Hawk cursed himself for a hopeless romantic fool.
“The harvest will be rich this Samhain,” Grimm remarked.
“Aye, that it will, Grimm. Adam.” Hawk nodded curtly to the smithy, who was approaching, the field of gold parting for his dark form.
“You’re leaving the game? You admit defeat, dread Hawk?” Adam gazed mockingly up.
“Don’t goad the devil, smithy,” Grimm warned tersely.
Adam laughed. “Bedevil the devil and devil be damned. I fear no devil and bow to no man. Besides, this concerns you not, or little at least—certainly not so much as you appear to think. You vastly overrate yourself, gruff Grimm.” Adam held the Hawk’s gaze, smiling. “Fear not, I will care for her in your absence.”
“I won’t let him near her, Hawk,” Grimm hastened to assure him.
“Yes you will, Grimm,” Hawk said carefully. “If she asks for him you will let him near her. Under no other circumstances.”
Adam nodded smugly. “And ask she will. Again and again in that husky, sweet morning voice she has. And Grimm, you might tell her for me that I have coffee from the Rom for her.”
“You will not tell her that!” Hawk snapped.
“Are you trying to limit my contact?”
“I did not agree to provide you with a messenger! Yet—what will be will surely be. My guard stands for her, but it’s you I will look to if she comes to harm.”
“You give her into my keeping?”
“Nay, but I will hold you responsible if harm should befall her.”
“I would never let harm come to any woman of mine—and she is mine now, fool Hawk.”
“Only in as much as she wants to be so,” the Hawk said softly. And if she does, I will kill both of you with my bare hands and rest easier at night, dead inside.
“You are either impossibly cocky or incredibly stupid, dread Hawk,” the smithy said with scorn. “You will return to find the flawless Adrienne in my arms. Already, she spends most afternoons with me in your gardens—soon she will spend them in my bed,” Adam taunted.
The Hawk’s jaw clenched, his body tensed for violence.
“She didn’t ask for you, Hawk,” Grimm reminded tonelessly, shuffling from foot to foot.
“She didn’t ask for him, captain of the guard?” Adam asked brightly. “Captain of honor, captain of truth?”
Grimm flinched as Adam’s dark gaze searched his. “Aye,” he said tightly.
“What a tangled web we weave….” Adam drawled slowly, the hint of a smile on his burnished face.
“What passes now between the two of you, Grimm?” Hawk asked.
“The smithy’s a strange man,” Grimm muttered.
“I would wish you Godspeed, but I believe God suffers little, if any, commerce with men such as us. So I wish you only a warrior’s farewell. And never fear, I shall keep safe the lovely Adrienne,” the smithy promised as he patted Hawk’s stallion on the rump.
Shadows flickered behind the Hawk’s eyes as he took his leave. “Watch her, Grimm. If there are any more attempts on her life, send word to me at Uster,” he called over his shoulder as he rode away. His guards could keep her alive, in that he felt secure. But now there would be nothing to keep her from Adam.
As Grimm watched his best friend leave, Adam studied the stoic warrior. “She didn’t ask for him?” he mocked softly.
“Who the hell are you, really?” Grimm snarled.
CHAPTER 21
“TRY A BIT MORE STEAMING WATER,” LYDIA DECIDED, AND Tavis obliged.
They both peered into the pan. Lydia sighed. “Well, drat and blast it all!”
“Milady! Such language for a woman of your position, I’ll say.” Tavis rebuked.
“It certainly doesn’t act like tea, does it, Tavis?”
“Nay, not a bit, I’ll say, but still no reason for you to be unladylike about it.”
Lydia snorted. “Only you, dear Tavis, dare criticize my manners.”
“ ’Tis because you’re usually the spit of perfection, so it fashes me more than a wee bit when you sally.”
“Well, stir it, Tavis! Don’t just let it sit there.”
Tavis flashed her a disgruntled look as he began to stir the mixture rapidly. “These talented hands were made for curing the richest hides in all of Scotia, not stirring a lady’s drink, I’ll say,” he grumbled.
