“I want to see Samantha,” he said, bypassing a polite introduction.
“She doesn’t want to see you.”
“Let her tell me that and then I’ll go.”
“You have no rights over my daughter,” Julia said, glaring at him.
“I don’t want any rights over your daughter,” he said. “I want to talk to her.”
“She’s asleep.”
“Then I’d ask you to wake her up.”
“And I’m asking you to leave.” Julia’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not her husband any longer, Mr. Stewart.”
He felt as if he’d been dealt a body blow. “I love her,” he said, dropping his pride at her feet.
“Oh, Mr. Stewart,” Julia said, with a sigh. “How I wish you hadn’t said that…”
SAM WAS THUMBING through a copy of Tatler when she heard the knock on her door. So far Julia had been an unending source of warm milk, buttered toast and good intentions. Being mothered was a new experience for Sam, and although she had had her fill of all three commodities, she didn’t want to discourage Julia.
“Come in, Mother,” she called, not looking up from her magazine. She heard the door squeak open, then heavy footsteps.
“I’ve come to take you home, Samantha.”
Duncan.
The world seemed to suddenly narrow into nothing more than the sound of his voice. Hands trembling, she turned the page.
“Go away,” she said. “I am home.”
She could feel his presence in every part of her body. He charged the atmosphere in the room simply by being there.
“Look at me, lassie.”
“Why should I?” she countered, longing to do exactly that. “It’s not like you’re my husband or anything.”
He sat next to her on the bed. She turned away from him.
“I love you, Samantha.”
His words grabbed her by the heart and wouldn’t let go. “Don’t,” she whispered. Don’t play games like that, Duncan. Did he have any idea how easy it would be to break her heart with words he didn’t mean? “You really should go.”
“Not until you look at me, lassie.” He brushed the hair from her cheek with a gentle hand. “Not until you listen to what I have to say.”
She turned to face him, and the expression in his beautiful eyes was almost her undoing. Hope, foolish hope, sprang to life inside her heart and no matter how hard she tried to control it, that hope continued to grow.
“I’m listening,” she said.
“I love you, lassie. I believe I’ve loved you from that first moment in the plane when you stormed out on me, determined to find your own way to Glenraven.”
He reached for her hand, the one with the signet ring she hadn’t been able to bring herself to take off. His fingers locked with hers and she didn’t pull away. Wisps of hope. Pieces of dreams. And one very important question.
“That’s infatuation,” she said at last. “That isn’t love.”
“It’s how love begins. When the plane hit trouble, I saw who you really were. A brave woman with more heart and courage than twenty men.”
A small smile tilted her mouth. “And you fell in love with my bravery?”
“Aye, that and more. With your beauty and your bravery. With your heart and with your soul.”
“You knew nothing of me, Duncan. How could you possibly love what you didn’t know?”
He told her of an evening in a little pub outside Glasgow. About a man who spotted his loneliness and called him on it. A man who made him see the empty shell his life would be without her by his side.
“You never wondered why I followed you to Texas? You never thought about that?”
“At first I thought you wanted your ten thousand dollars,” she said.
“And then?”
She shrugged. “And then it was about the baby.”
“I had no way of knowing about the baby, Samantha. I came to Texas for you.”
How could she have forgotten that? The night of her sister’s wedding was such a blur of emotion that somehow she’d managed to overlook the fact that he’d traveled from the Highlands all the way to Houston to see her again. To hear her voice. The baby’s existence had been unknown to both of them.
He had come to see Sam.
She struggled to rein in her feelings.
“Lana—” She stopped, unable to continue over the swell of emotion inside her heart.
“What did Lana tell you?”
“She told me about the baby—” She swallowed. “Your baby, the one you lost.”
His expression turned dark, and she drew back instinctively. “That’s what she told you, is it? That we lost the baby?”
“Yes,” Sam said, bewildered. “A miscarriage. And that once she’d lost the baby, you had no more use for her.” That all he’d wanted from the marriage was a child of his own.
“It wasn’t a miscarriage, Samantha.” He met her eyes. “She aborted our baby without my knowledge.”
His pain seemed to flood her body and she closed her eyes against it. She’d never known a man’s voice could hold such terrible grief. “My God, Duncan…I had no idea.”
“Neither had I,” he said. “She was two months pregnant and she said she was as happy about it as I was. A movie role came along and she went down to London to audition. When she came to Glenraven a week later, she had the job but she didn’t have the baby. A ‘business decision,’ she called it.”
It explained so much about him. The steadiness of his support, right from the start. His devotion to their unborn child. But did it explain his love for her?
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. To lose both wife and child through a selfish, impulsive decision, taken with no consideration whatsoever for his feelings on the matter.
The experience had changed him, he told her. He withdrew into his studio. He lost faith in love. His interludes with women were based on physical attraction, not the possibility of love. His heart had closed itself off to the world.
“And then I met you, lassie, and the sun came out again.”
She wanted
