The Highlander Series 7-Book Bundle

by Karen Marie Moning

  This room was made for babies. Crafted with such loving hands that it was almost overwhelming. A cacophony of discordant emotions skittered through her before she shoved them away.

  There were cradles of honey oak, curved and sanded smooth so not one splinter could work free and harm baby-soft skin. The east wall displayed high windows, too high for a toddler to risk harm, yet open to the golden glow of the morning sun. Wood floors were smothered with thick rugs to keep baby feet warm.

  Brightly painted wooden soldiers dotted the shelves, and lovingly crafted dolls reclined on tiny beds. A miniature castle, replete with turrets, dry moat, and drawbridge was filled with tiny carved people; an honest-to-goodness medieval dollhouse!

  Fluffy blankets dotted the cradles and beds. It was a huge room, this nursery. A room in which a child (or a dozen) could grow from baby to young teen before seeking a more adult room elsewhere. It was a room that would fill a child’s world with love and security and pleasure for hours on end.

  As if someone had created this room thinking like the child he or she used to be, and designed it with all the treasures that had given him or her such pleasure as a wee lad or lass.

  But the thing about the room that struck her so hard was that it seemed to be waiting.

  Open and warm and inviting, saying, fill me with laughing babies and love.

  All was in readiness, the nursery was merely biding time—until the right woman would come along and breathe into it the sparkling life of children’s songs and dreams and hopes.

  A pang of such longing flashed through her that Adrienne wasn’t even sure what it was. But it had everything to do with the orphan she’d been, and the cold place she’d grown up in—a place nothing at all like this lovely room; part of a lovely home, in a lovely land, with people who would lavish love upon their children.

  Oh, to raise babies in a place like this.

  Babies who would know who their mother and father were, unlike Adrienne. Babies who would never have to wonder why they hadn’t been worth keeping.

  Adrienne rubbed her eyes furiously and turned away. It was too much for her to deal with.

  And she turned right into Lydia. “Lydia!” she gasped. But of course. Why should it surprise her to run smack into the wonderful mother of the wonderful man who’d probably built the wonderful nursery?

  Lydia steadied her by the elbows. “I came to see if you were feeling all right, Adrienne. I thought it might be too soon for you to be up and about—”

  “Who built this room?” Adrienne whispered.

  Lydia ducked her head, and for a brief moment Adrienne had the absurd impression that Lydia was trying not to laugh. “The Hawk designed and crafted it himself,” Lydia said, intently smoothing tiny crinkles from her gown.

  Adrienne rolled her eyes, trying to convince her emotional barometer to stop registering vulnerability and rise to something safe, like anger.

  “Why, dear Adrienne, don’t you like it?” Lydia asked sweetly.

  Adrienne turned back and swept the room with an irritated gaze. The nursery was bright and cheery and alive with the creator’s own outpouring of emotion into his creation. She glanced back at Lydia. “When? Before or after the king’s service?” It was terribly important that she know if he had built it at seventeen or eighteen, to please his mother perhaps, or recently, in hopes of his own children someday filling it.

  “During. The king gave him a brief leave when he was twenty-nine. There was some trouble with the Highlanders in these parts, and the Hawk was permitted to return to fortify Dalkeith. When the feuding was resolved, he spent a measure of time working up here. He worked like a man possessed, and in truth, I had little idea what he was doing. The Hawk has always worked with wood, building and designing things. He wouldn’t let any of us see it, and didn’t talk much about it. After he returned to James, I came up to see what he’d been doing.” Lydia’s eyes misted briefly. “I’ll tell you the truth, Adrienne, it made me cry. Because it told me that my son was thinking of children and how precious they were. It filled me with wonder, too, when I saw it completed. I think it would most any woman. Men don’t usually see children like this. But the Hawk, he’s a rare man. Like his father.”

  You don’t have to sell me on him, Adrienne thought morosely. “I’m sorry, Lydia. I’m very tired. I need to go rest,” she said stiffly, and turned for the door.

  As she entered the corridor she could have sworn she heard Lydia laughing softly.

