The Highlander's Touch

Page 19

“I see I must approach this from a different angle, lass. When are you from?”
She forced herself to look at him. He’d lowered himself to the floor and was leaning back against the door, his powerful bare legs outstretched in front of him. The jeweled handle of his knife protruded from his boots. There was blood trickling down his temple and his lower lip was swollen. When he wiped absently at it with the back of his hand, tendons and muscles rippled in his forearm. “You’re bleeding.” The inane comment slipped from her mouth. And wearing a tartan, she marveled. An actual plaid, woven of crimson and black, draped about his body, carelessly revealing much more than it concealed.
The corner of his lip curved. “Imagine that,” he mocked. “I was ambushed by a spitting banshee and now I am bleeding. I was tripped, bashed in the head, rolled over broken stoneware, head butted, kicked in the—”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
“You were trying to kill me,” Lisa said defensively. “How dare you get mad at me when I was mad at you first? You started it.”
He ran an impatient hand through his hair. “Aye, and now I am ending it. I told you I have decided not to kill you for the moment, but I require information from you. I have fifty men outside this door”—he gestured over his shoulder with a thumb—“who will need reasons to trust you and let you live. Although I am the laird here, I cannot keep you safe all the time if I doona give my men plausible reasons why you are not a threat.”
“Why do any of you want to kill me in the first place?” Lisa asked. “What have I done?”
“I am in charge of this inquiry, lass.” With deliberate leisure, he folded his arms across his chest.
Lisa had no doubt that he’d struck the pose to make a point. It made all the muscles in his arms bunch and reminded her how small she was compared to him, even at five feet ten inches. She’d just learned another lesson: He could be courteous, even demonstrate a droll sense of humor, but he was always deadly, always in command. “Right,” she said tightly. “But it might help if I understood why you consider me a threat to begin with.”
“Because of what is in the flask.”
“What’s in it?” she asked, then berated herself for her incessant curiosity. Unchecked curiosity had created this situation.
“If you doona know, your innocence will protect you. Doona ask me again.”
Lisa blew out a nervous breath.
“When are you from?” he asked softly, circling back to his initial question.
“The twenty-first century.”
He blinked and cocked his head. “You expect me to believe you are from a time seven hundred years from now?”
“You expect me to believe that I’m in the fourteenth century?” she said, unable to conceal a note of peevishness in her voice. Why did he expect such madness to be any easier for her to deal with?
A quick smile flashed across his face, and she breathed more easily, but then the smile vanished and he was again the remote savage. “This conversation is not about you, lass, or what you think or what you believe. It is about me, and whether I can find a reason to trust you and let you live. Your being from the future and your feelings about being here mean nothing to me. It is irrelevant where or when you are from. The fact is that you are here now and you have become my problem. And I doona like problems.”
“So send me home,” she said in a small voice. “That should solve your problem.” She flinched as his intense gaze fixed on her face. His dark eyes latched on to hers and for a space of time unmeasured, she couldn’t look away.
“If you are from the future, who is Scotland’s king?” he asked silkily.
She drew a cautious breath. “I’m afraid I don’t know, I’ve never followed politics,” she lied. She certainly wasn’t about to tell a warrior who was fighting over kings and territories that seven hundred years from now Scotland still didn’t have a recognized king. She might not have a college degree, but she wasn’t a complete fool.
His eyes narrowed and she suffered the uncanny sensation that he was gauging far more than her facial expressions. Finally he said, “I accept that. Few women follow politics. But perhaps you know your history?” he encouraged softly.
“Do you know yours from seven hundred years ago?” Lisa evaded, quickly intuiting where he was headed. He would want to know who won what battle and who fought where and the next thing she knew she’d be all tangled up in screwing up the future. If she really was in the past, she was not going to participate in instigating world chaos.