She dropped it as if she’d been burned and it fell across the window, blessedly sealing out the inexplicable vista. Unfortunately, as her eyes focused on the tapestry, she discovered a new horror. It was brilliantly woven and far too detailed: a warrior riding a horse into battle while an army of men clad in bloodstained plaid cheered. At the bottom of the hanging, embroidered in crimson, were four numbers that chipped away at her sanity: 1314.
Lisa moved to the bed and sank limply onto it, her energy sapped by the successive shocks. She stared blankly at the bed for a moment, then her hand flashed out and poked frantically at the mattress as she tested another part of her environment. Not your run-of-the-mill Serta Sleeper here, Lisa. Filled with a growing sense of panic, she pulled back the tightly tucked blankets and was momentarily sidetracked by the fragrance that clung to the linens. His scent: spice, danger, and man.
Firmly ignoring a desire to bury her nose in the sheets, she tugged at the mattress, which was little more than thin pallets laid atop one another encased in bristly fabric. One crunched like dried brush, the next seemed stuffed with lumpy wooly stuff, and the top had the feel of limp feathers. For the next twenty minutes Lisa scrutinized her surroundings, driven by increasing desperation. The stones felt cool, the fire felt hot. The liquid in the cup near the bed tasted vile. She heard the bagpipes. Every sense she possessed was activated by her tests. Absently, she swiped at her neck with the back of her hand, and when she drew it away a single drop of blood lay crimson upon her skin.
She understood with sudden certainty that she should never have touched the flask. Although it defied rational explanation, she was neither in Cincinnati nor in the twenty-first century. She felt the last of her hope that she was dreaming slip from her tenuous grasp. Dreams she knew well. But this was too real to be a dream, detailed far beyond her mind’s ability to fabricate.
Give me the flask, he’d demanded.
You see this? This is part of the dream? She’d been astonished.
But now, reflecting upon it, she realized that he’d seen it because it was not part of a dream. It was part of reality, his reality, a reality she now shared. That it was the flask she had touched just before she’d started to feel like she was falling, and the flask that he’d demanded, seemed too logical a connection to exist within a dream. Had the flask somehow carried her back to a man who had direct or indirect proprietary rights to it? And if so, was she truly in the fourteenth century?
With growing horror, she saw the frightening pattern: His odd manner of dress, his intent perusal of her clothing as if he’d never seen the like before, the primitive wooden tub situated before the fire, the strange language he’d spoken, the tapestry on the wall. All of it hinted at the impossible.
Stricken, she glanced around the room, reassessing it from a different perspective. She viewed it as her employment in the museum had led her to believe a medieval chamber would appear.
And all the oddities made perfect sense.
Logic insisted she was in a medieval stone castle, and according to the wall hanging, at some point in the fourteenth century, despite the improbability of it.
Lisa blew her breath out in a frantic attempt to calm down. She couldn’t be somewhere else in time, because if this was medieval Scotland, Catherine was some seven hundred years in the future—alone. Her mother desperately needed her and had no one else to rely on. That was unacceptable. Being stuck in a strange dream was now relegated to the minor problem it would have been, had it been true. A dream would have been easy to manage; eventually she would have awakened, no matter how awful things had been in the dream. If she was actually in the past, which was what all her senses insisted, she had to get back home.
But how?
Would touching the flask do it again? As she pondered that possibility she heard footsteps in the corridor outside the chamber. She moved quickly to the door, debated cowering behind it, then pressed her ear to it instead. It would be wise to discover everything she could about her environment.
“Do you think he’ll do it?” a voice echoed in the hall.
There was a long silence, then a sigh so loud that it carried through the thick wood. “I believe so. He does not take oaths lightly and knows the woman must die. Nothing can come in the way of our cause, Duncan. Dunnottar must be held, that bastard Edward must be defeated, and oaths sworn must be honored. He will kill her.”
As the steps faded down the corridor, Lisa leaned limply against the door. There was no doubt in her mind exactly which woman they’d meant.
Dunnottar? Edward? Dear God! She hadn’t merely traveled through time—she’d been dropped smack into the sequel to Braveheart!
IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT WHEN CIRCENN QUIETLY EASED his chamber door open a few inches. Peering through the narrow aperture, he saw that the room was dark. Only a faint bar of moonlight fell from behind the tapestry. She must be sleeping, he decided, which would give him the advantage of surprise. He would get this over with, quickly.
He swung the door open, stepped into the room with swift conviction, and promptly lost his footing. As he hit the floor of his chamber, he cursed; it had been cunningly littered with sharp pieces of broken stoneware. He scarcely had time to register that he’d tripped over a taut and cleverly tied cord, when he was smashed on the back of his head with a stoneware basin. “By Dagda, lass!” he roared, rolling over on his side and clutching his head. “Are you trying to kill me?”
“Of course I am!” she hissed.
Circenn could discern nothing more than a blur of motion in the darkness when, much to his astonishment and pain, she kicked him in a most sensitive part of his body—a part most women touched reverently. When he doubled over, his hands grazed more of the jagged shards on the floor, and he winced. She leaped over his body like a frightened doe, bounding for the open doorway.
