At least, if Baird had his way.
And if Baird could do anything about it, he’d have Aurelia’s eyes sparkling routinely. Baird had to help Aurelia face the truth, however painful it might be.
But right now, he had to ease away the shadows he had unwittingly put in her eyes.
“What do you seek beneath the board?” she asked.
“I was looking to see where you hid all that pizza and wine.” Baird met her gaze solemnly. “Are you sure you don’t have a hollow leg?”
“Not me!” Aurelia laughed heartily, a far cry from the contrived trill that Marissa periodically let herself utter. “You have seen my legs enough to know the truth!”
Oh, that he had. Baird snuck a glance at her dancing toes and told himself that the heat in his veins was because of the wine.
“What about a dog?” he demanded with mock skepticism. “Have you been slipping all your pizza to some hungry mutt?”
“No! There are no dogs in your hall.”
“Hmm.” Baird stood and propped his hands on his hips, making a great show of looking around the room. He fixed a stern eye on Aurelia. “But you’re too small to eat more than me and drink more than Julian, let alone at the same time. Are you sure you don’t have big pockets in that dress?”
Aurelia scrambled to her feet and lifted her chin proudly. “Do you doubt the word of a Pictish princess?”
“No, just her capacity.” Baird closed the distance between them, fighting against a playful smile. “Maybe I should check,” he suggested wickedly and snatched at her.
“Oh, ho! You will not touch me!” Aurelia danced away evasively, holding up her left hand to ward Baird off.
It worked.
Three delicate, very blue whorls uncoiled on Aurelia’s left palm, the trio radiating from an ornate spiraled core. Each curve as graceful as a fern in the spring forest. It almost reminded Baird of drawings of galaxies, before he realized exactly where he had seen this pattern before.
It was in Talorc’s book.
The hair on the back of Baird’s neck rose right on cue.
“What’s that?” he asked, and his voice was unusually strained.
Aurelia looked to her hand, as though it was no big deal. “It is the mark of the onset of my courses and the pledge of my vows. Surely you have seen one like it before.”
Oh, he had, but how could she know that? Baird refused to even look towards the book. He took a step backwards, his gaze locked on the tattoo. An eerie tingle danced over his flesh.
It couldn’t be a Pictish tattoo!
Baird must have drunk more than he thought he had, to even be considering such a possibility! Anyone could have a tattoo made in any city in the world. It wasn’t hard to do - and if Aurelia had wanted to play the Pictish princess with conviction, she might have deliberately chosen this design.
If nothing else, Aurelia had done her homework.
But all the logical explanations in the world couldn’t undermine Baird’s intuitive certainty that this was the real thing.
Which was not the way Baird thought, at all. He wasn’t intuitive, he didn’t have any use for instinct, he certainly put no value in emotion. Only logic served a man well.
Even if logic was coming up a bit short in this circumstance. Maybe it wasn’t Dunhelm that had cast a spell over him, after all.
Maybe it had been Aurelia.
His blood ran cold at the thought. “It can’t be real,” Baird argued, but there was no conviction in his voice.
“It most certainly is real,” Aurelia scoffed. “I still recall the pain.”
“Then why do it?”
Aurelia lifted her chin proudly now as though insulted. “I am half Viking blood, by my sire, and unafraid of anything laid before me. A Viking neither backs away from a challenge, nor forgets obligation, nor leaves the field in defeat.”
She cast a scathing glance at Julian, now snoring on the floor. “Tell your Roman priest that the power of the old ones is yet strong.”
There was that talk about Julian being a priest again. Baird shifted his weight uneasily and refused to look to Talorc’s book.
Aurelia would have strolled from the room regally, no doubt, but she stumbled on the hem of her dress. She did an intricate little two-step towards the stairs and she caught her balance before Baird could even move to help her.
Then, she took a deep breath and pivoted to stare Baird right in the eye. “And tell him that the spell he laid on the fruit juice was weak indeed.”
Spell?
Before Baird could ask, Aurelia turned away. She must have done so a little too quickly, for she wobbled on her feet, then gripped the doorframe for a long moment. She crossed the foyer without looking back, the faint sound of a hiccup carrying to his ears.
Baird stood and stared after her for a long moment. She didn’t know what wine or pizza was, she drank mead, she didn’t understand indoor plumbing. Aurelia couldn’t really be from the eighth century.
She just couldn’t.
Baird eyed his snoring lawyer and realized that although one contestant had made it to her room under her own steam, the other one would need a little assistance.
And he was the only one left to provide it.
*
Chapter Eleven
Aurelia peeled off her clothes and cast them impatiently on the floor when she reached her room. She knew it was not her imagination that the whore’s chemise nearly burned her skin. The woman’s malevolence was powerful enough to have a life of its own.
The moonlight was spilling through the window in her chambers and Aurelia pressed against the clear pane to look. The moon was waxing towards full.
It had been the last new moon before the Moon of Eostre when Baird attacked Dunhelm, she remembered. And it was still early spring, she could tell by the growth around her.
Aurelia guessed that she had slept for at least seven nights. Which could only mean that the priest had drugged her.
