Page 101 of Claimed by a Highlander
Her greeting—in fact, her very presence—seemed to sour the Grant chief’s already cheerless expression.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
Sybil was startled by his rudeness. She straightened to her full height, which still left her a head shorter than the Grant chieftain.
“I am the wife of the MacKenzie,” she said.
His brows shot up. After a long moment of stunned silence, he seemed to recall his manners and gave her a stiff bow. “I apologize for my discourtesy. I’d not heard that Rory had taken a wife.”
“I understand your surprise,” she said, though she was puzzled by how strongly he reacted to the news. “Our marriage is quite recent.”
“Aye, it would be,” he said. “Let me introduce my sons.”
The Grant chief motioned to the two warriors who looked like younger versions of himself, with their straight, dark hair, piercing gray eyes, muscular builds, and wicked-looking weapons. As his sons stepped forward to join him, several MacKenzie warriors moved to either side of Sybil, ready to draw their weapons. She gave them a warning glance and a slight shake of her head, but they remained at her side.
When the first of Grant’s sons swept her a deep bow as his father introduced him, she sensed the tension of her guards ease a fraction. The other brother followed suit. Sybil was distracted by the sound of thundering hooves approaching the gate and failed to catch his name.
“And this is my grandson,” the Grant chieftain said, stretching out his arm in the direction of the Grant warriors.
Sybil looked past them to see Rory and several of his men galloping through the gate.
“Come, lad,” Grant said, drawing her attention back to her guests.
Sybil caught a glimpse of a young boy with copper curls emerging from the Grant warriors, but quickly shifted her gaze back to Rory, who leaped off his horse, dropped the reins without waiting for the stable boy, and started running toward them. Everything about him signaled urgency. But why? Did he not trust her to greet their guests properly?
Remembering her manners, she smiled as the chieftain’s grandson, a boy of eight or nine, came forward. Her smile faltered as she found herself looking into familiar green eyes.
“This is Kenneth Grant MacKenzie.” The Grant chief raised his voice so that it carried throughout the courtyard. “He is your husband’s son and heir.”
The ground seemed to shift under her, and a small, high-pitched gasp escaped her throat. Sybil felt as if she was falling backward into a black, bottomless chasm as her gaze traveled over the child’s face. He had Rory’s dimple in his chin and the same wide, expressive mouth.
And still, her mind could not accept what the Grant chieftain said as true. Nay, Rory would not have kept something—rather, someone—so important a secret from her.
“Sybil—”
She raised her gaze from the boy to Rory, who had come to a halt behind him. The truth was written in the guilt on her husband’s face. She understood now why the guard had hurried to fetch Rory, why the other MacKenzie guards were so uneasy about her meeting their guests, and why Rory had raced back to the castle.
The Grant chieftain had told her the truth. This boy was Rory’s son.
She felt as if an iron clamp was tightening around her chest and struggled to draw breath. How could Rory have hidden the boy’s existence from her? She knew instinctively that every MacKenzie and every Grant here knew what Rory had failed to tell her, his wife.
She felt the sting of tears at the back of her eyes as she and Rory locked gazes over the boy’s head. It was bad enough that her husband had mistrusted and disrespected her—and that everyone knew it. She would not humiliate herself further by letting them see how very much the insult wounded her.
For once, she was grateful for the years she spent navigating her way through the slings and arrows of court life. She needed the lessons of every single day of it to maintain her composure. These Highlanders saw that Rory had made a fool of his ignorant Lowlander wife.
She refused to let them see that he had also ripped out her heart.
CHAPTER 35
Rory’s labored breaths filled his ears like an echo of the accusation he saw in Sybil’s eyes. As soon as he heard that the Grants had come to the castle, he turned his horse homeward at a gallop, in the hope that he could speak to her first.
But the time to tell her was long since passed.
One look into his wife’s face, and Rory understood the depths of the error he had made. She only let it show for a moment before a mask of calm shuttered her expression, but the naked pain he saw in that moment pierced his heart like a hot blade in the center of his chest.
Now, the slight tremor of her fingers against the skirt of her gown was all that betrayed the storm of emotions she was hiding. God in heaven, would she ever forgive him?
Grant cleared his throat with growl, reminding Rory that he faced not one, but two disasters.
