Right about his falcons …
Had his own jealousy and insecurity about the smithy so muddled his vision?
None of my falcons have flown my hand …
Hawk lurched to his feet as a terrible thought occurred to him.
The day of their wedding she’d been gone from his side for more than two hours. He hadn’t been able to find her. Then she’d walked hurriedly out of the broch. He’d wanted to take her back into the sweet coolness to make love to her and she’d carefully and determinedly steered him away. They’d gone to the stable instead.
What had she been doing in the broch on their wedding day?
He sped through the frosty garden and leapt the low stone wall, racing through the lower bailey. He threw open the door of the broch and stood, gasping great breaths into his lungs. It was too dark with night falling. He went back outside and drew open the shutters. Not much light, but maybe it would be enough.
Hawk stood in the center of the round tower, memories tumbling around him. Eventually his eyes adjusted to the gloom. What were you trying to tell me, lass?
His mind whirled while his eyes searched the floor, the ceiling, the walls …
There.
He crossed to the wall by the door and there it was in tiny letters. Printed on the dark wall with chalky white limestone.
None of your falcons have flown you willingly, my love. Always yours! A.D.S.D.
A tiny leak sprang in the dam that had held back his anguish, releasing a trickle of pain that went on and on. She’d tried to tell him. He uses no coercion against me, she’d said. But coercion the smithy had obviously used against someone or something that Adrienne cared about more than she’d cared for her own happiness.
How could he have not figured it out before? That his cherished wife would have sacrificed everything to keep Dalkeith safe, just as he would. That hers was a love so deep, so unselfish, she would have walked through hell and back again to protect what she loved.
Hawk groaned aloud as memories tumbled through his mind. Adrienne bathing with him in a cool spring on their return from Uster, and the simple reverence in her eyes as she surveyed the untamed landscape that was Scotia. Adrienne’s eyes glowing every time she gazed up at Dalkeith’s stone walls. Adrienne’s tenderness and gentle heart hidden carefully behind her aloof façade.
The bastard smithy must have found her in the broch, or perhaps he’d been trailing her. Adam had obviously threatened to use his strange powers to destroy Dalkeith, and Adrienne had done whatever he’d asked to prevent that. Or was it he, the Hawk, Adam had threatened to destroy? That thought sent him into an even bleaker rage. So, his wife had given herself up to protect him and left him a loving message to let him know what she couldn’t risk telling him. That she would always love him. Her strange words had been carefully selected to make him wonder why she’d said them. To make him go to the falcon broch and look around. She hadn’t been able to risk being any more explicit for fear Adam would catch on.
She must have written the words only moments before he’d found her the day of the wedding. Knowing that she had to leave him to keep him safe, she had wanted one last thing—for him to hold fast to his belief in her.
But he hadn’t. He’d raged like a wounded animal, quickly believing the worst.
He swallowed the bitter bile of shame. She’d never stopped loving him. She’d never left him willingly. Small comfort now.
How could he ever have doubted her for even a minute?
The bottle dropped from his hands with a thump. Sidheach James Lyon Douglas, most beautiful man and renowned lover of three continents, man the very Fae might have envied, sank to the ground and sat very still. So still that the tears almost froze on his cheeks before slipping to the ground.
Hours later, Hawk made the slow, sober journey back up to the rooftop and sat heavily beside Grimm. As if their earlier conversation had never been interrupted he said, “Ever-hard … She said he used her for a fool, and she cried.”
Grimm looked at his best friend and almost shouted with relief. The wild black eyes were mostly sane again. The jagged, brittle pieces of his heart no longer dangled from his sleeve. There was just a glimmer of the old Hawk’s determination and strength in his face, but a glimmer was a good start. “Hawk, my friend, there is not a man, woman, or child at Dalkeith who believes she left you willingly. Either I can stay up here and freeze my ladycrackers off trying to find a falling star, or you can do something about it yourself. I—and my freezing nether regions—would thank you most assuredly. As would all of Dalkeith. Do something, man.”