Heart in the Highlands by Heidi Kimball
Chapter Thirty
The door to his study closed, and Callum fell into his chair, his legs sprawled toward the fire. Kate’s words—her pronouncement—had rendered him speechless. Even now he could think of nothing he might have said to change her mind. He had no defense. He hated his father. He always would.
By the hearth sat the remnants of the meal they’d shared together. A few pieces of bread, some crumbs. Burned cheese, left too long near the fire. How had a night that had begun so well turned out so wrong? Callum pushed himself to his feet, pacing along the length of the hearthrug, kicking aside the near-empty platter, the last pieces of the bread scattering.
Och, but his mood was dark. Darkening by the minute, just like this room, with the fire burned down to a few ashen logs. So Katie would forgive him, aye. But love him? Nae.
The irony was not lost on him. Callum ran his hands through his hair, releasing a humorless chuckle. He’d abandoned Katie, after all. Broken her heart and left her on her own for four and a half long years. And, like a fool, he’d believed he could patch up their little family as easily as one might mend a pair of breeches. Instead he’d fallen in love with her, and in return she’d all but promised never to love him again. Some would call it justice. But the ache in his chest didn’t feel like justice. It felt very much as if Katie had cut his heart to ribbons.
Did she know what she asked of him? He groaned aloud. She knew. Callum himself knew the irony of Katie offering mercy he certainly hadn’t merited while he was worlds away from extending such an offering to his own father.
But there was a difference. He was trying to change, to make things right. His father wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Callum knew that truth all the way to his bones. His hatred was like a prison made of iron bars. Impossible to move, even if he wanted to.
But what was Katie’s forgiveness without her love? If she looked at him with compassion but not affection? He couldn’t abide the thought. His anger gathered, a knot of resentment that continued to grow until there was no choice but to give it free rein. His mother wanted him to spend some time with his father? So be it.
He pounded up the stairs and down the corridor, past Katie’s bedroom, toward the room his father was staying in. He cared not for the late hour. The door flew open at the force of his thrust, the heavy oak banging into the wall behind it.
His father startled, but it seemed he hadn’t been asleep. “C-Callum?”
“Aye, it’s me.” The room was lit by a single taper. Callum lit several more, determined that his father would see the depth of his loathing.
“You c-came.” The words were still slow but with much less impediment.
“I did.” His throat burned with fury. A surfeit of accusations writhed inside Callum, but somehow he couldn’t quite set them free.
The covers rustled. Did he imagine it, or did his father straighten his shoulders where he lay? “S-s-say it. W-whatever you m-must.”
Callum paced across the room, his anger, his helplessness, his fear of losing Katie, all mounting. “You cost me everything,” he yelled and thrust a hand through his hair. “I went across the world and back, and yet still I am paying the price. Am I never to be free of you?”
His shout echoed through the room, perhaps through the whole house. But those very words indicted him. He had long given this man too much power. His skin buzzed uncomfortably. It wasn’t this man who had cost him so dearly.
It was himself.
He sank into the chair beside the bed, the very one he knew his mother sat in for hours every day.
He looked into his father’s face, his feelings spiraling down a dark tunnel. Anger, fear, resentment. A lifetime of emotions and uncertainties. The constant assurance that he’d never measure up. And yet, through the years, he’d always hoped for his father’s approval. Even now he wanted it, yearned for it, though he’d buried it so far within himself he’d almost learned to forget it.
The realization was frightening. He’d walked away from this man, determined to conquer such inclinations. To stand on his own two feet as a person—a man—separate and independent from the duke who had sired him.
Would he always be the sum of those years spent under his father’s thumb? With Katie, it felt as though he could be more than that. But she’d made her feelings clear.
“I am s-sorry, Callum.”
His father spoke in the same sluggish speech as the day Callum had first come home, but he spoke words Callum had never heard from him before. He’d imagined hearing those words hundreds of times, imagined the satisfaction it would bring if his father humbled himself enough to utter such a phrase.
But in light of Katie’s piercing words, they didn’t seem to matter at all. “Your apology comes too late, sir.”
Callum suddenly felt as though his limbs were made of lead. He bowed himself down, his forehead touching the coverlet. A moment later, his father’s hand came to rest upon his head. The touch was gentle, tentative. A question rather than a pronouncement.
The wild torrent of Callum’s fury begged for release. He wanted to yell, to curse. Instead he began to weep. A primal shame rose up inside him, engulfing all else. He did not want his father to see him cry. But the dam on his emotions had been weakened, and the deluge broke free.
