The Highlander's Touch

Page 15

She understood with sudden certainty that she should never have touched the flask. Although it defied rational explanation, she was neither in Cincinnati nor in the twenty-first century. She felt the last of her hope that she was dreaming slip from her tenuous grasp. Dreams she knew well. But this was too real to be a dream, detailed far beyond her mind’s ability to fabricate.
Give me the flask, he’d demanded.
You see this? This is part of the dream? She’d been astonished.
But now, reflecting upon it, she realized that he’d seen it because it was not part of a dream. It was part of reality, his reality, a reality she now shared. That it was the flask she had touched just before she’d started to feel like she was falling, and the flask that he’d demanded, seemed too logical a connection to exist within a dream. Had the flask somehow carried her back to a man who had direct or indirect proprietary rights to it? And if so, was she truly in the fourteenth century?
With growing horror, she saw the frightening pattern: His odd manner of dress, his intent perusal of her clothing as if he’d never seen the like before, the primitive wooden tub situated before the fire, the strange language he’d spoken, the tapestry on the wall. All of it hinted at the impossible.
Stricken, she glanced around the room, reassessing it from a different perspective. She viewed it as her employment in the museum had led her to believe a medieval chamber would appear.
And all the oddities made perfect sense.
Logic insisted she was in a medieval stone castle, and according to the wall hanging, at some point in the fourteenth century, despite the improbability of it.
Lisa blew her breath out in a frantic attempt to calm down. She couldn’t be somewhere else in time, because if this was medieval Scotland, Catherine was some seven hundred years in the future—alone. Her mother desperately needed her and had no one else to rely on. That was unacceptable. Being stuck in a strange dream was now relegated to the minor problem it would have been, had it been true. A dream would have been easy to manage; eventually she would have awakened, no matter how awful things had been in the dream. If she was actually in the past, which was what all her senses insisted, she had to get back home.
But how?
Would touching the flask do it again? As she pondered that possibility she heard footsteps in the corridor outside the chamber. She moved quickly to the door, debated cowering behind it, then pressed her ear to it instead. It would be wise to discover everything she could about her environment.
“Do you think he’ll do it?” a voice echoed in the hall.
There was a long silence, then a sigh so loud that it carried through the thick wood. “I believe so. He does not take oaths lightly and knows the woman must die. Nothing can come in the way of our cause, Duncan. Dunnottar must be held, that bastard Edward must be defeated, and oaths sworn must be honored. He will kill her.”
As the steps faded down the corridor, Lisa leaned limply against the door. There was no doubt in her mind exactly which woman they’d meant.
Dunnottar? Edward? Dear God! She hadn’t merely traveled through time—she’d been dropped smack into the sequel to Braveheart!
IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT WHEN CIRCENN QUIETLY EASED his chamber door open a few inches. Peering through the narrow aperture, he saw that the room was dark. Only a faint bar of moonlight fell from behind the tapestry. She must be sleeping, he decided, which would give him the advantage of surprise. He would get this over with, quickly.
He swung the door open, stepped into the room with swift conviction, and promptly lost his footing. As he hit the floor of his chamber, he cursed; it had been cunningly littered with sharp pieces of broken stoneware. He scarcely had time to register that he’d tripped over a taut and cleverly tied cord, when he was smashed on the back of his head with a stoneware basin. “By Dagda, lass!” he roared, rolling over on his side and clutching his head. “Are you trying to kill me?”
“Of course I am!” she hissed.
Circenn could discern nothing more than a blur of motion in the darkness when, much to his astonishment and pain, she kicked him in a most sensitive part of his body—a part most women touched reverently. When he doubled over, his hands grazed more of the jagged shards on the floor, and he winced. She leaped over his body like a frightened doe, bounding for the open doorway.
Deadening himself to the pain, he moved swiftly. His hand flashed out and fastened on her ankle. “Leave this room and you are dead,” he said flatly. “My men will kill you the moment they see you.”
“So what’s the difference? You will too!” she cried. “Let go of me!” She kicked ineffectually at the hand clasped around her ankle.