“Shawna, Aidan wasn’t even a part of it. Sometime, long ago, your great-uncle’s frustration at his place in the inheritance line sent him upon a very strange path. I’m not sure he was so much a Satanist himself as he was a man determined to seize some kind of power.” David shrugged, then looked at her.
“My own great-uncle!” she breathed.
“But it’s over, m’lady.” He was silent a minute. “Shawna, I wanted revenge against the MacGinnises so badly, yet I hope you can believe that I’m truly sorry. I’ve spent some time with Aidan tonight—he is truly a wreck. Gawain is as astonished as anyone can be. The Andersons were in on Lowell’s cult—as was your maid, Mary Jane. She—” He hesitated. “She’s dead.”
Shawna shivered. “She kept insisting that the Druid Stone needed a sacrifice. He wanted to kill me more slowly. He must have decided that if she wanted the stone to have a sacrifice, he’d let it happen.”
“Maybe.”
“What of Lowell?”
“I had to kill him, Shawna.”
She sat up, throwing her arms around him tightly. “David, he meant to kill me, my own kin?—”
“Shawna, Shawna, you can’t think of it that way. He was sick, Shawna. Twisted. Your kin do love you. Gawain, Aidan, Alaric…Alistair.”
She lay against his chest, shivering. It had all been so horrible, so far-reaching, and in the end, so completely terrifying.
Lowell had planned and plotted it all for truly evil designs.
Lowell was dead.
But David was alive.
“David?”
“Aye?”
“Are we really married?”
He drew back from her, offering her a strange half smile. “You do know the Reverend Massey?”
“Aye.”
“And are we in the Douglas master’s chambers, my love?”
“We are.”
He hesitated just a second. She drew back. His green eyes were sparkling. His lashes lowered. He appeared to be having just a bit of trouble speaking.
“Do you wish to be married?”
She should tell him that in no way did she wish to be at the whim of such a tyrant for the rest of her life.
But she could not.
She knew that his anger and fear had been for them both. He had suffered very deeply. Trust had been difficult to come by. But he had believed in her, even if he hadn’t always realized it. He had married her, and no matter what the circumstances, he would not have done so had he not wanted to do so.
She smiled.
“It’s taken you that long to decide?”
“Umm…”
“Do you—forgive me?” he queried.
“For?”