Much Ado In the Moonlight (42 page)

Now, if she could just get him to listen to her while he was otherwise engaged.

“The Frenchman will send for you,” she shouted over Connor and Cormac’s cursing. “His messenger will promise to tell you where to find your children.”

“Be silent!” Connor thundered.

She waited until he’d taken a bit more of his irritation out on his cousin before she attempted anything else.

“Beware the Frenchman,” she said. “He will murder you in the clearing near the stream—”

Connor growled and pointed his sword at her. “If you say one more word, I will pull out your entrails and strangle you with them.”

She blinked. “You will?”

“Well,” he conceded reluctantly, “likely not, you being a woman and all.”

“Could we sit and visit, then?” she asked.

He swore in disgust. “Nay, we may
not
! Woman, I’ve
business
to see to that does not include listening to some strange, daft wench who would be better served by being silenced permanently!”

“But—”

“Be
gone,
ye silly wench!”

“We can’t chat over a cup of ale?”

Connor swore viciously and took her by the arm. He dragged her to the front door.

“Wait,” she said, digging her heels into his floor. This wasn’t going at all how she’d planned. It wasn’t even going according to her worst-case scenario. She had to at least blurt out a warning or two. Maybe then something would click with him and he would stop long enough to listen to everything she had to say. She suspected that convincing him he wanted to have dinner with her might be asking too much.

She took a deep breath. “The arrow will come at you. Your horse will crush you beneath it and then the Frenchman will come and finish you,” she said quickly.

He growled.

“He will tell you as you die that your bairns and your wife died of the ague because he dragged them through the wet for days on end—”

She found, quite suddenly, that she was flying down the front steps. Fortunately, there were only four of them. Even more providential was the fact that one of Ian’s first lessons had been the tuck and roll. She stumbled down the stairs, tucked, and rolled. She came back up onto her feet and turned to look back at the hall.

Connor stood there, his chest heaving, and glared at her a final time.

Then he slammed the door and didn’t open it again.

Victoria brushed herself off and took a good long look at Connor’s medieval home. It was gray, unforgiving, built to withstand assaults of all kinds. Sort of like Connor himself.

Well, things had certainly not gone as planned.

She stood there for several minutes and simply stared at the keep. She could go back and try again. Maybe if she tackled Connor to the ground and sat on him, she might be able to keep him immobile enough to make him listen to her.

Somehow, though, she doubted it.

It was with great reluctance that she realized the most unfortunate truth of all.

Her trip to the past had been a bust.

She thought about Connor, his beautiful, mortal self, and realized that perhaps she had leaped where she should have looked. Never mind that he had told her unequivocally not to try to rescue him, that he was not reasonable as a mortal, that he would not listen to her, that it was very likely that he would do her harm.

Had she listened?

No, she had not.

Suddenly, unpleasant and uncomfortable realizations washed over her. There might be, she conceded, parts of herself that were not very likeable. One of those parts might possibly have been her need to control everything and everyone around her. Looking at her life from her current perspective in the past, she could see that she had spent almost the whole of her adult life micromanaging the lives of the actors who worked for her, demanding commitments far and beyond what other directors demanded. She realized with an equal and sudden clarity that she did so because she desperately feared that if she let people act the way they wanted to, they might do something she didn’t like.

As Connor just had.

She wanted to sit down, but there was nowhere to go but the ground, and heaven only knew what kind of response that would bring from Connor’s clan. It was difficult to come to terms with it, but she realized that she had no choice but to accept that she simply could not save Connor’s life. She couldn’t fix him, she couldn’t control him, she couldn’t help him when he didn’t want to be helped. She couldn’t write his script for him.

More importantly, she realized that she had no right to try.

She heard the door open behind her. She almost didn’t turn around, but her curiosity got the better of her.

Cormac came loping down the steps, mopping up the blood dripping from his nose with the hem of his tunic. He stopped in front of her and smiled.

She was almost sure he’d had more teeth ten minutes ago.

“Where will you go?” he asked.

She smiled faintly. “Home.”

“Don’t you have a horse?”

“It ran away.”

He lifted both eyebrows in surprise. “Indeed. I vow I do not like the thought of you wandering about without protection.”

“Don’t worry; I have a sword.”

“Can you use it?”

“If I have to.” She paused. All right, so she couldn’t save Connor. That didn’t mean she couldn’t make one last effort to warn him. “You know, Cormac, there is something you could do for me.”

“Name it.”

She smiled truly. What a gallant soul. “Convince Connor to be careful in dealing with the Frenchman. He is not to be trusted.”

“How do you know? Are you in league with him?”

“No. I have the Second Sight.”

“Aaahh,” Cormac said, satisfied. “Our grandmother had it as well. I daresay if you had told Connor as much, he would have listened to you.”

She shook her head. “I’ve told him all he needs to know. Just help him, if you can.”

He looked at her for several minutes in silence. “Did you come through the fairy ring in truth, Victoria McKinnon?”

She hesitated. “That would be difficult to believe, wouldn’t it?”

“Scotland is a magical place, my lady.”

Victoria was just certain she’d heard that somewhere before. She suspected James MacLeod carved it into big rocks in every century he visited. “Well, magical it may be, but the Scotland of your day is no longer the place for me.” She smiled. “Keep Connor safe. That’s all that matters.”

He stared at her in amazement, and that was the sight she carried with her as she walked from the hall and made her way back through the forest.

Fortunately, not much time had passed inside the hall, so it was still near noon when she started through the forest. It was fortunate, because it made it quite easy to find her path back through the trees. And given that she could hardly see for her tears, that was a very good thing, indeed.