And that his power to see great buildings rise from the ground was beyond anything Aurelia had ever seen before.
But she had bested him in a simple contest of will. Aurelia rubbed her temple in confusion. Clearly, Julian had bewitched this wine to prove the strength of his power over hers.
But he had fallen prey to his own spell. It was a sign of incredible incompetence. Just like his spell on her room door.
Though both were odd contrast with the other signs of his power.
And where had her sire gone?
The moonlight splayed across the tapestry on the chamber floor, painting an inviting square of silver light. Aurelia tugged the draperies back and made the square into a large rectangle.
Aurelia’s second gift was the ability to see her way most clearly when she beckoned prophetic dreams to her sleep. On this night, in Bard’s dangerous den, she needed that gift’s aid more than she ever had in all her days.
Aurelia stood in the rays of the glowing moon, her flesh bare to its cool light. She closed her eyes and began to chant the words her mother had taught her from the cradle.
The chant surrounded and embraced her, lifting her above the limitations of the earth. Deep in a hidden corner of her mind, Aurelia reached into a deep well of shadows and pulled to light the dreaming stone.
Aurelia felt its smoothness as though she held it within her hands, knew that it was magically wrought of the spittle of countless snakes. In her mind’s eye, she stroked the veined red and gray of the stone, and urged its power into herself.
The stone began to glow. Aurelia felt its strength build within her, felt the tide rise in her favor, and smiled with certainty that this night’s dream would be powerful in its insight.
In the peril confronting her, Aurelia needed no less. She tipped back her head, stretched her arms wide to embrace the moon’s silver light, and boldly beckoned to the Dreaming.
*
Baird tossed restlessly in his sleep. He saw himself descending the stone stairs, cutting back the thorns as he had thi
s very morning.
But Baird never dreamed.
Never had, never would. Dreams were for other people. Even in sleep, a part of his mind pointed out logical inconsistencies.
But the dream continued, all the same, apparently unaware that it was unwelcome on this foreign turf.
Baird noticed suddenly that the light was different than it had been that morning. He saw the flaming torch held high in his own hand, the golden firelight dancing off every surface and making intriguing shadows. The night pressed against him from all sides.
And despite himself, his attention was snared.
Baird caught a glimpse of a long, full ostrich feather bobbing in his peripheral vision, and knew it must adorn his hat. A long sword with an elaborate handguard bumped against his leg, his feet, when he looked, were shod in high cuffed leather boots.
He had stepped into a Three Musketeers movie.
The cold shadows of the stairwell rose higher and higher around him, the damp smell of the underground chamber filled his nostrils. He looked up, just before ducking beneath the portal as he had this morning, but was shocked to find the sky overhead a star-studded bowl.
It had been raining and gray this morning.
To Baird’s further surprise, the stone portal before him was slightly ajar. This wasn’t the same at all.
The dream Baird slipped through doorway cautiously, blinking in the shadows and shivering in the chill sheltered within. He stepped forward, slowly at first, holding the torch this way and that. His hand was on the hilt of his sword.
Baird could see the silhouette of Aurelia’s sleeping form. She breathed slowly and deeply, the sound a soft whisper in the dead silence of the well. The lady slumbered like a corpse, the flickering light giving the impression that her lips moved ever so slightly.
Baird drew nearer to Aurelia’s side, feeling the same weird magnetic pull he had experienced this morning. His heart thundered in his ears with the audacity of what he meant to do.
Aurelia lay undisturbed as Baird reached her side. The musty smell of the chamber enveloped him, the sweetly familiar perfume of Aurelia’s flesh rose to tease his nostrils. He held the torch high, eying the way her delicate hands were folded across her chest and felt the satisfaction of a man who had reached his goal.
What goal?
Gemdelovely Gemdelee. Should her true love kiss her, his bride she will be.
The strange phrase made Baird toss and turn in his sleep, as though he would tear free of his mind’s games.
But the dream-Baird was undeterred. His hand came to rest on the stone beside her hip. Baird had the same sense of powerlessness he had felt this morning. He was startled to see his hand garbed with heavy green leather and lace spilling from his sleeve. In his mind’s eye, he bent over the sleeping woman, his heart racing.
He was going to kiss her.
Baird’s attention fixed on the shadowed silhouette of her sculpted lips. His mouth was only a finger’s breadth from hers when a bellow erupted immediately behind him.
Baird straightened with alarm. He pivoted on his heel and saw the flash of the knife just before he was struck. Baird dropped the torch with a cry and hauled his own sword from its scabbard, too late to make a difference.
A searing pain erupted in his chest. Baird looked down in disbelief, the torch still burning fitfully from the stone floor.
A knife with an ornately chased grip was buried to its hilt between Baird’s ribs.
And his own blood ran in a dark, sleek current to puddle on the stone floor. A clatter of footsteps betrayed his attackers’ flight, then there was no sound beyond the lady’s faint breath and his own labored breathing.
A strangled cry broke from Baird’s lips, then he roared in mingled pain and disappointment. He tried to run toward daylight and assistance, but his legs refused to support him.
