Kiss of the Highlander

Page 74

Aye, he could travel through the stones, that much of it was true. But everything else she claimed reeked of wrongness. If he’d ever gotten trapped in the future he would never have behaved in such ways. He would never have sent a wee lass back through the stones. He couldn’t begin to imagine the situation in which he might take a lass’s maidenhead—he’d vowed never to lie with a virgin unless ’twas in the marriage bed. And he would never have instructed her to tell his past self such a story and expected himself to believe it.
Och, thinking all this future self, past self was enough to give a man a pounding head, he thought, massaging his temples.
Nay, were he to get into such a situation, he would have simply come back himself and set things aright. Drustan MacKeltar was infinitely more capable than she’d made him out to be.
There was no point in getting unduly upset about her. His primary problem would be keeping his hands to himself, because addled or no, he desired her fiercely.
Still, he mused, mayhap he should send a full complement of guard with Dageus on the morrow. Mayhap the country wasn’t as peaceful as it appeared from high atop the MacKeltar’s mountain.
Shaking his head, he strode to the boudoir door and slid the bolt from his side, locking her in. Then he grabbed the key from a compartment in the headboard of his bed, left his chamber, and locked her in from the corridor as well. Nothing would jeopardize his wedding. Certainly not some wee lass scampering about unattended, spouting nonsense that he’d taken her virginity. She would go nowhere on the estate unaccompanied by either him or his father.
Dageus, on the other hand, he didn’t plan to allow within a stone’s toss of her.
He turned on his heel and stalked down the corridor.
Gwen curled up on the bed and cried. Sobbed, really, with hot tears and little choking noises that gave her a swollen nose and a serious sinus headache.
It was no wonder she hadn’t cried since she was nine. It hurt to cry. She hadn’t even cried when her father had threatened that if she didn’t return to Triton Corp. and finish her research, he would never speak to her again. Maybe a few of those tears leaked out now as well.
Confronting Drustan had been more awful than she’d imagined. He was betrothed. And by saving Dageus, she was saving Drustan’s future wife. Her overactive brain busily conjured torturous images of Drustan in bed with Anya Elliott. No matter that she didn’t even know what Anya Elliott looked like. It was clear from the way things were going that Anya would be Gwen’s antithesis—tall and slim and leggy. And Drustan would touch and kiss tall leggy Mrs. MacKeltar the way he’d touched and kissed Gwen in the stones.
Gwen squeezed her eyes shut and groaned, but the horrid images were more vivid on the insides of her eyelids. Her eyes snapped open again. Focus, she told herself. There is nothing to be gained by torturing yourself, you have a bigger problem on your hands.
He hadn’t believed her. Not a word she’d said.
How could that be? She’d done what he’d wanted her to do, told him what had happened. She’d believed telling him the whole story would make him see the logic inherent, but she was beginning to realize that sixteenth-century Drustan was not the same man that twenty-first-century Drustan had thought he was. Would the backpack have made that much of a difference? she wondered.
Yes. She could have shown him the cell phone, with its complex electronic workings. She could have shown him the magazine with the modern articles and date, her odd clothing, the waterproof fabric of her pack. She’d had rubber and plastic items in there; materials that even a medieval whatever-he-was—genius?—wouldn’t have been able to dismiss without further consideration.
But the last time she’d seen the damn pack, it was spiraling off into the quantum foam.
Where do you suppose it ended up? the scientist queried, with childlike wonder.
“Oh, hush, it’s not here, and that’s all that really signifies,” Gwen muttered aloud. She was not in the mood to think about quantum theory at the moment. She had problems, all kinds of problems.
The odds of her identifying the enemy without his help weren’t promising. The estate was vast, and Silvan had told her that, including the guards, there were seven hundred fifty men, women, and children within the walls, and another thousand crofters scattered about. Not to mention the nearby village….It could be anyone: a distant clan, an angry woman, a conquering neighbor. She had at most a month, and as recalcitrant as he was—not even willing to admit he could travel through the stones—she certainly couldn’t expect him to be forthcoming with other information.