Deadening himself to the pain, he moved swiftly. His hand flashed out and fastened on her ankle. “Leave this room and you are dead,” he said flatly. “My men will kill you the moment they see you.”
“So what’s the difference? You will too!” she cried. “Let go of me!” She kicked ineffectually at the hand clasped around her ankle.
He growled and banged the door shut with his foot. Then, pulling on her ankle, he caused her to lose her balance and brought her crashing down on top of him. He’d tried to roll her toward him as she fell to keep her from striking any of the stoneware she’d so deviously strewn about, but she bucked as she hit him and bounced over his side. A grapple ensued and she fought him with a surprising amount of courage and strength. Aware of his superior brawn, he focused his efforts on subduing her without hurting her or allowing her to harm herself. If anyone was going to be harming her, it was he.
They wrestled in silence, except for his grunts when she landed a particularly painful shot and her gasps when he finally captured her hands and held them above her head and stretched her on her back on the floor. His grasp nearly slipped when his hand closed around a band of metal on her wrist. As he forcefully restrained her arms, it slipped off and he closed his fist over it, then placed it in his sporran for later inspection—it might yield clues to her identity. He deliberately let the full weight of his body settle atop hers, knowing she would not be able to breathe. Submit, he willed silently as she bucked against him, trying to win her freedom. “I am stronger than you, lass. Cede this battle to me. Doona be foolish.”
“And let you kill me? Never! I heard your men.” She panted, trying to draw air into her lungs while crushed beneath his weight.
Circenn scowled. So that was why she’d laid a trap for him. She must have overheard Galan and Duncan as they’d retired to their rooms; they’d obviously said something about his killing her. He’d have to speak with those two about discretion, perhaps encourage them to revert to Gaelic while within the walls of the keep. He suffered a momentary lapse in concentration while admiring her resourcefulness, and she exploited it by bashing her forehead into his chin, and it hurt. He shook her forc
efully and was astonished when the woman didn’t yield, but tried to head butt him again.
She showed no signs of giving up the fight, and he realized that she would beat at him until she passed out from lack of breath. Since the only part of their respective bodies they both had free were their heads, he did the only thing he could think of—he kissed her. It would be impossible for her to head butt him with her lips pressed against his, and he’d learned long ago that the best way to control a fight was to get as far into his enemy’s space as possible. It took nerves of steel to handle six feet and seven inches of ruthless Brodie a breath away from one’s heart.
While congratulating himself for the inventive strategy he’d employed to keep her from hitting him with the only part of her body she could move, he acknowledged his attempt at self-deceit. He had wanted to kiss her since the moment she’d materialized in front of his bath—yet another violation of his careful rules. He knew that physical intimacy with this woman might skew his impartiality. But their skirmish had brought him into contact with every inch of her body, her curves were pressed against his hard length as if they were naked together, and her fierce, intelligent ambush had aroused him even more than her beauty had.
He had the scent of her in his nostrils: fear and woman and fury. It made him rock hard.
He sought to subdue her with his kiss, to make her understand his complete dominance, but the crush of her breasts beneath his chest heated him, and he found himself plunging his tongue between her lips with the intention of seducing rather than conquering. He sensed the moment when his kisses stopped being his way of controlling her and became nothing but a savage desire to indulge his appetite for the woman. All he need do was push aside his plaid, peel off her strange trousers, and push himself inside her. The temptation was exquisite.
His breathing quickened, sounding harsh to his own ears. It had been too long since he’d been with a woman, and his body was tightly strung. He angled himself away, drawing back to stop the painful press of his arousal against the cradle of her hips.
When she went motionless beneath him, he girded his will. Loath to lose the fullness of her lower lip, he sucked it hard as he drew away. He gazed down at her; her eyes were closed, her lashes dark fans against her cheeks.
“Are you going to kill me now?” she whispered.
Circenn stared at her, conflicting directives warring within him. In their tussle, he’d freed his dirk, and now he laid it against her throat. One swift plunge and it would be over. Brief, merciful, simple. His oath would be fulfilled, and there would be naught to do but remove the lass with the torn neck and forever-silenced heart and return to his carefully orchestrated world. Her eyes widened in alarm as she felt the chill metal brush against her skin.
He made the mistake of gazing into them. He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. Cut, he ordered himself, but his fingers didn’t so much as tense around the handle of the short knife. Cut! he raged at himself. Perversely, his body hardened against her, and he felt a sudden wave of desire to drop the knife and kiss her again.
Kill her now! he commanded himself.
Not a finger flinched. The knife lay useless against her skin.
“I can’t die now,” she whispered. “I haven’t even lived yet.”
The muscles in his arm recognized defeat before his mind did. There were no other words she could have said that would have dismayed him more. I haven’t even lived yet An eloquent plea to taste what life had to offer, and, whether she realized it or not, quite revealing. It told him much about her.
His arm relaxed, and he removed the knife from her throat with far greater ease than he’d placed it there. He muttered a curse as he flung it across the room and it sank into the door with a satisfying sound.
