blue water, watched it sink, then rose to his feet. He whistled for his horse, which came at once; without hurry he rode back to the castle where, when he stepped into the Great Hall, he overheard one of the maidservants saying to another, with a distinct note of awe in her voice:
“The mistress is up in a tree?”
“What?” Alasdair said. “Where?”
They turned quickly, each dipping a little curtsy, and the other maidservant said, “Out in the back, laird, so I heard, among the very treetops!”
Naturally he had to go.
As soon as he was outside he saw the tree with an enormously long ladder propped up against it, and there was Monty, too, with a gnarled hand upon one of the rails—all too casually it seemed to Alasdair. And there, high above, on the uppermost rung, was Fiona, peering with interest at something concealed among the branches.
She too gave the appearance of great casualness, and Alasdair could not suppress a vision of her falling, falling, lying crumpled and broken at his very feet. He had feared for her life as a captive among the Sutherlainns, but at least it had not been her fault she’d been thrust into danger. Nobody had forced her to climb this damned ladder!
He was afraid for her. And he didn’t want to be afraid for her. To care about someone so much his heart was in his throat. From head to toe his body was alert to the possibility she might be harmed . . . Oh, God in heaven, here he went again. He glared down at Monty and said in a low, fierce growl: