Kiss of the Highlander

Page 59

She shook herself abruptly. She needed to know what the date was. While she stood gaping out the window, peril could be drawing ever nearer her Highland lover.
She was about to tug the coverlet off the bed and don it toga-style when she noticed a gown—lavender, of course—lying across the stuffed armchair near the fire, aside a miscellany of other items.
She hurried to the chair, where she fingered the items, trying to decide the order in which she was supposed to put them on.
And there were no panties, she realized with dismay. She could hardly be expected to swish around, bare-bottomed beneath her gown. She glared at the clothing, as if irritation alone might conjure a pair of panties from thin air. She glanced about the room with an entrepreneur’s eye but reluctantly concluded that even if she snatched up a table covering, she’d have to knot it about her like a diaper.
She slipped off her nightgown, then slid the soft white undergarment over her head. A simple shift, it clung to her body and fell to midankle. Over it went the gown, then the sleeveless overtunic of darker purple, embroidered with silver threads. Stunned that it didn’t drag on the floor, she plucked up the hem and snorted when she saw it had been neatly sheared off. Apparently people had already noted how short she was. She tied the laces on the overtunic beneath her breasts.
The slippers were a joke, sizes too big, but would have to do. She swiped the silk swath from a table and ripped the sheer fabric. As she was balling it up and stuffing it in the toes, her stomach growled mightily, and she remembered that she hadn’t eaten since yesterday afternoon.
But she couldn’t just stroll out into the corridor without a plan.
Order of the day: a bathroom, coffee, then at the earliest possible opportunity find Drustan and tell him what had happened.
Tell him…what danger he is in was probably what he’d been saying before he’d melted in the circle of stones. Show him…had obviously meant her backpack. She sighed, wishing she had it. But Drustan was a brilliant man with a fine logical mind. Surely, he would see the truth in her story.
In retrospect, it infuriated her that Drustan hadn’t told her the whole truth. However, she grudgingly acknowledged, chances were good that if he had told her, she would have, with infinite condescension, debated the implausibility of time travel for however long it had taken her to drive him to the nearest psychiatric ward.
She would never have believed he knew how to move in the fourth dimension. Who and what was this man to whom she’d given her virginity?
There was only one way to find out. Find him and talk to him.
Yo, Drustan. You don’t know me, but a future you will be enchanted, wake up in the twenty-first century, and send me back to save you and keep your clan from being destroyed.
She frowned. It wasn’t something she’d believe, if a man showed up in her time with such a story, but Drustan must have known what he was talking about. It was clear that he’d wanted her to tell the “past” him the truth. There was nothing else he could have been trying to say.
She was starved, both for food and a glimpse of Drustan.
And it was urgent that she discover the date.
Jamming the slippers on her feet, she hurried out into the corridor.
13
Sleeping past sunrise was not a thing Drustan did often, but troubled dreams had disrupted his slumber and he’d slept until long past dawn.
He’d pushed the vague memories away and concentrated instead on the pleasant thoughts of his upcoming wedding. Silvan longed to hear the castle filled with voices again, Nell would be delighted by wee ones scampering about, and Drustan MacKeltar wanted bairn of his own. He would teach his sons to fish and calculate the motion of heavenly bodies. He would teach his daughters the same, he vowed.
He wanted children, and by Amergin, he would get his bride to the altar this time! No matter that he knew naught of her. She was young, of child-bearing age, and he would lavish her with respect and courtesy. Double it, for having him.
And mayhap one day she might come to have feeling for him. Mayhap she was young enough that she might be…er, trainable like a young foal. If she couldn’t read and write, she might like to learn. Or she could be weak of sight and not notice the eccentricities of the occupants of Castle Keltar.
And mayhap his wolfhounds would take to sailing longboats across the loch, sporting Viking attire. Waving flags of surrender. Ha.
Anya was his last chance, and he knew it. Because they were Highlanders who kept much to themselves, because of the centuries of rumors, because of the string of broken betrothals, fathers of well-bred young ladies were loath to pledge their daughters to him. They sought for their daughters safe, respectable men to whom rumors didn’t cling as tenacious as burrs on a woolen.