The duke stroked Callum’s head with his one good hand. The young boy inside Callum reached for that hand like a lost child, as if the long years of his father’s control and manipulation didn’t exist. To Callum’s surprise, the man’s grasp was weak. He had once thought of his father’s hands like bear paws, strong and powerful. But in truth they weren’t any larger than his own.
What had happened to the giant who was once his father? Perhaps he had only loomed so large in Callum’s boyhood memory. But it was more than the change in his father’s physical size, his very presence. It was the tenderness in his touch as he traced his wrinkled fingers along Callum’s brow. There had never been anything in him akin to tenderness before. Was it possible he could have altered so drastically? The very thought made Callum reel. Several long minutes passed before the wave of emotion ebbed. He raised his head, afraid of what he might see in his father’s eyes.
The duke cleared his throat. “I d-didn’t deserve t-t-to have you c-come back.” He drew in a labored breath. “T-to have the chance to m-make things right.”
Callum’s throat bobbed, his heart adrift. The hatred he’d been anchored to for so long had become unmoored, and he felt unsteady. Untethered.
Some chamber of his heart had been unlocked, but he wasn’t ready to explore it yet.
He got to his feet, nearly tripping over the chair. “I must go.”
Kate had reached the safety of her room minutes before, but she still stood at the door, a jumble of emotions warring inside her. A door banged in the corridor so hard it made her own door vibrate. What on earth? Curiosity bade her investigate, or perhaps it was simply that she could not stand being alone in her room another minute.
But the corridor was silent. Only the door to the duke’s room was open. Despite her better judgment, she moved toward it, drawn by the sound of shouting, low voices. And then . . . weeping. Kate stood there, stricken, tears balanced on her lashes.
A man. A gutting sound, deep and abysmal. Her husband.
She had sensed Callum’s hurt, the great rift that lay between father and son, but hearing it this way? It made the pain raw and sharp and all too real.
She didn’t want to dwell for too long on why that forlorn sound undid her. But how could she walk away and leave Callum without offering comfort? He’d laid night after night on the nursery floor so Charlotte might sleep in peace. He’d come after her in a blizzard, seeing her home to safety. He’d humbled himself, completely and unabashedly. And despite her heartless accusations a half an hour before, he’d shown through word and deed that he was not the man he’d been when he left her long ago.
For all that, she loved him.
Her stomach twisted, yet she knew it was true. She did love Callum.
She still didn’t trust him completely. She still wondered if he’d want her the same way if she wasn’t the mother of his daughter. She still feared how he would react to the truths she hadn’t yet had the courage to share.
It was those fears that sent Kate scurrying back to her room, her arms crossed over her stomach as she tried to quell the bilious feeling that grew with each of Callum’s quiet groans. She closed the door without a sound and leaned against it.
She’d said she couldn’t love him as he was, full of bitterness for his father. But that was a lie. Much as she’d tried not to, Kate loved him, every part of him. It had been sneaking up on her since the day he’d walked back into her life, despite all her efforts to keep her heart out of his reach. She’d set her rules and surrounded herself with a hedge of thorns and briars, yet he’d slashed down every one of them. And now her heart beat swiftly in her chest, unguarded, unprotected. Vulnerable.
Just as it had when he’d so carelessly snapped it in two, as though it were nothing more than a paltry twig.
Heavy footsteps—they could only be Callum’s—sounded in the corridor. She sucked in a breath as he stopped right outside her door. Her heart thudded in her ears. How badly she wanted to open the door and fling herself into his arms. But she wouldn’t. Couldn’t. She stepped back, anchoring herself to the wall to keep from doing something foolish. A minute passed. Then two. Finally, his footsteps retreated.
Kate gulped in air, trying very hard not to cry. Despite her efforts, she could feel her face growing splotchy with unshed tears. The case clock at the bottom of the stairs chimed the midnight hour, but sleep was the last thing on her mind.
Tonight this room felt every bit the cage it had before. Kate needed freedom. Her hands trembled as she reached for the taper on the bedside table. Where she would go, she didn’t know, but she could not stay in this room. The corridor was empty when she stepped out of her bedroom, but as she pulled the door shut behind her, another door creaked down the corridor. She startled at the sudden noise.
“Kate?” The duchess closed the door to the duke’s room, her face etched with concern.
That look was Kate’s undoing. She burst into tears. The duchess hurried toward her, gracefully taking Kate’s candle and setting it on a nearby table before enveloping Kate in her arms. “Shh, shhh. Shall I assume yer tears are somehow related tae my son’s outburst?”
Kate couldn’t speak, not when tears were streaming down her face and clogging her throat. She clung to the duchess, praying the woman might somehow ease the ache in her heart. Though Callum’s mother stood at least three inches shorter than Kate, she was by no means fragile, her embrace warm and welcoming. Kate’s mother had died when she was too young to remember, but this was exactly how she’d imagined a mother’s arms would feel.
