She broke off, her voice trailing away as he ignored her to take a hand and shift the ink-black curls from the neck of the sleeping youngster on the bed.
“Hawk, Sloan, if you please, take a look at this child for me?” David requested icily.
The two men walked curiously by Shawna.
Hawk and Sloan then both stared at David, startled.
“Damn you all!” Shawna cried. She had endured a great deal. Once upon a time, she had believed that she was a strong woman. But between the murderous cloaked men, Sabrina’s kidnapping and rescue, and David’s behavior, it was suddenly far too much. “Damn you all!” she repeated with soft vehemence. “What in God’s name is it?”
“The boy is—” Hawk began.
“See,” Sloan said gently, pointing to the hairline at the boy’s nape where the hair grew in a peculiar pattern and a tiny half-moon of hair edged over that line in a small but distinct crescent shape.
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” Shawna protested. “I’ve never seen such a mark. If it’s a Douglas mark—David has no such mark.”
Staring at her, Hawk lifted his thick black hair, twisting slightly so that she could see the crescent shape at his nape.
Skylar Douglas gasped, so stunned that indiscreet words tore from her lips. “Hawk, you told me that you’d never slept with Shawna!”
“Oh god!” Shawna breathed.
“And thank you, wife, for that vote of confidence!” Hawk returned, indignant and aggravated.
“The child is mine,” David stated. “I’ve no such peculiar pattern of hair growth myself, but my father had it, and it often appears in the Douglas family.” Staring at Danny in shock, Shawna suddenly felt the icy green fire of David’s eyes burning into her again. “Lady MacGinnis knew nothing more of what happened that night, yet she bore my child and turned the babe over to the most wretched pair in all of Craig Rock to be raised among their brood!”
Indeed, the night had brought with it far too much.
Shawna was dimly aware of his murderous gaze, then no more. She fell to the floor in a dead faint.
Images whirled through her sleep. At first, she ran. Ran through wave after wave of thick, swirling ground fog. Cloaked figures chased her. Then they disappeared, and the images that haunted her were far worse, cutting through her like a knife.
She was in the small room she had taken at the Tudor-style tavern at Glasgow. She had left Craig Rock to be on her own, to decide how she would handle her life once her babe arrived.
The first pain hit her just at dawn. She refused to acknowledge it because it was more than a month too soon for the babe to arrive.
For hours, she had labored on her own. Then, miraculously, the midwife appeared.
And for hours more she had labored. The pain had been intense, and through it all, she had prayed for the child. To ease the pain, she fought again the constant battles in her mind. What to do? She didn’t want to go back home because David had died there in the fire at the stables.
She carried the Douglas heir, and he was about to enter the world, but she’d never wed David Douglas, and in all the time that had passed since David had died, she hadn’t decided whether to tell his father about the child. She didn’t want him to think that she wanted anything from the Douglases, but by the same token, she didn’t want to deny him David’s child either.
Day turned into night.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Because she’d gone into labor far too early.
Her pain was incredible, and still the babe didn’t come. The midwife urged her to drink a painkilling brew, and she accepted it.
That was all she could remember until she awoke from a deep sleep to discover that it was daylight. The midwife told her that the child had been stillborn.
The gentle old woman told her, “Lass, there’s no help for it, the wee bairn didna have the proper time for birthin’, and there was nothing anyone could do.”
Her poor wee bairn was dead. She fought against the exhaustion and pain that seized her. A misshapen bundle was placed in her arms, and she wept. She tried to look at it, but the midwife took it away again, telling her that the babe was a pile of deformed blood and bones.
All of David was now lost to her. In the end, in the only way that she could have done something for him, she had betrayed him. She had let his child die as well. She was disconsolate. Ready to die herself. But when she hadn’t died, and her family had come…
Her child hadn’t died! Her child was here. Danny, oh, aye, the boy looked like a MacGinnis, for he was a MacGinnis, her child, and some terrible, cruel prank had been played upon her by someone who had attempted to kill David and attempted to kill her.
And now…