Lydia smiled at his words. How he went on about his talented hands! One would think they were made of purest gold instead of flesh, bone, and a few calluses. She glanced at him a pensive moment while he stirred the brew. Ever faithful Tavis by her side. Her mornings and afternoons wouldn’t be quite so rich without the man. Her evenings, well, she’d spent her evenings alone for so many years that she scarcely noticed it anymore—or so she liked to believe.
“Why don’t you marry?” she had asked Tavis twenty long years ago, when he’d still been a young man. But he had only smiled up at her as he’d knelt by the vats where he’d been soaking a deerskin to buttery softness.
“I have all I need here, Lydia.” He spread his arms wide, as if he could sweep all of Dalkeith into his embrace. “Why would you be shooing me on?”
“But don’t you want children, Tavis MacTarvitt?” she probed. “Sons to take over your tannery? Daughters to cherish?”
He shrugged. “The Hawk is like a son to me. I couldn’t ask for a finer braw lad, I’ll say. And now we’ve the two wee ones running about, and well … you’re without a husband again, Lady Lydia …” He trailed off slowly, his strong hands rubbing and squeezing the hide in the salt mixture.
“And just what does my being without a husband have to do with you?”
Tavis cocked his head and gave her the patient, tender smile that sometimes swam up to linger in her mind just before she drifted off to sleep at night.
“Just that I’ll always be here for you, Lydia. You can always count on Tavis of the tannery, and I’ll say that a thousand times more.” His eyes were level and deep with something she was unable to face. She had already lost two husbands to two wars and the sweet saints knew there was always another war coming.
But Tavis MacTarvitt, he always came back. Scarred and bloody, he always came back.
Back to stand in the kitchens with her while she dried her herbs and spices. Back to lend a helping hand now and again as she dug in her rich black soil and pruned her roses.
There were times when they both knelt in the dirt, their heads close together, that she’d feel a fluttery sensation in her belly. And times when she sat by the hearth in the kitchen and asked his help brushing out her long dark hair. He’d take the pins out first, then unsmooth her plaits one by one.
“Nothing’s happening Lydia.” Tavis’s voice shattered her pensive reverie and forced her mind back to the present.
She shook herself sharply, dragging her thoughts back to the task at hand. Coffee. She wanted coffee for her daughter-in-law.
“Maybe it’s like the black beans or dried peas and has to soak overnight,” she worried as she rubbed the back of her neck. Nothing was going right this morning.
Lydia had woken early, thinking about the lovely lass who had so bedazzled her son. Thinking about how the situation must seem from her point of view. Calamity after calamity had struck since her arrival.
Which is why she’d gone to the buttery to retrieve quite a store of the shining black beans her daughter-in-law so coveted. The least she could do was find Adrienne a cup of coffee this morning before she told her that the Hawk had left for Uster at dawn. Or worse, the news Tavis had discovered a scant hour ago: that Esmerelda had been trying to kill Adrienne but was now dead herself.
So it had come to this … peering into a pan full of glistening black beans that were doing not much of anything in the steaming water.
“Maybe we should smash the beans, Lydia,” Tavis said, leaning closer. So close that his lips were scant inches from hers when he said, “What think you?”
Lydia beamed. “Tavis, I think you just mi
ght have it. Get that mortar and pestle and let’s get at it. This morning I’d really like to be able to start her day off with coffee.” She’s going to need it.
“It’s getting out of hand, fool. A mortal lies dead,” King Finnbheara snapped.
“Of her own race’s hand. Not mine,” Adam clarified.
“But if you hadn’t been here, it would not have come to be. You are perilously close to destroying everything. If the Compact is ever broken, it will be by my Queen’s choosing, not through your act of idiocy.”
“You had a hand in this plan too, my liege.” Adam reminded. “Furthermore, I have harmed no mortal. I merely pointed out to the Rom that I was displeased. It was they who took action.”
“You split hairs quite neatly, but you’re too close to rupturing the peace we’ve kept for two millennia. This was not part of the game. The woman must go back to her time.” King Finnbheara waved a dismissive hand.
