“Our children,” he emphasized, finally revealing his true colors. “If I am not living among the Balmoral, naturally you and the children will not be, either.”
“I will not go back to that clan.” Her former laird had not been a good man, no matter what Caelis might think.
“Not immediately, no, but once I have discharged my duty, you and our children will join me.”
She laughed then, the sound bordering on hysterical. The man was completely daft. “You speak as if we have promises between us, plans to be together as a family. We have none.”
Her voice rose and the hysteria edged closer. She forced air in and out of her lungs as she pushed away the overwhelming sense of panic.
“We will have the future we dreamed of six years ago.” He dropped to his knees in front of her, his big hands engulfing her own. “I am no longer willing to live without my true mate for the sake of a corrupt alpha.”
“You are not making any sense, Caelis.”
“You belong to me. ’Tis simple as that.”
He could not truly believe that?
“Oh, no. It is not simple at all. I do not belong to you.” Though her heart called her a liar. “Mayhap I did all those years ago, but not now. Never again.”
“Never is a long time, lass.”
“And sometimes not long enough.” When it came to seeing Percival, new Baron of Heronshire, again, never would be too short.
She’d thought the same about Caelis, but the heart that had gone dormant when she left Scotland began to flutter again. True that flutter brought naught but pain now.
And yet a very tiny part of her was glad not to be so dead inside. She’d felt emotion for her children, but it was a different place in her heart that had been sleeping these past years.
A place that at one time had given her both her greatest joy and most devastating sorrow.
“I will change your mind.” He promised. “We are meant to be together.”
“I used to believe that.” She’d been certain to the very depths of her soul that she and this man had a glorious future together.
A love story to write with their hearts and their bodies so profound, their children’s grandchildren would tell it to their babes. Losing her faith in the future had hurt almost as much as losing him.
“Believe it again.”
“No.” She’d been hurt enough by this man and by her own dreams.
Neither would ever be given free rein in her heart again.
His impossibly blue gaze bored into hers. “Some things in life, we have no choice about.”
“You mean like six years ago?” she asked sweetly.
An expression of relief (no doubt that she’d finally understood) came over his features. “Exactly like six years ago.”
“Then you are a very ineffectual man, Caelis of the MacLeod. Six years ago, you had a choice indeed.”
“I told you—”
“That our laird denied us the right to marry in the clan,” she interrupted. “But what does that signify? Only that your love for his regard far exceeded any small feelings you might have had for me. You denied me. You denied our son. All on the say-so of a despot worse than the man I am currently running from. Do not you claim you had no choice. You had a very real choice, Caelis, and you made it!”
“You do not understand.”
“You think not? I know this. Had the choice been mine six years ago, I would have run from the clan, abandoned my family and followed you across the waters if need be for us to be together. You wouldn’t even leave with me to another clan.”
“I could not!” His bellow was louder than hers, but she was not impressed.
“Then I say again, Caelis, you were a very ineffectual man. And I believed you a warrior at heart.”
“I am. How dare you doubt my fighting spirit!”
“How dare you claim one when you never fought for the right to be with me!” He surged to his feet, towering above her, his rage a palpable force around them.
She was not impressed.
“I thought he wanted only what was best for me. As you said, I was one of his favored ones. He claimed that as my alpha he could tell you were not my true mate. How was I supposed to know he lied?”
“You wanted to believe him. You wanted to believe that some in the clan were more important, superior to others. You wanted to be one of those superior beings.” She put all the derision she felt into that word, letting Caelis know just how unsuperior she considered a man who could abandon her as he had done.
His face contorted as if holding something of great import back. Finally, he said, “I was.”
“I would say that I am sorry you lost your place, but I am not. The longer you held favor with that man, the more of your humanity you would have given up to him.”
“You do not know how true your words are,” Caelis said, his tone subdued, his face cast in shadows so she could not read his expression.
She had no answer for him. He had chosen, no matter that he claimed there had been none, and he had done so poorly.
He sat on the edge of her bed, leaving his scent behind, though she would not tell him so. She’d always been sensitive to it, reveling in his nearness even when she could not see him.
He looked down at the floor, as if it might have the answers he sought. “There are things I did not tell you then. Things you will have to know now.”
“You sound very mysterious.”
He nodded, his expression sober. “It is a great mystery, a secret the humans who are privileged to know must keep at the pain of death.”
“You say humans like you think yourself something greater than.” Was this truly the man she had loved so dearly?
His sense of superiority and excessive vanity might even rival Percival’s.
“Not better than—I understand that now—but not the same either.” Caelis’s expression pleaded with her for understanding.
But once again, his words were more confusion than explanation.
“Will you ever start making sense?” she demanded with asperity. “No matter what your exalted laird would have you believe, you are not some superior being.”
“I am Chrechte,” Caelis blurted out with exasperation, jumping to his feet and turning away as if frustrated with her obdurate behavior.
Really? If he persisted in trying to unite them as a family, he would soon learn that she was capable of far more obstinacy than this.
And the whole Chrechte mystique? Not so mysterious after all. Everyone in the clan knew about the band of warriors that considered themselves elite among the soldiers.
She rolled her eyes. “So I heard on more than one occasion six years ago from you and others. You considered your skills as a warrior something to set you apart.”
He spun back to face her, his expression growing increasingly astonished as she continued speaking.
“My skills as a warrior are above those of other men, Chrechte as well,” he declared with affront.
“And I am an English lady with claim to title and little else. Do you know how it has set me apart?” she asked scathingly. “Not one wee bit. I am still a mother, a friend, a woman with less say in my life than the steward who ran my dead husband’s estates.”
“You ignore everything you do not wish to hear,” he accused, his frustration obviously mounting.
She glared at him, her own ire rising to match his. “If you want me to hear you, may I suggest you try talking sense rather than the ravings of arrogant idiocy.”
“I am no idiot!”
“Well, you’re certainly not a lord of logic, either.”
“I am a shape-changer,” he practically yelled. “Chrechte means I share my nature with an animal. Mine is a wolf.”