Page 38 of Her Magnificent Mistake
Shrugging without looking at her, Hawk began to climb once more. He didn’t drop her hand.
Finally he spoke. “Allison…was suitably impressed. I’ve only brought her once, right after she arrived, but she was…” He blew out a breath. “I dinnae ken. She looked around with wonder and asked questions and I…I suppose I saw myself in her. The way I used to be, with Grandda.”
“That is a good thing, is it not?” she ventured.
“Aye! It’s…”
He trailed off, so she squeezed his hand. “You are concerned she is not happy here?” In the days she’d seen them together, she’d seen their warm camaraderie, based mainly on banter that spoke of deep caring for one another.
His dark gaze darted to her, then back to the path. “Nay, quite the opposite. I worry sometimes she is too happy here. Too settled. Too ready to hide away from the world…”
Marcia waited for him to finish that sentence, because she had no idea what he was trying to say. Finally she prompted him with her best, or most adventurous, guesses. “You worry that you will lose her to marriage? That she will never marry and become a spinster, a sprite of the Glen? That she is ill-suited to live in Cowal? That she is going to learn the trapeze and run off and join the circus?”
He snorted. “Ihaveconsidered that. Nay, I just worry that I did her a disservice by sending her off to school all those years. She has hinted, a few times—more than hinted that…she was lonely.”
When Hawk glanced at her over his shoulder, his foot hit a patch of damp moss and slid out from under him. He would’ve pitched sideways into the burn had she not yanked him back on the path.
“Thank ye,” he said ruefully. “Perhaps I ought to put in a rope railing here.”
They were approaching another bridge across the stream, but Marcia was more interested in what he’d just confessed. “Whydidyou send her away, Hawk? I remember there being no love lost between you and your older brother…”
He stopped on the bridge, and she did too, joining him at the railing to stare down at the rushing water below. It was a reminder that the world was bigger, wilder, more untamable than anything she could conceive of.
And yet her attention was on the man beside her.
“Aye,” Hawk finally admitted. “Stephen and I were ill-matched. He was a bully, a liar…and a cheat.”
“What happened?” she whispered. When she’d last been a part of Hawk’s life, the injustices of his older brother had often been a topic of conversation, but he had never gone into detail. Never thought it honorable.
“He died,” he breathed simply. “Here, in this glen. He was visiting with Grandda, and asked to see the burn, and Artrip found him face down in the water at the base.”
She sucked in a breath. “He…drowned? On purpose?”Suicide?
Another death…
Hawk rolled his shoulders. “We dinnae ken. His wife was gone by then, and his daughter…Allison had been raised by nannies and governesses, she barely knew Stephen. Or me.” He leaned forward, propping his elbows on the railing. “And then she was my problem, and I sent her away.”
Her hand rested on his back. “Where?”
“A boarding school, the best I could afford. To make her a lady, an educated lady.” The bleakness in his tone was heart-breaking. “Grandda offered to pay, but she was my responsibility. I doubled my efforts in my forestry business and sent her a stipend along with tuition. I couldnae bring her to live with me, no’ in the wilds of the Highlands, she needed a proper upbringing. But perhaps…I should’ve visited myself.”
Yes, he should have. “How old was she?”
“She left when she was almost ten. Last month she returned home.”
Home. He thought of this place—of himself—as Allison’s home. Did she? “And since then?”
“Since then, until yer arrival, she’s gone out of her way to shock me as often as possible, to say outrageous things and prove she’sno’a lady. I suspect it’s punishment. She’s trying to show me the school didnae work.”
That sounded accurate. It would be the kind of revenge Marcia herself would wreak if she’d been forced to do something she’d hated…such as becoming a proper lady. Allison sounded very much like her.
“And since my arrival?”
His lips twitched. “She’s been busy trying to show yer brother that she’s an intelligent young lady, and only says shocking shite when she kens he’s interested.”
“Ah. Like their conversation about the mating habits of lobsters?”
“I think it was clams.”