Adrienne was walking in the garden, thinking about the advantages of the sixteenth century and the serene bliss of unspoiled nature, when it happened. She suffered a horrid falling sensation, as if a great vortex had opened and a relentless whirlpool tugged her down. When she realized that she recognized the feeling, Adrienne opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. She’d felt this way just before she’d found herself on the Comyn’s lap; as if her body were being stretched thin and yanked at an impossible speed through a yawning blackness.
Agonizing pressure built in her head, she clutched it with both hands and prayed fervently, Oh, dear God, not again, please not again!
The stretching sensation intensified, the throb in her temples swelled to a crescendo of pain, and just when she was convinced she would be ripped in two, it stopped.
For a moment she couldn’t focus her eyes; dim shapes of furniture wavered and rippled in shades of gray. Then the world swam into focus and she gasped.
Adrienne stared in shock at the fluttering curtains of her own bedroom.
She shook her head to clear it and groaned at the waves of pain such a small movement caused.
“Bedroom?” she mumbled dumbly. Adrienne looked around in complete confusion. There was Moonshadow perched delicately upon the overstuffed bed in her customary way, little paws folded demurely over the wood foot-rail, staring back at her with an equally shocked expression on her feline face. Her lime golden eyes were rounded in surprise.
“Princess!”
Adrienne reached.
Adam quickly made a retrieving gesture with his hand and glared at his king. “She stays.”
King Finnbheara snapped his fingers just as quickly. “And I said she goes!”
Adrienne blinked and shook her head, hard. Was she back in Dalkeith’s gardens? No, she was in her bedroom again.
This time, determined to get her hands on Moonie, Adrienne lunged for her, startling the already confused cat. Moonie’s back arched like a horseshoe, her tiny whiskers bristled with indignation, and she leapt off the bed and fled the room on tiny winged paws.
Adrienne followed, hard on her heels. If by some quirk of fate she was to be given a second chance, she wanted one thing. To bring Moonshadow back to the sixteenth century with her.
Adam snapped his fingers as well. “Do not think to change your mind midcourse. You agreed to this, my King. It wasn’t just my idea.”
Adrienne groaned. She was in the gardens again.
It happened three more times in quick succession and each time she tried desperately to capture Moonie. A part of her mind protested that this simply couldn’t be happening, but another part acknowledged that if it was, she was damn well going to get her precious cat.
On the last toss, she almost had the bewildered little kitten cornered in the kitchen, when Marie, her erstwhile housekeeper, selected that precise moment to enter the room.
“Eees that you, Mees de Simone?” Marie gasped, clutching the doorjamb.
Startled, Adrienne turned toward her voice.
The women gaped at each other. A thousand questions and concerns tumbled through Adrienne’s mind; how much time had passed? Was her housekeeper Marie living in the house now? Had she taken Moonie for her shots? But she didn’t ask because she didn’t know how much longer she had.
Sensing a reprieve, Moonshadow bolted for the door. Adrienne lunged after her, and abruptly found herself once again in the garden, shaking from head to toe.
Adrienne moaned aloud.
She’d almost had her! Just one more time, she whispered. Send me back one more time.
Nothing.
Adrienne sank to a stone bench to spare her shaky legs and took several deep breaths.
Of all the nasty things to have to endure first thing in the morning. This was worse than a bad hair day. This was insult to injury on a no-coffee day.
She sat motionless and waited again, hopefully.
Nothing. Still in the gardens.
She shivered. It had been terrible, being tossed about like that, but at least now she knew Moonie was okay and that Marie obviously hadn’t waited too long before moving to the big house from her room over the garage. And although Adrienne’s head still ached from being tossed back and forth, there was comfort in her knowledge that her Moonshadow was not a little skeleton cat traipsing through a lonely house.
“I am your King. You will obey me, fool.”
“I found the woman, therefore one might say I started this game, my liege. Allow me to finish it.”
King Finnbheara hesitated, and Adam pounced on his indecision.