“Let’s go tae the kitchen and get ye some tea.” She said nothing of Kate’s tearstained cheeks or rumpled dress on their way downstairs. Instead she kept up a steady monologue about trivial things—something she needed to tell the housekeeper, gratitude for the slightly warmer temperatures now that spring was fully upon them, an observation about Charlotte’s habits.
Her chatter was surprisingly calming. She helped Kate into a chair at the servants’ table. By the time the duchess pressed a cup of tea into her hands, the sharp pain in Kate’s chest had lessened to a dull throb. The duchess poured her own cup of tea and then took a seat beside her.
“Now, dearie, tell me what troubles ye.”
Her directness was unexpected. Kate took a sip of her tea, trying to collect her thoughts. “I’m . . . terribly confused. About Callum. I don’t know how to . . . to trust him. And I—may I ask you a question?”
The duchess’s mouth lifted. “Certainly, ye can.”
“Truthfully, I have several questions.” Kate gathered her courage, afraid she might be seen as impertinent. “When you married the duke, did you love him? And do you love him now?” She set down her cup, hardly able to form the words. “And if so . . . how?” Her voice trembled as she spoke the last word. “I confess, when my grandfather spoke of love, he made it sound simple. Perhaps as an older man, he’d forgotten the difficulty, the complications of the heart. Or perhaps . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
The duchess scooted her chair closer. She seemed not at all offended by Kate’s questions. “I daresay I should have fetched some biscuits as weel.” Sympathy showed in the lines of her face.
The duchess drew in a breath and then let it out. “I didnae love the duke whin we first wed. Och, he was dashin’. I was young, and it all seemed verra excitin’. I was mostly in awe, ye ken. I’d ne’er supposed a future beyond bein’ the wife of a crofter or shepherd.” She traced the rim of her teacup with her index finger.
“And whin it was jus’ the two of us, he was thoughtful, generous. But I soon found he was nae the same man in public that he was behind closed doors. Whin others were around . . . he was ashamed o’ me, ye ken. Or ashamed of himself that he’d married me, a lowborn lass. Nae matter how I tried, I knew I’d ne’er speak or act as a duchess should.” She glanced down.
Kate was gripping her teacup so fiercely her knuckles turned white. She relaxed her hold, a feat, given the duchess’s heartbreaking words.
“He loved me in his ain way. His gruffness has always been his way o’ protectin’ me. He does nae wish for others tae judge me harshly. I confess it hurt the maist when he tried tae squeeze oot all of Callum’s Scots roots, like he wanted tae erase every part o’ me. Whin he sent Callum off tae school, I thought my heart wuid break.”
Kate sat forward, stomach in knots. This was Callum’s mother. This was the home Callum had grown up in, the circumstances under which he’d learned to view the world. Sitting here with his mother, listening to her story, made it more real than it had ever been. Something like compassion tugged at Kate’s heart. For Callum. For his mother. And even a little for his father.
When the duchess met Kate’s gaze, there wasn’t the faintest trace of regret. Simply a look of angelic tenderness. “It took time, Kate, a guid deal o’ time. Years passed afore I came tae care for him. I fought it at first. But I’ve come tae accept that if I waited tae love someone until they were perfect, I’d ne’er love anyone at all.”
Kate swallowed. The truth of this woman’s words struck a chord that vibrated through her, the reverberations so powerful they made her stomach tremble. Was it asking too much to expect Callum to forgive his father? And what happened if she expected too little? She set down her teacup, not trusting her shaking hands.
The duchess bowed her head, hands clasped together. “Kate, I cannae tell ye what tae do. But your grandda had the right of it. Love is simple. We make it mair complicated than it need be. That’s not tae say ’twill always be easy; it certainly hasnae been for me. I have prayed for my husband tae change. Hoped for it. And waited. Perhaps his condition now is an answer tae that prayer.” She lifted her head, eyes shining. “All I ken is that I love him.”
Kate sat back in her chair a little. The woman’s devotion was humbling but also a little frightening. Fear still had a firm grip on Kate’s heart. How could she offer Callum her unfettered love when he’d hurt her so terribly? And when he might yet hurt her once he knew the truth? Her instinct was to keep all that she felt for him hidden.
The duchess straightened her shoulders, the waning candlelight accentuating the conviction on her face. “Love is brave. And bold. It provides nae guarantees. True love gives, withoot expectin’ anything in return. But it is a beautiful thing, Kate. When ye learn tae love someone in all their imperfections, ainlie then will your heart truly be full.”