Seduced by the Highlander (10 page)

She wondered uneasily if she had just confirmed everyone’s fears that she was a raving lunatic, who would be better off at an asylum. Had she really just told him that she saw ghosts of herself? She wouldn’t be surprised if he decided to abandon her right now and take his chances with the curse.

“It’s been a long day,” he said, watching her carefully while she poked at her supper. “You’re exhausted, lass.”

“I most certainly am.”

Reaching for the jug of wine, he rose to his feet, circled around the fire, and refilled her glass. “Are you cold?”

She shook her head, but shivered. He went to fetch a blanket from one of the saddlebags and wrapped it securely around her shoulders.

“You’ll have to prepare yourself for tomorrow,” he told her, sitting down on the opposite side of the fire and reaching for his plate. “It won’t get any easier. We’ll ride around the Gargunnock Hills in the morning, stop for supplies in Kippen, and maybe get a hot meal, but once we reach the Great Glen, we’ll be sleeping and eating under the stars. Will you be able to manage?”

She looked down at the bedroll, then across at him in the firelight, taking some comfort in the fact that he was, to some extent, concerned for her well-being.

“I suppose if I have come this far,” she heartily replied, “I can survive the rest, for the sake of recovering my memories. It hardly matters anyway, where I rest my head. My joints are groaning with agony; my eyes feel like they are full of sand. Even if there were cannons going off over my head, I’m quite sure I would sleep like a baby.”

“Good.” He stared at her for a moment, then dug into his supper. They spoke no more after that.

Later, after washing the dishes in the creek, Catherine returned to the fire and lay down on her side. The last thing she remembered as she drew the blanket over her shoulders was the sight of Lachlan on the other side of the fire, lounging back on an elbow, sipping a cup of wine, watching her through the iridescent flames with those smoldering dark eyes, before her own weary lids fluttered closed.

*   *   *

Sometime during the night, Catherine tore the blanket off and scrambled to her feet.
“Get off me!”
she shrieked, slapping at her cheeks and arms, spitting out the dirt she could still taste on her tongue.

She was aware of the campfire and the trees, and part of her knew that she was somewhere in Scotland, traveling with Lachlan MacDonald, the Highlander who had attacked her in an ancient stone circle—and that she’d had a dream. But the effect upon her mind was so vivid and disturbing, she could not yet escape it. Her heart was racing with terror. She felt as if she were suffocating. She couldn’t get the dirt off her sleeves!

Suddenly Lachlan was there, holding her steady by the arms. “You’re dreaming, Raonaid. Wake up. Look at me!” The deep timbre of his voice compelled her to focus on his eyes, darkly luminous in the night.

It took a moment for her to accept that there was no dirt on her. Still feeling panicked, she held on to him, her hands curled tightly around his forearms.

“Are you all right?” he asked when he seemed certain that she was fully awake.

“I dreamed someone was trying to bury me,” she said, “as if I were dead. I was lying in a grave, and dirt was being shoveled onto my face. It felt very real.”

“It wasn’t,” he said. “No one was trying to bury you.”

“Am I going mad? I fear that I am. The nuns in the convent thought I was haunted by the devil. If my grandmother hadn’t come to claim me when she did, they might have sent me away, to someplace terrible.” Her body began to tremble.

Lachlan regarded her with concern in the moonlight. He was completely drawn in.

Was this a trick? he wondered, working hard to shake himself out of the spell. Was she making it up in order to convince him that she was truly in need of help?

It had occurred to him more than once that she might simply be seeking another chance to return to Kinloch and destroy his cousin’s marriage. She had been obsessed with Angus before, to a murderous degree. Perhaps she was out to finally seize everything she wanted—a dead heiress’s fortune and the powerful Chief of Kinloch as well.

A tear spilled from the corner of her eye, rushed down her soft, pale cheek, and all thoughts of theft and treachery tumbled from Lachlan’s mind.

“There’s no need to cry,” he heard himself saying as all his protective instincts came surging to the fore. “You’re going to be fine. I promise.”

