Chapter 10
Ten
The men sat for hours bantering and laughing. Callie listened, her heart warmed by the brotherly love they had. The MacAllisters even accepted Simon into their midst and unlike her clansmen, they had no problem whatsoever with his English breeding.
She learned much of their past, including a lot of information about their brother Kieran, who had killed himself. But she learned very little about Sin. It was almost as if they knew his past hurt him and so they sought to only mention tiny slices of it.
It was the wee hours of the night before they decided to find their beds. Callie yawned as she showed the men where they were to sleep.
At last, she found herself headed to her room to be alone with her husband.
Sin was still smiling.
“You’re very handsome when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Smile.”
He frowned at her words.
“Hear now, I didn’t mean to make you stop.”
He cast a reluctant look to the bed, then moved away from her.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were a MacAllister?” she asked quietly.
“Because I’m not.”
Her frown matched his as she tried to sort it out. He definitely wasn’t related through his mother. “I don’t understand.”
He sighed as he unbelted his sword and set it aside.
“My father sired me the first year of his marriage.
He was away from home, visiting a friend in London without his wife and for whatever reason, my mother caught his fancy.
She was scarce more than a girl back then, and they tell me his accent and wild ways enchanted her.
I was conceived in the back of a barn in a manner my mother assured me was most humiliating and painful for her.
“As soon as she bore me, she sent me and my wet-nurse to Scotland to live with my father. An old servant who was there that night told me that my stepmother took one look at me and was so distraught she almost miscarried Lochlan.”
He spoke the words calmly and without emotion. Still, it had to hurt him deep in his heart and soul. There was no way it couldn’t.
She wanted to go to him and offer comfort, but was afraid if she tried he would stop talking. So she listened quietly while her heart broke a little more with every word he uttered.
“From that moment on, my father wanted nothing to do with me. He ignored me every time I tried to speak to him. If I approached him, he turned his back and walked away.
“To my stepmother, I was nothing but a painful reminder of my father’s infidelity.
She despised everything about me. Because of his guilt and shame over what he’d done, my father went out of his way to prove to his wife that he bore no special favor toward me.
My brothers had the best of everything. I had whatever was leftover. ”
She swallowed against the tears that choked her, but she refused to let him see them. “He sent you back to England to be with your mother?”
“He tried, once, when I was seven. It was the middle of winter.” He paused and leaned with one arm against the mantel to stare at the fire as if recalling the event.
He looked so lost standing there with his raw hurt etched plainly along the lines of his handsome face.
Callie didn’t know how she maintained the strength to keep herself from going to him.
Perhaps it was his own strength that held her together and allowed her to just listen as he told a story she was sure he had never told before.
When he spoke again, she heard the hidden agony inside his heart. “I remember being so cold the entire way. My father had sent next to no coin with us and the knight who was taking us to my mother would rent a room for himself and leave us to the stable or barn.”
Callie cringed at the dispassionate way he spoke.
“My nurse kept telling me that my mother would be delighted to see me. She assured me that all mothers loved their children and that my mother would treat me just as Aisleen treated my brothers. She said my mother would grab me up in her arms and kiss me home.”
Callie closed her eyes to stave of the sympathetic pain inside her. Knowing his mother as she did, she could well imagine his reception.
“We arrived on Christmas Eve. There were presents strewn about and my nurse, Edna, led me across the great hall to where my mother sat at the lord’s table with a baby boy in her lap.
She held him so lovingly as she laughed and teased him.
I was joy-filled at the sight and thought that at last I would have the mother I had yearned for.
That she would see me standing there in my worn-out shoes and tattered plaid, and hug me close and tell me how glad she was to have me there at last.”
Callie felt a tear slide down her face and she was glad he wasn’t looking at her to see it.
“When Edna told her who I was and why we were there, she shrieked in outrage. Angrily, she threw her wine in my face and said that she only had one son and that I was to never again disgrace her with my presence. Then she had us thrown out into the cold night.”
