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Evander stood there, unable to move.
He’d walked into a hundred rooms in his life knowing exactly what to say. But he had nothing now, only the weight of his brother’s name and two small faces that had his mother’s chin.
And Freya, kneeling there with her hair coming loose, looked like everything he was afraid to want.
14
Freya had been singing to them for the better part of an hour. Neither bairn showed the slightest inclination toward sleep, which she suspected was less a comment on her voice and more a comment on their utter refusal to accept that the night was, in fact, over, whatever the rest of the camp might think.
“Ye’re meant to be tired,” she told the baby boy, who gurgled with pure, wide-eyed delight, entirely unbothered by the accusation and apparently pleased to have found an audience. His sister, propped against a rolled blanket, regarded Freya with suspicion.
Freya looked over her shoulder but could no longer hear Evander or Callum. The time had passed slowly. It had been far longer than she expected such a conversation to last.
Why was it taking him so long?
She toyed with the idea of leaving the tent and searching for him, but that would mean leaving the bairns alone. They couldn’t be older than ten months. They were so young and needed to be watched.
And… well, she liked bairns, and no one else nearby could step in for her.
She lowered her hand to the babies. The little girl set her chin and regarded her suspiciously, while her brother wrapped his hand around one finger and held on.
The tent flap moved, and she whirled around, her hand flying to her chest. Her heart pounded hard against her ribs as Evander ducked inside.
She hadn’t expected such a large, dangerous man to be so damned silent on his feet. Or perhaps she had been too focused on the babies.
Freya expected him to say something, but he wasn’t even looking at her. Evander looked past her at the babies squirming on the bed, babbling to themselves or to each other. It was hard for her to tell.
He looked at them strangely, and Freya immediately understood. He was perhaps seeing a relative’s eyes in the boy’s face, and something of himself in the set of the girl’s small, stubborn jaw, that same refusal to be charmed before she’d decided one was worth the trouble.
“Are ye all right?” Freya asked when he didn’t move, when the silence had stretched a beat too long even for him.
She didn’t know why she asked something so foolish. Of course, he wasn’t all right.
“The bairns belong to me braither.”
“Yer braither? But why—”
“He and his wife have passed, leaving no one else to look after the twins,” he said flatly. “Though that isnae it.”
She frowned. “Ye just learned ye are an uncle, and there is more?”
“Me braither had taken over the lairdship after me faither passed, a fact I was unaware of.”
The little Evander had mentioned of his father had made her believe he was still alive. All this time, he had been operating under a falsehood, an idea that perhaps they might one day fix what had ever been broken.
“And now… they’ve come to ye.”
“Aye.”
Freya’s frown deepened. “Again, are ye all right?”
“Aye.” He didn’t sound it. Freya wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince her or himself more. “I have a decision to make. An important one.”
“And what’s that?”
He told her everything in detail. All of it, standing there in the low tent with his arms crossed as if to hold himself together: the man at the treeline, the dead brother he hadn’t spoken to in twelve years, the empty village, the offer of a title he’d walked away from once and never, by the sound of it, wanted back.
She wanted to reach out and smooth the crease between his eyebrows. She couldn’t imagine how it was to learn that his brother had passed, leaving them no chance to fix what had been broken between them.
