The men sat for hours bantering and laughing. Callie listened, her heart warmed by their affection for one another. The MacAllisters even accepted Simon into their midst, and unlike her clansmen, they had no problem whatsoever with his English breeding.
She learned much of their past, including a lot of information about their brother Kieran who had killed himself. But she learned very little about Sin. It was almost as if they knew his past hurt him and so they sought only to mention tiny slices of it.
It was the wee hours of the night before they decided to find their beds. Callie yawned as she showed the men where they were to sleep.
At last she found herself headed to her room to be alone with her husband.
Sin was still smiling.
"You're very handsome when you do that."
"Do what?"
"Smile."
He frowned at her words.
"Here, now, I didn't mean to make you stop."
He cast a reluctant look to the bed, then moved away from her.
"Why didn't you tell me you were a MacAllister?" she asked quietly.
"Because I'm not."
Her frown matched his as she tried to sort it out. He definitely wasn't related through his mother. "I don't understand."
He sighed as he unbelted his sword and set it aside. "My father sired me the first year of his marriage. He was away from home, visiting a friend in London without his wife, and for whatever reason, my mother caught his fancy. She was scarce more than a girl back then, and they tell me his accent and wild ways enchanted her. I was conceived in the back of a barn in a manner my mother assured me was most humiliating and painful for her.
"As soon as she bore me, she sent me and my wet nurse to Scotland to live with my father. An old servant who was there that night told me that my stepmother took one look at me and was so distraught she almost miscarried Lochlan."
He spoke the words calmly and without emotion. Even so, it had to hurt him deep in his heart and soul. There was no way it couldn't.
She wanted to go to him and offer comfort, but was afraid if she tried he would stop talking. So she listened quietly, while her heart broke a little more with every word he uttered.
"From that moment on, my father wanted nothing to do with me. He ignored me every time I tried to speak to him. If I approached him, he turned his back and walked away.
"To my stepmother, I was nothing but a painful reminder of my father's infidelity. She despised everything about me. Because of his guilt and shame over what he'd done, my father went out of his way to prove to his wife that he bore no special favor toward me. My brothers had the best of everything and I had whatever was left over."
She swallowed against the tears that choked her, but she refused to let him see them. "He sent you back to England to be with your mother?"
"He tried, once, when I was seven. It was the middle of winter." He paused and leaned with one arm against the mantel to stare at the fire as if recalling the event. He looked so lost, standing there with his raw hurt etched plainly along the lines of his handsome face. Callie didn't know how she maintained the strength to keep herself from going to him. Perhaps it was the strength of him that held her together and allowed her to just listen as he told a story she was sure he had never told before.
When he spoke again, she heard the hidden agony inside his heart. "I remember being so cold the entire way. My father had sent next to no coin with us and the knight who was taking us to my mother would rent a room for himself and leave us to the stable or barn."