“I’m
not
crying,” she insisted, lifting her chin, but she looked so frightened, he couldn’t bring himself to abandon her just yet.

He gently wiped the tear away from her cheek and looked into her eyes.
It would just be for this one night,
he told himself. He would give her the benefit of the doubt until she went back to sleep.

She placed a shaky hand on his chest, on top of his shirt, and he allowed her that liberty, covering it with his own to keep it warm. When at last the fear in her eyes began to subside, he led her back to the fire.

“Lie down now,” he said. “You need to rest.”

*   *   *

Catherine obeyed Lachlan’s quiet command, for she couldn’t seem to think clearly enough on her own. Dropping to her knees, she arranged her skirts, then curled up on her side and faced the fire. Lachlan covered her with the blanket.

“Do you think it was a memory?” she asked. “It felt very real.”

“Dreams often do.”

To her surprise, he knelt down and curled up behind her. He tucked the blanket in all around her and laid his heavy arm across her hip.

“You’ll be all right now.” His voice was unexpectedly soothing.

“After I was missing for two years,” she confessed, “I was presumed dead. My family gave up the search. Perhaps that’s why I dreamed such an awful thing.”

She felt his warm breath against her hair at the back of her head. Soon her fears began to diminish, and she closed her eyes, taking comfort in his warmth—and his surprising, unexpected tenderness as he brushed the hair away from her forehead and stroked a light finger back and forth across her brow.

“You seem very different now,” she whispered, looking over her shoulder at him, as confusion welled up inside her.

“Don’t get used to it,” he softly replied. “We are still enemies, Raonaid.”

Yet he snuggled closer, tucking his hips tight up against her bottom, while holding her securely in his arms. She could feel the beat of his heart against her back and realized he was breathing very fast. So was she. Butterflies fluttered in her belly.

For a long moment he did not move, and it seemed as if the whole world went quiet and still. Then he nuzzled her hair and lifted his head. He paused a moment and slid away from her. “This isn’t wise,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You know why, lass.”

She felt all the warmth and blissful serenity pull away from her as he stood and returned to his own bedroll. Again he watched her from afar with those sweltering dark eyes, until at last she drifted back into a dark and dreamless sleep.

Chapter Nine

Drumloch Manor

John Montgomery galloped down the drive to the groomed path at the lake, where Aunt Eleanor always took her morning stroll. Rain or shine, she packed her two silly lapdogs into the coach, drove to the bridge, where she was let out with her walking stick, and circled once around the lake.

This morning there was a crisp autumn chill in the air, and John sniffled before he trotted up beside his aunt. The dogs yapped and barked at him, and his horse reared up and nearly threw him.

“Quiet, you rascals!”
the dowager commanded, pointing her stick at them. “Or I’ll boil you both for dinner.”

The dogs continued to growl at John and his skittish mount, but anything was better than their incessant yapping.

“Have you come with news?” the dowager asked, shading her eyes to squint up at him.

He dismounted and walked beside her. “Nothing yet. Not a single word from anyone.”

They had sent a few of their own men in various directions to search for Catherine, and the magistrate had his people searching as well—those who had survived the Highlander’s escape.

“I am confused, John. How could our girl go missing
twice
? You don’t suppose this Highlander is the same one who abducted her before? Perhaps it is a scheme to hold her for ransom, now that the inheritance is finally within reach. But no one ever asked for money the last time.”

“It’s impossible to say,” John replied, “for we haven’t the slightest idea what happened five years ago, or how she ended up in Italy. You have your theories, of course.”

“That she simply ran off, for some kind of wild adventure?”

He removed a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and dabbed the perspiration on his brow. “Yes, but that does not explain her memory loss. Nothing seems to explain it, other than a spell of madness.”

“But we mustn’t ever say such a thing to others. It’s enough of a scandal without adding talk of lunacy. If she is declared mentally unfit…”

“The inheritance will be lost.”