Baird fell to his knees and fought to crawl out of the well, but without success. His limp fingers touched growing pool of blood as though he could not believe it was his own. The room began to fade to black from all sides.
He had failed.
Again.
*
No!
Baird sat up bolt upright in his bed, shaking from head to toe. The sweat was running down his back in a cold river. His heart hammered, his breathing was labored and his fingers rose instinctively to touch the burning of his lethal wound.
But there was no raged hole in his chest, much less an ornate knife.
Baird swallowed his fear with difficulty. He ran his fingers across his unblemished flesh and breathed a ragged sigh.
There was no knife. He had not been attacked.
He wasn’t dying.
He wasn’t even bleeding. Baird took a deep, steadying breath and heard it rattle out of his lungs.
He was in his room, alone, safe in his new hotel.
And outside his windows, the moonlight toyed with the incessant waves of the sea.
Baird couldn’t help rising from his bed. There was no way he would sleep now. He shoved a hand through his hair, drawn to the window by some force he could not explain. His gaze sought the shadows shrouding the steps he had only cleared this morning.
Nothing moved on the resort grounds. Baird could see the outlines of the briars and barely detect the shadow of the descending stairs.
Baird hadn’t known Aurelia was there this morning - he couldn’t have known she was there. He had just wanted to uncover Dunhelm’s secrets because Dunhelm was old. And he had found a gorgeous if unbalanced woman that even now he felt compelled to protect.
Mr. Responsibility, that was Baird.
Baird had always loved the challenge of untangling a mystery - and Aurelia was an enigma and a half. His interest in her was perfectly logical, if he thought it through. She was beautiful and beguiling, a double whammy for a red-blooded man who loved mysteries. Baird almost believed his own explanation.
He looked to tangled sheets on the bed and swallowed awkwardly.
Almost.
Baird tasted again the agony of his failure and couldn’t explain its source, much less his certainty that it was not the first time he had been here.
Oddly enough, Baird’s gut demanded that he go to Aurelia right now and make sure that she was all right. It made no sense at all. She would be asleep!
As he should be.
Baird paced the length of the room and back. What had Aurelia been doing in that well? How had she gotten in there, without disturbing the briars? There must be another entrance…
But Baird knew he had seen no other entry point to the stone chamber. He looked to the right, pressing his hot face against the cool glass, knowing her room was three doors down. But he couldn’t see Aurelia’s room from this vantage point. Of course not! The wing was built perfectly straight.
Gemdelovely Gemdelee. Should her true love kiss her, his bride she will be.
Bride. Baird wasn’t the marrying kind, he knew that without a doubt. Only one other woman had kept him awake nights with desire, one other woman with plans for marriage.
And that had been nothing compared to this. Maybe that was what had prompted his nightmare.
Maybe he shouldn’t have had so much Chianti.
*
Aurelia sat up in her room and watched the moon climb higher as she puzzled over what she had witnessed.
Why had the dream come from another’s perspective?
Whose perspective had it been? Who had come to her while she slept? Why did she feel he had come more than once? If only he had awakened her and she could have witnessed the truth!
And what did the name Gemdelovely Gemdelee have to do with anything at all?
Aurelia frowned. The Dreaming was supposed to provide clarity, not more questions. It was clear there was more at work here than she had guessed.
Her head ached with the aftermath of the wine’s enchantment and Aurelia could think no more. What she needed was a good night’s sleep, for morning would undoubtedly bring some answers her way.
>
Perhaps there would be something better to eat in Bard’s hall than there had been on this night. Reassured at the prospect, Aurelia burrowed beneath the duvet and was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
*
Baird was feeling far from his best the next morning.
Chianti had more of a bite than he remembered. That was the only possible explanation for his headache. It certainly couldn’t have anything to do with his nightmare.
Or his restlessness afterwards.
It was indicative of how he was feeling that Elizabeth’s coffee didn’t taste half bad. There is nothing more frightening to someone who relies on a good cup of java to start their engine than the thin instant coffee offered in Britain.
Baird sipped and struggled not to groan.
What he needed was a couple of aspirin.
“There you are, Mr. Beauforte!” Elizabeth erupted from the little nook that she had made her own with a perkiness that Baird could not have returned to save his life.
Elizabeth was a woman in her mid-fifties whose hips showed a livelong love of simple hearty food and whose laugh lines indicated her merry good nature.
She was also as much of a morning person as Baird was not. Elizabeth reminded him of his fifth foster mother.
“Nothing like a good hot breakfast to get a man going in the morning!” she declared cheerfully and bustled about, setting the table with alarming efficiency.
Even watching her made his headache worse.
Baird shoved his hand through his hair as Elizabeth fixed him with a bright eye. “Will you starting with oatmeal this morning, Mr. Beauforte?”
“No, not today, Elizabeth. Maybe just the coffee…”
“Mr. Beauforte! Why, you can’t be eating so poorly in my kitchen, even if it is only my kitchen for a wee while.” Elizabeth waved off any potential objection before it could be uttered and trotted back to her lair. “You just sit right there and I’ll have a fine Scottish breakfast ready for you in no time at all.”
Time Travel Romances Boxed Set Page 14