“Nay, lass, I will not kill you.” Not tonight, he appended silently. He would question her, study her, determine her involvement. Judge her: guilty or innocent. If he found evidence of subterfuge or a shallow and avaricious personality, his blade would easily find the mark, he assured himself. “I need to ask you some questions. If I let you up, will you sit quietly on the bed and answer me?”
“Yes. I can’t breathe,” she added. “Hurry.”
Circenn shifted so his weight was not resting fully on her. He allowed her to regain her freedom in regulated stages so she understood that he was giving it to her. It was neither a freedom she had earned nor one she could ever hope to take. He granted her passage, permitted her range of motion. It was imperative she understand that his control over her was absolute.
Despite his uncomfortable state of arousal, he forced her to keep close contact as she slipped her body from beneath his. It was a purely male show of dominance. He scarcely gave her room enough to find her knees beneath her. He leaned back minutely so she was forced to falter to her feet by clutching his shoulders, which put her lips a mere breath away from his. He would be all over her, until she acquiesced to his dictates.
She kept her gaze defiantly averted, refusing to look at him while she used his body to pull herself up. Had you met my gaze, lass, I would have pushed you farther, he thought, for had she still possessed enough defiance to meet his eyes he would have provoked submission some other way. He rose in tandem with her so their bodies touched at many contact points, and didn’t miss her swift intake of breath when he deliberately shifted so her breasts brushed against his abdomen. He backed her to the bed and, with one gentle push, seated her upon it.
Then he turned his back on her as if she were nothing, no threat, insignificant. Another lesson she must learn—he had nothing to fear from her. He could turn his back on her with impunity. His movement had the secondary boon of giving him time to quell his desire. He took several deep breaths, bolted the door from the inside, and whipped his dirk from the wood and slapped it into his boot. He lit tapers before turning back to face her. By then he was breathing evenly and his plaid was carefully bunched at the front. She didn’t need to know what toll their enforced closeness had taken on him.
She had buried her face in her hands and her coppery hair slipped in a glossy fall across her knees. He reminded himself not to look at her long legs in those revealing trousers. Scarcely concealed by the pale blue fabric, a man could follow the slim line of her ankles over muscled calves and up shapely thighs to the vee of her woman’s privacy. Those trousers could seduce a Templar Grand Master.
“Who are you?” he began quietly. He would continue in a gentle voice until she demonstrated resistance. Then he might roar at her. With a small measure of amusement, he conceded the probability that this lass would roar back.
“My name is Lisa,” she murmured into her palms.
A good start, obedient and swift. “Lisa, I am Circenn Brodie. Would that we had met under different circumstances, but we did not, and we must make the best of it. Where did you find my flask?”
“In the museum where I work,” she said in a monotone.
“What is a museum?”
“A place that displays treasures and artifacts.”
“My flask was on display? For people to see?” he asked indignantly. Hadn’t the curse worked?
“No. It had just been found and was still in the chest. It hadn’t been placed on display yet.” She didn’t raise her head from her hands.
“Ah, so the chest had not been opened. You were the first one to touch it.”
“No, two men touched it before I did.”
“You saw them touch it—truly touch the flask?”
She was silent for a long moment. “Oh my God, the tongs!” she exclaimed. Her head shot up and she stared at him with an expression of horror. “No. I didn’t actually see them touch it. But there was a pair of tongs lying next to the chest. I’ll bet Steinmann and his cohort never touched the chest or the flask at all! Is that what did this to me—touching the flask? I knew I shouldn’t have pried into business that wasn’t mine.”
“This is very important, lass. You must answer me truthfully. Do you know what the flask contains?”
She gave him a look of utter innocence. She was either the consummate actress or was telling the truth. “No. What?”
Actress or innocent? He rubbed his jaw while he scrutinized her. “Where are you from, lass? England?”
“No. Cincinnati.”
“Where is that?”
“In the United States.”
“But you speak English.”
“Our people fled from England several hundred years ago. Once, my countrymen were English. Now we call ourselves American.”
Circenn regarded her blankly. A look of sudden revelation crossed her face, and he wondered at it.
“That was silly of me. Of course you couldn’t possibly understand. The United States is far across the sea from Scotland,” she said. “We didn’t like England either, so I can empathize,” she said reassuringly. “You’ve probably never heard of my land, but I’m from very far away and it’s imperative that I get back. Soon.”
When he shook his head, her jaw tightened, and Circenn felt a flash of admiration; the lass was a fighter to the last. He suspected that if he had attempted to kill her, there would have been no pleas from her lips but vows of vengeance to the bitter finale. “I am afraid I cannot send you back just now.”
“But you can send me back at some point? You know how?” She held her breath, awaiting his reply.
“I am certain we can manage,” he said noncommittally. If she was from a land across the sea, and if he could find a way to accept not killing her, he could surely find a ship to put her on, if it was decided that she could be released. The fact that she was from so far away might make it easier for him to free her, because it was doubtful her homeland had any interest in Scotland; and once she was gone, perhaps he could force himself to forget he’d broken a rule. Out of sight might well be out of mind. Her appearance in the keep could truly have been a vast mistake. But how had his chest gotten to a land so far away? “How did your museum obtain my chest?”
The Highlander Series 7-Book Bundle Page 65
