He’d once helped her save a bird. He’d let her trail after him and ask endless questions that would have caused most men to be sharp or short with her. He’d been there. A place for her words to go so she didn’t have to sit in silence.
Then one day he’d gone. No explanation. No goodbye. It might as well have been death.
She’d mourned him.
Only this time she’d done it inside. For she knew better than to ever show her pain.
She did the same now, her hands folded in her lap, her face betraying nothing as the vision of the life she’d hoped for burned before her. And she had no idea how she might make it right.
Lachlan Bain was a patient man. The years had hardened him, changed him. Battle had scarred him. Destroyed what had once been good inside him.
But it had also sanded away the edges of youth. Impatience, hot-headedness. Like a broadsword made in fire all that remained was sharp, cold steel.
For years he had carried his rage inside him, a reckless heat that had driven him in battle. Had driven him beyond. The years had dimmed the motivation for that rage. Somewhere on the muddy battlefields he had forgotten where his anger had come from. It had spilled over into all the things around him, the atrocities of war.
The innocent lives he’d failed to save.
But he’d learned to harness it. Honed it into a sharpened blade he’d used to cut down the enemy.
He’d let the memory of the enemy who had ignited the rage in the first place fade.
But when news of his father’s death reached him, he was reminded. It had taken him six months to ready his business to function without him. Six months to begin putting his plans for revenge in order.
And his blood burned with all the red-hot rage that had existed inside him these long years. It had not truly gone away. The fire had only been banked. And now it glowed red.
Before he returned to Scotland, before he returned to the Highlands to restore his clan to their former glory, he would collect the debt owed him.
He had heard whispers among London’s high society, happy enough to share the tables in the gaming hell with him though he knew he would never be invited to any ballrooms, that the Earl of Avondale had made himself a prestigious match for his daughter.
A match that was far above what an impoverished man with his reputation should have been able to manage.
A duke.
The man was puffed up in his pride over his triumph.
Lachlan knew the Earl had nothing else of value. Nothing but his daughter.
He remembered the girl. She had been pretty in that way a doll might be, but had looked terribly fragile with her blonde hair, so light it was nearly white, and her wide, blue eyes the colour of a robin’s egg. He had felt pity for her. As much of a hardship as it had been to work for the Earl as a lad, he imagined being a child in that mausoleum that passed for a manor house was worse.
Lachlan knew all about useless fathers. And he had deemed the Earl worse than useless.
He had felt pity for the girl then and he might have felt guilt for using her now if he were a different man.
But he was not.
He was a man of battle. A man who had the courage to be all his father could not. A man who refused to sit back and fill his pockets while his people went without.
He had gone into battle to fight. He had gone into battle to die.
But over the near decade he’d spent fighting, he’d gone from being a boy who’d been beneath the contempt of the Englishmen around him to a brother in arms.
The necessities of war, and his own skill, had found him advancing through the ranks until he was a captain. He’d been in command of a group of men, most Scottish like himself, and they had fought hard, in kilts, for their oppressors. And through those acts had earned respect none of them had even wanted.
But in war, they’d all become the same. He could not stomach the death of a young man any easier if he was English. Covered in mud and blood, they were the same.
And when he’d saved a young peer who’d been injured in a battle, had stayed with him in a ditch all night while gunfire exploded around them...
He had found himself a decorated war hero and a very rich man. Which made his options when it came to revenge that much richer. It also presented the possibility of being able to restore that which his father had nearly destroyed.
He had a plan. He could not afford guilt.
Guilt was a luxury afforded to men who were both rich and titled. Of course, men less likely to feel guilt did not exist, as far as Lachlan could see.
The girl’s father was only lucky he’d decided on this action, rather than separating the man’s head from his shoulders.
When he had ensured that his horses were secured in the stable—a stable that was all too familiar to him from his time spent on the Avondale estate—he made his way to the house.
It stood as grim and imposing as it ever had. An English manor house was a far cry from the impassable stone keeps in the Highlands, where he had been the son of a chieftain. Disgraced though he was in Lachlan’s eyes, his father had been a man who retained an air of power. And in his homeland, no door was ever closed to Lachlan.
In England, it was another matter.
Though the years had shifted English sentiments on the Scots, after seeing how bloody well they fought, it was still clear he wasn’t a member of the
