Page 69 of When the Laird Conquers

His eyes stung as he stared down at her, his chest suddenly tight. It wasn’t hard to imagine a different red-haired child safe in his arms, calling him Dada, with an entire future stretching out ahead of them. It didn’t take any imagination at all, for at such a young age, there wasn’t much difference between the appearance of a son or a daughter.

But that was taken from me, little one. He was taken from me.

He held the baby tighter for a moment and inhaled the sweet, milky scent of her tousled hair until he thought he might shatter if he didn’t let her go.

Clearing his throat, he handed the baby back to Agnes, who was eyeing him strangely.

Carefully plucking the fox cub out of his lap and setting it down on the hearth rug, he rose to his feet and muttered something about distracting Iona. That done, with no idea if he had been coherent at all, he left the library as quickly as possible.

There was only one way to fix this… sentimentality.

His tower was calling to him.

27

Blood red splashed across the room, hitting the walls, hitting everything that Gordon had unveiled and raised up from beneath heavy dust sheets.

And when the red was gone, he soaked his largest brush in a pot of green and streaked it across the canvases that he had kept hidden from view, putting them away just as soon as they were finished. Yellow and blue came next, the colors mingling together until they turned brown, ruining the paintings that he had spent so many hours on.

All those painstaking details vanished behind the sludge of paint, all the landscapes, the faces, the imagined worlds that had kept him sane over the past five years. The paintings from before then did not escape destruction either, for they belonged to a different version of himself and his life. A version that no longer existed. A version that had been hopeful and whole.

In the glow of a dozen lanterns and a sea of candles, he lost himself in the frenzy, throwing more and more paint… until the paint wasn’t enough.

He drew his blade from his belt and began to slash, cutting the canvases apart, snapping the thin boards of wood that he had occasionally used, obliterating it all.

Almost all.

Breathless, he stopped in front of a painting that had been tucked between two others, mostly sheltered from the chaos.

He shoved the other two paintings aside and felt his heart clench as he looked upon himself, his back turned to the observer. His arms were raised, throwing a child—his child—into the air. The little boy’s face was alight with happiness, his little arms outstretched as if he were flying, not a bit of fear in his expression. And the clouds in the background formed two subtle wings, sprouting from the boy’s back.

Gordon couldn’t remember if he had painted that deliberately or if it was an unhappy coincidence.

Me son. Me boy.

It stuck in his throat like a fragment of bone that he would never get to know his son’s face, or his name, or his voice, or what amused him, or what sort of man he would grow up to be.

His watery eyes searched the painting more closely, spotting a figure in the distance, beside the edge of a forest: flaming red hair, mouth quirked into that playfully mocking smile of hers.

I’m sorry, Kathy.

He thought he saw her smile sadden. The low light must be playing tricks on his eyes.

“No beheaded enemies in here then, just… eviscerated paintings,” a warm, gentle voice said behind him.

He didn’t turn, uncertain if Agnes’s voice was part of the madness or if she was really there. Part of him didn’t want to find out.

“That is a beautiful painting,” she said, her presence like a balm, soothing his stormy mood. “Is that you?”

His art was such a private thing. It had always been his escape, from the first moment he picked up a stick of charcoal to sketch something to this very moment. He didn’t paint for his work to be seen. He painted for himself, to express what he couldn’t with words or actions. To have Agnes in his tower like this, with all of his work on display instead of covered in sheets, was like her seeing into his very soul.

He did not yet know what to make of that feeling.

“Breakin’ me rules again?” he said quietly.

As he heard her footsteps on the flagstones, all of the frustration, all of the grief, drained out of him. What was left behind wasn’t relief or hope or anything good that he could decipher, just a bone-deep ache of exhaustion. The kind that he might have liked to recover from at her side, in her bed, with her head on his chest.

“I… I just wanted to make sure that you were well,” she replied. “You left so quickly, and you did not seem yourself.”