The dowager tapped her walking stick lightly along the gravel path. “Are you paying Dr. Williams well enough?”

“Aye. More than enough, and he knows it.”

“That, at least, is helpful.”

The horse nickered and tossed his head behind them, and they walked on in silence. John watched the two dogs scamper ahead of them, then turned his gaze to his aunt. She had a stern face, lined with years of bitterness and hostility. As a child he had always found her intimidating, and he continued to feel that way now, even though he was earl.

He stopped on the path. “Aunt Eleanor, I must be frank.”

She stopped and turned, and the dogs circled back to wait at her side.

“You know how I feel about Catherine,” he said. “I want nothing more than to bring her home, safe and unharmed, but I cannot accomplish that if I do not know the whole story. For that reason, it must be said … I sense there is something you are not telling me.”

His aunt regarded him with chilly disdain. Her lips curled into a thin, hard line, and the dogs began to bark and snarl. She lifted her walking stick and jabbed him with it, hard in the chest, so that he was forced to take a step back.

“There is
nothing,
” she said harshly, “that you need to know. Leave me be now. I must walk.”

With that she stalked off, and the dogs growled at him viciously before turning to follow her, tails wagging in the morning sun.

John mounted his horse. The corner of his mouth twisted in annoyance. Catherine was out there somewhere, most likely in the clutches of a brutal Highlander with dangerous intentions. John had seen what the dirty savage tried to do to her in the stone circle, and he’d heard the particulars of the Highlander’s violent escape from the prison coach.

Meanwhile Catherine’s inheritance was at risk as well. If anything happened to her, the funds would be sent to Edinburgh, forfeited to the Jacobite cause.

That John could not allow.

As he galloped off in the other direction toward the manor house, he wondered if it was possible to physically shake the truth out of his wretched old aunt. Someone needed to stand up to her for once. And those exasperating little dogs, too.

Chapter Ten

On the night that followed Raonaid’s strange awakening from the dream, Lachlan could not sleep.

Throughout the day, he had watched her with silent, broody fascination, becoming less consumed by his physical desire for her and more curious about her peculiar state of mind. She had mentioned on more than one occasion that she felt as if she were going mad, and had even referred to herself as a lunatic.

He’d always known Raonaid to be deranged and lacking in what he would call a
normal
human conscience, but somehow the woman before him—wrapped in a heavy blanket and sleeping in the grass—no longer fit that description.

After two full days of riding with her, he no longer felt that she was the embodiment of pure evil. He felt quite the opposite, in fact, and far less certain that she was lying to him about her memory loss. All he wanted to do now, as he sat awake by the fire and watched over her while she slept, was
help
her, and it confused the hell out of him.

How could he possibly feel this way about Raonaid, the oracle, after loathing her for years, hunting her down with an obsession that bordered on madness, and giving up everything—
everything
—to achieve some sort of vengeance against her?

Suddenly she stirred and whimpered softly in the night. The sound of her voice was velvety and erotic.

Lachlan sat forward, resting an elbow on a knee, watching as she rolled gracefully onto her back.

A light breeze whispered through the grasses and fluttered the bottom of her blanket. He felt a shiver of need rush through him, though he didn’t want to bed her. Not exactly. He just wanted to lie with her and hold her as he had the night before. To feel her soft, lush body against his own, to smell her hair. To experience the intimacy and closeness. It all seemed like a dream to him now. He had not known anything like it in such a long time.

Raonaid lay very still and quiet in the dark chill of the night; then suddenly, without warning, she sat up—her back straight as a spear.

Lachlan did not speak. He remained utterly still, though his heart began to pound like a wild thing in his chest.

Tossing the blanket aside, she rose to her feet, gathered her skirts in her fists, and started walking away from the camp.

“Wait!” he quickly said, shaking himself out of his stupor and rising to follow. “Where are you off to? It’s dark, lass. You’ll get lost.”

Ignoring the warning, she trudged with purpose through the damp, tangled grass, straight ahead, as if she knew exactly where she was going.