  Hawk found Grimm waiting for him in the study, gazing out at the west cliffs through the open doors. He didn’t miss the tiny whiteness at Grimm’s knuckles on the hand that clenched the door frame, or the rigid line of his back.

  “So?” Hawk asked impatiently. He would have gone to the Comyn keep to investigate his wife’s past himself, but that would have meant leaving Adrienne alone with the damned smithy. No chance of that. Nor could he have taken her with him, so he’d sent Grimm to uncover what had happened to Janet Comyn.

  Grimm turned slowly, kicked out a chair, and sat heavily before the fire.

  Hawk sat as well, rested his feet upon the desk, and poured them both a brandy. Grimm accepted it gratefully.

  “Well? What did she say?” The Hawk’s grip tightened on his glass as he waited to hear who had done such terrible things to his wife that her mind had retreated into fantasy. The Hawk understood what was wrong with her. He’d seen battle-scarred men who had experienced such horrors that they had reacted in similar fashion. Too many barbaric and bloody losses made some soldiers spin a dream to replace the reality, and in time many came to believe the dream was true. As his wife had done. But, unfortunately, with his wife he had no idea what had caused her painful retreat into such an outlandish fancy that she couldn’t even bear to be called by her real name. And whatever had happened to her had left her totally unwilling to trust any man, but especially him, it seemed.

  The Hawk braced himself to listen, to channel his rage when it came so he could wield it as a cool and efficient weapon. He would slay her dragons, and then begin her healing. Her body was growing stronger day by day, and the Hawk knew Lydia’s love had much to do with it. But he wanted his love to heal her deepest wounds. And the only way he could do that was to know and understand what she had suffered.

  Grimm swallowed, fidgeted in his chair, tilted it at the sides like a lad, then got up and moved to the hearth to shift restlessly from foot to foot.

  “Out with it, man!” The week Grimm had been gone had nearly driven the Hawk crazy imagining what this Ever-hard man must have done. Or even worse, perhaps the Laird Comyn himself was to blame for Adrienne’s pain. Hawk dreaded that possibility, for then it would be clan war. A terrible thing to be sure, but to avenge his wife—he would do anything. “Who is this Ever-hard?” The question had been gnawing at his insides ever since the night he’d first heard the name emerge from her fevered lips.

  Grimm sighed. “Nobody knew. Not one person had ever heard of him.”

  The Hawk cursed softly. So, the Comyn was keeping secrets, was he? “Talk,” he commanded.

  Grimm sighed. “She thinks she’s from the future.”

  “I know Adrienne thinks that,” Hawk said impatiently. “I sent you to discover what Lady Comyn had to say.”

  “That’s who I meant,” Grimm said flatly. “The Lady Comyn thinks Adrienne is from the future.”

  “What?” Hawk’s dark brows winged incredulously. “What are you telling me, Grimm? Are you telling me the Lady Comyn claims Adrienne isn’t her blood daughter?”

  “Aye.”

  Hawk’s boots hit the floor with a thump as the latent tension charging his veins became a living heat.

  “Let me get this straight. Althea Comyn told you that Adrienne is not her daughter?”

  “Aye.”

  Hawk froze. This was not what he had expected. In all his imaginings he had never once considered that his wife’s fantasy might be shared by her mother. “Then exactly who does Lady Comyn think the lass
is? Who the hell have I married?” Hawk yelled.

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “Does she have any ideas?” Sarcasm laced the Hawk’s question. “Talk to me, man!”

  “There’s not much I can tell you, Hawk. And what I know…well, it’s damned odd, the lot of it. It sure as hell wasn’t what I expected. Ah, I heard such tales, Hawk, to test a man’s faith in the natural world. If what they claim is true, hell, I don’t know what a man can believe in anymore.”

  “Lady Comyn shares her daughter’s delusions,” Hawk marveled.

  “Nay, Hawk, not unless Althea Comyn and about a hundred other people do. Because that’s how many saw her appear out of nowhere. I spoke with dozens, and they all told pretty much the same tale. The clan was sitting at banquet when all of the sudden a lass—Adrienne—appeared on the laird’s lap, literally out of thin air. Some of the maids named her witch, but it was quickly hushed. It seemed the laird considered her a gift from the angels. The Lady Comyn said she saw something fall out of the oddly dressed woman’s hand, and fought through the panic to get it. ’Twas the black queen she’d given me at the wedding, which I gave to you when we returned.”

