“No, Murdoch,” Farah admonished as her hands finally slid free and she pressed them against a protesting back as she stood. “You must forgive him for this.”
“Never!”
Farah searched the floor around her until she snatched up her ripped eggshell-blue drawers. “You must,” she insisted. “Just as I must forgive you for not telling me who he was all this time.”
He turned the color of a jaundiced turnip. “I—I doona know what ye mean, lass.”
“Oh, do give it up, Murdoch!” she huffed. “Now tell me which way he went.”
“Christ, Jaysus,” the old man moaned, looking quite unwell.
“Which way?” She brandished her unmentionables at him in a threatening manner.
Murdoch pointed out the west doors. “Follow the devastation,” he said rather dazedly. “Though when he’s in such a state, I wouldna advise being in his path.”
Despite everything, Farah was unable to suppress a grin and planted a kiss on Murdoch’s balding pate. “Don’t follow me,” she ordered before dashing out.
The devastation did, indeed, mark a path toward her husband. Antiques were pushed over. Pictures pulled off walls. Priceless glass vases and stone statues lay smashed in the middle of the hallways.
Ducking into an unused guest room, she used her ruined undergarments to clean herself and discarded them in the rubbish basket before resuming her search.
The path ended at the back stairs, and Farah followed them down to where the garden door flapped against the storm.
Of course, Farah knew exactly where she’d find him.
* * *
The stone walls of the terrace gardens stood higher and in better repair than those ancient mossy rocks at Applecross. It made sense to Farah, in a way, as she approached the man slumped against one. He stood higher, too, these days, impossibly so. But this sable-haired man was once a sable-haired boy she’d known better than any other, and he still retreated to cold stone walls in times of crisis.
His white linen shirt and dark vest were plastered to his torso and outlined powerful shoulders along with the dips and swells of thick arms. His limp hands dangled over splayed knees. Locks of hair dripped rainwater onto the grass beneath him, hiding his downturned face. The posture of defeat didn’t diminish the potency of his masculinity.
An acute ache opened a pit in her chest and spread until she had to swallow to keep it down.
Here they were again. A cold storm. A stone wall. A wounded boy. A lonely girl.
“Tell me why you’re crying?” She whispered the first words she’d ever spoken to him.
And he gave her the same reply, without looking up. “Go. Away.”
A ragged gasp escaped her and she rushed to him, sinking to her knees next to him in a cloud of expensive midnight skirts.
He snatched his hands back and fisted them at his sides. “I mean it.” The dangerous growl rumbled from deep in his chest. “Get out of here.”
She swallowed a lump of tender, painful joy. “Let me see your hands.”
He lifted his head like a man with the weight of a mountain on his shoulders and turned it on his straining neck to spear her with those unsettling mismatched eyes. He wasn’t crying. Not yet. But muscles twitched in his face and his lips pulled into a hard white line as he visibly fought the pool of bright moisture gathering against his lids. “I’m warning you, Farah.”
“You should know me better than that,” she murmured, slowly moving her fingers across the grass toward where his fist clenched at his side.
Neither of them felt the rain or the biting cold as she picked up his big, white-knuckled fist. Her hands looked so small in comparison. Both of them clutching his one fist and still not engulfing it. Farah’s heart didn’t pound so much as it quivered inside her rib cage, struggling to move her blood through veins tight with hope and awe and terror.
Her long, slim fingers covered his thick, scarred ones and one by one, coaxed them to uncover his secret.
A breath as jagged as the long seam across his palm broke from her throat, then another. She could feel her face crumbling as hot tears mingled with the cold rain on her cheeks. The wounds Dougan had suffered the day they’d met. The scars she’d traced as a girl more times than she could count.
“Oh, my God,” she sobbed, pressing her lips to his scarred palm. “My God, my God.” The exclamation became a chant. A question. A prayer. Punctuated with kisses and strokes of her fingers as though his hand were a holy relic and she a pious disciple at the end of a long pilgrimage.
Finally she held it to her cheek as she sat back on her knees and stared into the face of the boy she’d given her heart to, and the man who’d begun to steal it.
His entire body shook, though his features were still as granite, but for a twitch in his strong chin he couldn’t seem to control. He regarded her as one might a strange dog, unsure of whether its next move was to nuzzle or attack.
“Is it truly you, Dougan?” she pleaded. “Tell me this isn’t some kind of dream.”
He turned his face from her, a drop of moisture leaving the corner of his eye and slowly following the blade of his cheek to join the rivulets of rainwater running down his jaw and neck.
“I am Dorian Blackwell.” His voice matched the stone, gray, flat, and cold.
Farah shook her head against his palm. “I knew and married you as Dougan Mackenzie, all those years ago,” she insisted.
His throat worked over a difficult swallow and he pulled his hand out of her grasp. “The boy you knew as Dougan Mackenzie is deceased. He died in Newgate Prison.” His gaze swung back to hers. “Too many times.”