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My stomach turns. I have to tell her. I have to come clean.
I reach out, grabbing her hands from her hips and holding them tight. “Alright, but promise me you’ll remember all the good things you have here. How happy we are.”
“Callum,” she pleads. “You’re making me nervous. Just tell me. Please.”
I take a deep breath, finally saying, “Yer father dinnae come to me.”
“What do you mean?” she asks, her hands flexing in mine as her face falls.
“I may have gone to your father first, offering the money, knowing about his gambling.”
Her hands fall away from mine. “You didn’t.”
I run my hand over my beard.
“Don’t do that,” she says. “Not now.”
“Do what?”
“Rub your hand over your beard like that.” She starts to pace, moving back and forth across the cement in front of me. “I love it when you do that; I find it…sexy, and I don’t want to feel that now. I want to know why you did what you did.”
“K.” I shove my hands in my pockets.
She continues pacing, quiet, contemplating. Each step she takes brings more unease to my chest. Finally, she stops, turning to face me. “You planned this. Ages ago. Didn’t you? You knew he’d be in debt to you, and then you’d demand my hand in marriage as payment.”
“Aye, ‘tis romantic, don’t you think?” I hope she agrees since I can’t stop the cocky grin that’s spreading across my face.
It was romantic—aye?
She gives me a look of pure disgust. “When did you first loan my father the money?”
“After that night at the Hobgoblin. When I asked you to dance, and you denied me.”
“How could you do such a thing?”
“If I hadn’t given it to him, he would have got it elsewhere. At least I knew if he got it from me, he wouldn’t be killed for missed payments.”
“No,” she says. “You just set it up to take his daughter as payment instead.”
“Exactly.”
“Don’t you see how wrong that is?”
I dinnae see the problem. I’ve given her a home, a family, a life. “I brought you to a better place. I wouldnae have brought you here if I didn’t think it would be good for you.”
“You were thinking of what was good for me?”
“Aye! Every moment. That’s why I had the movers there. So your father couldn’t pawn off your valuables or anything of your mother’s for gambling.”
“That doesn’t make it okay.”
To hell with putting myself in her shoes. She belongs here, and she knows it. “You’re happy here, Fiona.”
“You don’t get it. That’s not the point.”
“What’s the point?”
“You lied. You’ve been living a lie.”
