Beyond the Highland Mist

Page 102

Another resounding crash shuddered through the Great-hall. She stifled a very unladylike oath and laid her seeds aside. “Keep it down out there! A body’s trying to do a bit of thinking!” she yelled.
Still the deafening crashes continued. “We aren’t all that short of firewood, lads!” Lydia roared at the frozen door.
Her words were met with a terrible screeching noise.
“That’s it. That’s it!” She leapt up from her chair and seethed. That last one had seemed to come from … upstairs?
She cocked her head at an angle.
Someone had either decided it was too cold to split firewood outside or was quite busily turning the furniture into kindling instead.
The crash was followed by the shattering of glass. “Holy shit!” Lydia muttered, as her lovely daughter-in-law would have offered quite perkily. She spun on her heel, grabbed up her skirts, and raced the stairs like a lass of twenty. Hand on her heart she flew down the corridor, skidding past gawking maids and tense soldiers. How many people had stood about listening to this insane destruction while she’d been sitting downstairs?
Not the nursery, she prayed, anything but that.
Her son would never destroy that room of dreams. Granted, he’d been a bit out of sorts, but still … No. He definitely would not do something so terrible. Not her son.
By all that’s holy, oh yes he would. And he was.
Her breath came in burning gasps as she stared, dumbfounded. Her son stood in the nursery surrounded by a twisted heap of horrid broken wooden limbs. He’d been literally ripping apart the lovingly crafted furnishings. He was clad in only a kilt, his upper body glistening with sweat. The veins in his arms were swollen and his hands were raw and bloody. His raven hair was loose but for the two war braids at either temple. By the sweet saints, just paint his face blue and I wouldn’t even know him for my son! Lydia thought.
The Hawk stood silently, wild-eyed. There was a smudge of blood on his face where he’d wiped at sweat. Lydia watched, frozen in horror, as he tilted an oil bowl, drizzling its contents over the splinters of furniture, the toys and books, the magnificent dollhouse that had been squashed flat in his gargantuan rage.
When he dropped the candle, a soft scream wrenched her mouth wide.
The flames leapt up, greedily devouring the pile of Hawk’s and Lydia’s shattered dreams. Shaking with hurt and fury, Lydia pressed a hand to her mouth and swallowed a sob. She turned away before the animal that used to be her son could see her tears.
“We have to do something,” Lydia murmured woodenly, staring blankly at the kitchen hearth.
Tavis stepped close behind her, his hands suspended in the air just above her waist. He dropped his head forward and inhaled deeply of her scent. “I’ll speak with him, Lydia—”
“He won’t listen,” she choked as she spun around. “I’ve tried. Dear God, we’ve all tried. He’s like some rabid dog, snarling and foaming and oh, Tavis! My nursery! My grandbabies!”
“I haven’t tried yet,” Tavis said calmly, dropping his hands to grip her waist.
Lydia cocked her head, marveling at the implicit authority in his words. He’d managed to surprise her once again, this gentle man who’d stood patiently by her side for so long.
“You’ll speak with him?” she echoed hopefully, her eyes glimmering with unshed tears.
“Aye,” he assured her.
Strength and ability laced his reply. How could it have taken her so long to begin to see this man clearly?
Some of her astonishment must have been evident in her gaze, because he gave her that patient smile and said tenderly, “I knew one day you’d finally open your eyes, Lydia. I also knew it would be worth every minute of the wait,” he added quietly.
Lydia swallowed hard as a fission of heat and hope and heady, tumultuous love spread through her in a wave. Love. How long had she been in love with this man? she wondered dumbly.
Tavis brushed her lips with his, a light friction that promised so much more. “Doona worry. I care for him like my own, Lydia. And, as if he were my own, ’tis time we had a good thorough father-son kind of talk.”
“But what if he refuses to listen?” she fretted.
Tavis smiled. “He’ll listen. You can take Tavis MacTarvitt’s word on that, I’ll say.”
The Hawk brooded into the fire, watching ghosts dance whitely in the spaces between the flames. They were memory-born and hell-bound, as he surely was. But purgatory—if not heaven—was within his reach, tidily captured in a bottle, and so he toasted the ghosts as he raced them to oblivion.