“My King, she rejects over and over again the man who pleased our Queen. She humiliates him.”
The King pondered this a moment. He claims a woman’s soul, his Queen had said dreamily. He had never seen such a look on Aoibheal’s face in all their centuries together, unless he himself had put it there.
Fury simmered in the King’s veins. He didn’t want to withdraw from this game any more than Adam did—he’d watched and savored every moment of the Hawk’s misery.
Finnbheara studied the fool intently. “Do you swear to honor the Compact?”
“Of course, my liege,” Adam lied easily.
A mortal pleased my Queen, the King brooded. “She stays,” he said decisively, and vanished.
CHAPTER 22
“WELCOME, MILORD.” RUSHKA’S GREETING SOUNDED PLEASANT enough, but Hawk felt a strange lack of warmth in it. Smudges of black marked the olive skin beneath the old man’s tired eyes and they were pink-rimmed, either from sitting too close to a smoky fire or from weeping. And Hawk knew Rushka didn’t weep.
Hawk stood in silence while the man ran a callused hand through his black hair. It was liberally streaked with gray and white, his craggy face handsome, yet equally marked by time. Absentmindedly, the man began to plait his long hair, staring into the dying embers as full morning broke across the valley.
Brahir Mount towered above this vale, its outline smoky blue and purple against the pale sky. Hawk dropped to a seat atop one of the large stones near the circle-fire and sat in silence, a trait that had endeared him to this tribe of Gypsies.
A woman appeared and deposited two steaming cups before leaving the two men to sit in companionable silence.
The old Gypsy sipped at his brew thoughtfully, and only when it was gone did he meet the Hawk’s gaze again.
“You don’t like our coffee?” he asked, noticing the Hawk had left his drink untouched.
Hawk blinked. “Coffee?” He peered into his cup. The liquid was rich, black and steaming. It smelled bitter but inviting. He took a sip. “It’s good,” he declared thoughtfully. With a hint of cinnamon, topped with clotted cream, the drink would be delicious. No wonder she liked it.
“A lass, is it?” The old man smiled faintly.
“You always did see right through me, Rushka, my friend.”
“I hear you’ve taken a wife.”
The Hawk looked piercingly at his old friend. “Why didn’t you come, Rushka? When she was ill, I sent for you.”
>
“We were told ’twas Callabron. We have no cure for such a poison,” the old man said. Rushka shifted his attention away from the Hawk’s steady gaze.
“I would have thought you’d have come, if only to tell me that, Rushka.”
The old man waved a hand dismissively. “Would have been a wasted trip. Besides, I was sure you had more pressing things to contend with. All aside, she was healed, and all’s well that ends well, eh?”
The Hawk blinked. He’d never seen his friend behave so oddly. Usually Rushka was courteous and cheerful. But today there was a heaviness in the air so tangible that even breathing seemed a labor.
And Rushka wasn’t talking. That in itself was an oddity.
Hawk sipped the coffee, his eyes lingering on a procession of people at the far end of the vale. If he wanted answers, he’d simply have to ask around his questions. “Why did you move out here, Rushka? You’ve camped in my north field by the rowans for years.”
Rushka’s gaze followed the Hawk’s and a bitterness shadowed his brown eyes. “Did you come for Zeldie?” Rushka asked abruptly.
I can’t handfast Zeldie, Hawk had told this man a decade ago when he’d been bound in service to his king. The Rom had desired a match and offered their most beautiful young woman. He’d explained that it simply wasn’t possible for him to take a wife, and while Rushka had understood, Esmerelda hadn’t. Zeldie, as they called her, had been so infuriated by his refusal that she’d quickly lain with man after man, shocking even her own liberal people. The Gypsies did not prize virginity—life was too short for abstinence of any sort, which was one of the reasons the people had seemed so intriguing to him as a young lad. He’d been ten when he’d secretly watched a dusky Gypsy girl with budding breasts and rosy nipples make love with a man. Two summers later she had come to him saying it was his turn. Ah, the things he’d learned from these people.
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