  “I wondered why she’d sent that to me.” Hawk rubbed his jaw thoughtfully.

  “Lady Comyn said she thought it might become important later. She said that she thinks the chess piece is somehow bewitched.”

  “If so, that would be how she traveled through”—he broke off, unable to complete the thought. He’d seen many wonders in his life, and was not a man to completely discount the possibility of magic—what good Scotsman raised to believe in the wee folk would? But still…

  “How she traveled through time,” Grimm finished for him.

  The two men stared at each other.

  Hawk shook his head. “Do you believe …?”

  “Do you?”

  They looked at each other. They looked at the fire.

  “No,” they both scoffed at the same time, studying the fire intently.

  “She doesn’t seem quite usual though, does she?” Grimm finally said. “I mean, she’s unnaturally bright. Beautiful. And witty, ah, the stories she told me on the way back here from the Comyn keep. She’s strong for a lass. And she does have odd sayings. Sometimes—I don’t know if you’ve noticed—her brogue seems to fade in and out.”

  Hawk snorted. He had noticed. Her brogue had virtually disappeared when she’d lain ill from the poison, and she’d spoken in an odd accent he’d never heard before.

  Grimm continued, almost to himself, “A lass like that could keep a man—” He broke off and looked sharply at the Hawk. Cleared his throat. “Lady Comyn knows who her daughter was, Hawk. Was is the key word there. Several of the maids confirmed Lydia’s story that the real Janet is dead. The gossip is that she’s dead by her father’s hand. He had to marry someone to you. Lady Comyn said their clan will never breathe a word of the truth.”

  “I guess not,” Hawk snorted. If any of this is true, and I’m not saying it is, the Comyn knows James would destroy us both for it.” The Hawk pondered that bitter thought a long moment, then discarded it as an unnecessary concern. The Comyn would assuredly swear Adrienne was Janet, as would every last man of the Douglas, if word of this ever got to the king in Edinburgh, for the existence of both their clans depended upon it. The Hawk could count on at least that much fealty from the self-serving Comyn.

  “What did the laird himself have to say, Grimm?”

  “Not a word. He would neither confirm she was his daughter, nor deny it. But I spoke with the Comyn’s priest, who told me the same story as Lady Comyn. By the way, he was lighting the fat white praying candles for the soul of the late Janet,” he added grimly. “So if there are delusions at the Comyn keep, they are mass and uniformly detailed, my friend.”

  The Hawk crossed swiftly to his desk. He opened a carved wooden box and extracted the chess piece. He rolled it in his fingers, studying it carefully.

  When he raised his eyes again they were blacker than midnight, deeper than a loch and just as unfathomable. “The Lady Comyn believes it brought her here?”

  Grimm nodded.

  “Then it could take her away?”

  Grimm shrugged. “Lady Comyn said Adrienne didn’t seem to remember it. Has she ever mentioned it to you?”

  Hawk shook his head and looked thoughtfully, first at the black queen, then at his brightly burning fire.

  Grimm met Hawk’s gaze levelly, and Hawk knew there would never be words of reproach or even a whisper of the deed, if he chose to do it.

  “Do you believe?” Grimm asked softly.

  The Hawk sat before the fire for a long time after Grimm left, alternating between belief and disbelief. Although he was a creative man, he was also a logical man. Time travel simply didn’t fit into his understanding of the natural world. He could believe in the banshee, who warned of pending death and destruction. He could even believe in the Druids as alchemists and practitioners of strange arts. He’d been raised on childhood warnings of the kelpie, who lived in deep lochs and lured unsuspecting and unruly children to their watery graves.

  But traveling through time?

  Besides, he told himself as he stuffed the chess piece into his sporran for later consideration, there were other more pressing problems to address. Like the smithy. And his willful wife, upon whose lips the smithy’s name sat far too often.