Sin took a deep, ragged breath as he continued to watch the fire. It was as if he were afraid to look at her for fear she too would reject him.
He lifted one foot to kick a piece of wood back into the grate.
“I knew then that there was no such thing as a family for me. I was neither Scot nor English. I was nothing but a homeless bastard. Unwanted. Useless. Edna returned me to my father and his contempt for me grew until the day when King David’s men came for a son.
They wanted hostages to send to King Stephen in England to ensure that no more Scots would raid his lands or attack his people. ”
“So he sent you.”
He nodded. “Aisleen told him if he sent one of her sons, she would kill herself. Not that she needed to say it. All of us boys knew who was going to be sent. There was never any real doubt.” He laughed bitterly.
“It was the only time in my entire life my father had ever looked at me or spoken to me.”
Sin wiped a hand across his face as if thinking about the past made him weary and tired.
“My father and I passed angry words and in the end, he grabbed me by my shirt and shoved me into the hands of David’s men.
He said I was never to be welcomed into his home again and as far as he was concerned, I no longer existed. ”
Her tears fell freely as Callie tried to imagine the horror that had been his life. Never wanted, never loved. No wonder he was so distant to her.
Worse, she thought about how her clan had greeted his brothers after the way they had treated him and Simon. The way she, herself, had left his side to see to his brothers’ needs while he had been left up here with a fresh wound. Alone.
He was always alone.
Dear lord, how she wished she could go back and change this afternoon. He had been pushed aside more than anyone ever should. And she ached for him. She wept for the way he’d been treated in his life and in her heart, she knew she would never be able to let him leave her and walk alone anymore.
“I will always want you with me, Sin.”
He curled his lips at that and pushed himself away from the hearth. “Don’t mock me,” he snarled angrily. “I don’t need your pity.”
Nay, what he needed was her love. But he had lived so long without anyone’s love that she wondered if it was too late for him. Maybe there was such a thing as being too strong.
“It’s not pity I feel for you.” She moved to touch his arm.
To her amazement, he didn’t move away. She ran her hand gently over the biceps of his uninjured side and up to his face until she forced him to look at her and see the sincerity of her eyes.
“You are my husband, Sin, sworn before God. I will always be here for you.”
Sin swallowed at her words, unable to fathom them. She couldn’t really mean them. He didn’t believe it for a minute. It was a game she was playing with him, and he could only guess why she would want to do this to him.
He stared at the floor as he remembered the times in his life he had deceived himself.
The times he had lain beaten by Harold, thinking that his father had only been angry at him when he had sent him away.
That if he was a good enough lad and did as the English asked and spoke no angry words to Harold, that he would be allowed to go home as King Stephen had promised.
That his father would welcome him back with open arms.
In the end, his father had continued to shun him. His father’s letter to Henry hadn’t even borne Sin’s name upon it. It bore no reference to him as a son at all. It had been cold. Harsh. A final rejection that still resonated in his heart.
He remembered the sting of the Saracen whips. The beatings he’d endured during his training. The only thing that kept him sane was the belief that if he could escape them and get back to England, all would be right. His mother’s people would surely welcome him back into their fold.
And yet after Henry returned him to London, he had been sneered at, hated and feared. They had treated him worse than a leper, worse than a heretic.
“Not even God Himself could love something like you.” The Pope’s condemnation rang in his ears.
Nay, he was still that little boy who had stood before his mother on Christmas Eve with his heart full of hopeful longing. What had he ever gotten for such foolish dreams?
Nothing but more ridicule. Nothing but more hurt.
His heart had withered and died years ago from lack of use. If he opened himself up to Callie now, he was sure she would betray him.
It was the only thing in life he counted on. The only thing that was a certainty.
Reluctantly, he removed her hand from his face. “‘Tis late. You need to go to bed.”
“Where will you sleep?”
“On the floor before the hearth.”
Callie’s lip quivered as she fought against the tears inside her. Her frustration mounted. How she wished she knew a way to reach him. How to make him believe in her. In them.
But he had shut himself off from her again.