She had done the right thing. Not the easy thing, but the right thing.

She wondered what Connor would say when she saw him in the future. Maybe that was why he had been so vocal in his insistence that she not try. Maybe he had known she would come and he would ignore her and be killed just the same.

But how could that be, when she hadn’t met him until after he’d been dead for centuries?

She decided to try and sort it out later. For now, she could carry with her the knowledge that she had tried and that she had walked away. Hopefully that counted for something in the grander scheme of things.

She turned back for one final glimpse of Connor’s forest, then turned away and trudged off toward the fairy ring.

Connor
paced about his great hall, wishing desperately that someone would enter those doors and tell him that there were enemies tampering with the cattle, or crofters needing a rescue from unruly neighboring clans, or perhaps even the stray band of Englishmen lost in the north and desiring a quick send-off to the next life.

Unfortunately, all he had was his very pleasant, very reasonable cousin coming inside to be further tormented.

“You should have listened to her,” Cormac said easily.

Connor growled at him, but his cousin only smiled, unafraid. And given that the responsibility for his bloody nose could be laid at Connor’s feet, along with that tooth that had been rotting out of his head an hour earlier and now seemed to have migrated to the floor, Connor refrained from further comment with his fists.

“She was daft,” Connor muttered. “Me, slain? Ha!”

“She seemed in full possession of her senses. Besides, why would a McKinnon want to do you a good turn? I vow, Connor, she was in earnest.”

“She was a McKinnon?” Connor exclaimed. “I
knew
it.” Then he paused. “But why would a McKinnon want to enter my hall? Surely that she did so is proof enough that she had lost all her wits.”

“You’re an untrusting whoreson.”

“Can you fault me for it?”

Cormac sighed. “Nay, I cannot. But,” he added, “I think you should consider her words. You know, she had the Sight.”

Connor pursed his lips and turned away. Victoria McKinnon might have been beautiful, but she was daft, spouting all that nonsense about him being killed—

He looked back over his shoulder at his cousin. “The Sight?”

“Aye, so she claimed.”

Connor turned away and reluctantly gave that some thought. His grandmother had possessed the Sight and she had certainly predicted more than one thing over the course of her life that had come to pass in its own time.

He considered what the McKinnon wench had spewed at him. His wife had indeed left him a fortnight ago, taking his bairns with him and casting in her lot with that cuckolding Frenchman, but that was common knowledge.

Connor turned and looked into the fire. It wasn’t in his nature to ruminate overmuch on things he had decided he had no time for, but even so, there was something almost familiar about that wench. As if he’d dreamed of her but only just remembered that at this moment.

He frowned. He was quite certain he wasn’t feuding with McKinnons at present. Then why did her name raise his hackles?

He rubbed his hands over his face vigorously. He was having a damned unpleasant se’nnight.

The door burst open. Connor looked, hoping foolishly that it might be that feisty redheaded wench come back to torment him a bit more.

Instead, it was a man, filthy and drenched, gasping for breath. He fell to his knees just inside the doorway. Connor strode over to him, but stopped a handful of paces away. He heard Victoria McKinnon’s words whisper in his mind.

He considered, then shook his head with a snort. Impossible. He didn’t consider himself above death, but he was well aware of his own fierceness and prowess as a scout. No one would catch him unawares.

Well, unless Victoria McKinnon was the one to murder him, but somehow he suspected she was not capable of that. Besides, what reason would she have for it? He could think of several who might want him dead, but he could not list that flame-haired wench among them.

He looked at the man kneeling on the floor in front of him. “Aye?”

“I bring you tidings of your lady, my laird,” the man gasped.

The hair on the back of his neck stood up. It was as Victoria McKinnon had predicted.

Then again, perhaps she
was
in league with the Frenchman and she had known this fool would come to bring his tidings.

“What tidings?” Connor asked flatly. “That she is fled?”

“She dies, my laird. She calls for you.”

“Why?” Connor asked. “That she might again remind me of my condition as cuckold?”

The man shook his head. “She bid me say she will tell you where your children lay.”

Connor caught his breath. Ach, but if there was one thing that would have induced him to leave his home, ’twas that.

He shrugged aside the warning. “I will come,” he said shortly. “Are you alone?”

“Aye, my laird.”

“Refresh yourself whilst I fetch my gear.”

The man nodded, accepted drink, and was waiting when Connor came back with his sword and cloak. They walked down the steps to the ground, where Connor found his horse waiting for him.

“What is your name?” he asked the messenger.

“MacDuff.”

“Well, then, lead on, MacDuff.” Connor paused, then frowned. By the saints, was he losing his mind? Lay on? Lead on? The words swirled in his head. He had a vague memory of having a ferocious fight with someone over which it was.

He’d fought with that red-haired wench. He was almost certain of it.

But how was that possible? He’d just clapped eyes on her but an hour ago. Was he having a vision of something else?

By the saints, was his
grandmère
’s Sight coming home to roost in him?

He put his hands to his head and held it for a moment until the fog receded. Obviously, breakfast’s vile smell should have signed that something was amiss with it. Next time, he wouldn’t ignore his nose in favor of his belly.

He vaulted up into the saddle.

“Let us be off,” he said curtly. “MacDuff.”

The man took the lead and they set off. They hadn’t left the castle behind before it began to rain. Connor cursed. The day was doomed.

He paused. Doomed?

The hair on the back of his neck rose in direct proportion to how far away from his keep he rode. The man in front of him looked back now and again, as if he made certain Connor was still there.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Connor barked.

The man jumped as if he’d been pricked with a dirk. He nodded nervously and continued on.