  The future would allow plenty of time to unravel all of Adrienne’s secrets, and make sense of the mass delusions at the Comyn keep. But first, he had to truly make her his wife. Once that was accomplished, he could begin to worry about other details. Thus resolved, he stuffed away the unsettling news Grimm had brought him, much as he had stuffed away the chess piece.

  Plans of just how he would seduce his lovely wife replaced all worries. With a dangerous smile and purpose in his stride, the Hawk went off in search of Adrienne.

  CHAPTER 13

  ADRIENNE WALKED RESTLESSLY, HER MIND WHIRLING. HER brief nap in the sunshine had done nothing to dispel her wayward thoughts. Thoughts like just how capable, not to mention how willing, the Hawk was of providing babies to fill that dratted nursery.

  Instinctively she avoided the north end of the bailey, unwilling to confront the smithy and those unnerving images still fermenting in her mind from when she’d been ill.

  South she strayed, beckoned by the glimmer of sun off a glass roof and curiosity deep as a loch. These were no barbaric people, she mused. And if she didn’t miss her guess, she was walking right toward a hothouse. How brilliant was the mind that had fashioned Dalkeith-Upon-the-Sea. It was impenetrable on the west end due to the cliffs, which presented a sheer, unscalable drop to the fierce ocean. Spreading north, south, and east, the keep itself was sealed behind monstrous walls, all of seventy to eighty feet high. How strange that the same mind which had designed Dalkeith as a stronghold had made it so beautiful. The complicated mind of a man who provided for the necessity of war, yet savored the times of peace.

  Careful, getting intrigued are you?

  When she reached the hothouse, Adrienne noticed that it was attached to a circular stone tower. During her many hours of surfing the Internet she’d been drawn time and time again to things medieval. The mews? Falcons. It was there they kept and trained falcons for hunting.

  Drawn by the lure of animals and missing Moonshadow with an ache in her chest, Adrienne approached the gray stone broch. What had Hawk meant about treating her like one of his falcons? she wondered. Well, she’d just find out for herself, so she’d know what to avoid in the future.

  Tall and completely circular, the broch had only one window, which was covered by a slatted shutter. Something about the dark, she remembered reading. Curious, she approached the heavy door and pushed it aside, closing it behind her lest any falcons be tempted to escape. She wouldn’t give the Hawk any excuse to chastise her.

  Slowly her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom and she was able to make out several empty perches in the dim lig
ht. Ah, not the mews, this must be the training broch. Adrienne tried to recall the way the trainers of yore had skilled their birds for the hunt.

  The broch smelled of lavender and spice, the heavy musk from the attached hothouse permeating the stone walls. It was a peaceful place. Oh, how easily she could get used to never hearing the rush of traffic again; never having to look over her shoulder again; never seeing New Orleans again—an end to all the running and hiding and fear.

  The walls of the broch were cool and clean to the touch, nothing like the stone walls that had once held her prisoner in the gritty dirt of a New Orleans prison cell.

  Adrienne shuddered. She’d never forget that night.

  The fight had begun over—of all things—a trip to Acapulco. Adrienne hadn’t wanted to go. Eberhard had insisted. “Fine, then come with me,” she’d said. He was too busy, he couldn’t take the time off, he’d replied.

  “What good is all your money if you can’t take the time to enjoy life?” Adrienne had asked.

  Eberhard hadn’t said a word, he’d simply fixed her with a disappointed look that made her feel like an awkward adolescent, a gauche and unwanted orphan.

  “Well, why do you keep sending me on these vacations by myself?” Adrienne asked, trying to sound mature and cool, but her question ended on a plaintive note.

  “How many times must I explain this to you? I’m trying to educate you, Adrienne. If you think for a moment that it will be easy for an orphan who has never been in society to be my wife, think again. My wife must be cultured, sophisticated, European—”

  “Don’t send me back to Paris,” Adrienne had said hastily. “It rained for weeks, last time.”

  “Don’t interrupt me again, Adrienne.” His voice had been calm; too calm and carefully measured.

  “Can’t you come with me—just once?”

  “Adrienne!”