With a soft knock, the door opened to reveal his mysterious guest. As she paused in the doorway to take in the scene, her eyes widened in unmistakable horror and the color leached from her face.
“Fiona!” Thomas said, surging toward her.
“No!” She whirled around as if she intended to run, but Allan, despite his age, was too quick for her. He grabbed her wrist in what Diarmid saw was a bruising grip. Before he remembered he had no rights here, he’d stepped forward to protest.
“Time to come home, lassie.” Allan hauled her into the library and kicked the door shut with a crash.
The girl was visibly shaking, as Allan wrenched her closer. Thomas took up a place in front of the exit, blocking her escape route.
Despite his lifelong contempt for faithless women, Diarmid couldn’t let this go on. “Mr. Grant, there’s nae need for violence. May I remind ye the lady has been unwell? Pray release her immediately, and let’s see what she has to say.”
“I don’t know these men, Mr. Mactavish.” Huge blue eyes, glassy with terror, focused on him. In spite of all he knew of her, Diarmid fought the urge to rip her away from her captor. “They’re strangers.”
Diarmid wished to blazes he believed her. But even without that panicked denial when she came in, he saw recognition in her eyes, and the kind of fear that was always missing when she claimed to have lost her memory. He couldn’t doubt that she knew the Grants, and his faint ridiculous hope that there was some confusion faded to nothing.
“Mr. Grant?” he repeated.
He prickled as he saw the reluctance with which the older man lifted his hand.
The girl immediately made for the open window behind the desk. It was a purely animal reaction. There was nowhere for her to go.
Recalling that she was still frail after the shipwreck, Diarmid went after her. Thomas shoved him out of the way and caught her arm in a grip hardly less brutal than Allan’s. “You’ll no’ run this time, Fiona. Your place is at Bancavan with me.”
“No…”
But her denial this time conveyed despair rather than defiance. She looked pale and ill and more like the drenched waif Diarmid had discovered on Canmara Beach than she had since she’d arrived.
When she raised her beautiful eyes to his face, they were dull with misery. “Please don’t let them take me, Mr. Mactavish.”
“Mrs. Grant, if these people are your family…” He struggled against the ludicrous instinct that he gave her up too easily.
What could he do? He had no claim over her, and it seemed these men did.
Thomas gave her a savage shake. “That’s enough of that, lassie.”
Before Diarmid could protest, a knotted handkerchief slipped from her pocket and landed with an unmistakable clink on the Turkey carpet at her feet.
A bristling silence crashed down. Horrified on the girl’s part, curious on the Grants’, while Diarmid’s stomach cramped with a caustic disappointment he shouldn’t feel. After all, he’d always known her as a liar, and today’s revelations proved her to be a faithless wife. But somehow this seemed the worst treachery of all.
As if he touched something poisonous, he bent to pick up the heavy little bundle.
“Don’t…” she said in a constricted voice that once might have touched his heart.
“You stole from me?” Through the thin lawn handkerchief, he felt the hard metal roundness of coins and the crackle of pound notes.
“I had to.” Shame flooded those lustrous eyes and a remorse he almost believed was genuine. “I wish to heaven I could make you understand.”
“After all the kindness you’ve received in this house, this is the best return ye can make?”
She flinched under the biting question, and her eyes fluttered down in a silent admission of wrongdoing. “I hope you’ll forgive me,” she mumbled. “You’ve all been so good to me.”
He bit back a host of melodramatic responses. He could call her a snake and a liar and a doxy. But what was the point of berating her? She was leaving today with these austere, unpleasant men, and he’d never see her again.
Right now, that seemed a blessing.
“I’m just glad to see ye restored to your kin,” he said, and knew himself for a hypocrite, because the chaos of wild emotions swirling in his belly included nothing so benign as gratitude.
“There’s nae more to be achieved here, Mactavish,” Allan Grant snapped out, and Diarmid heard the subtle contempt he injected into the last word. It was clear that the Grants remained set on pursuing the feud between their families. “It’s a good few days traveling back to Bancavan, and there’s work to be done in the fields. The estate cannae afford to be without us at this time of year.”