“I’m just happy that you found me in time. I dinna think I could have saved myself.” His heart had settled back to its normal rhythm, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of how close he’d come to losing it all.
“I don’t know.” Iain shrugged. “I’ve seen you pull yourself from worse predicaments.”
“Aye, but no’ where I had to sprout wings.”
Iain sobered, squatting down to inspect something in the muddy turf.
“What do you see?” Bram asked.
Iain shifted back, pointing at the ground. “It looks like it wasn’t the horse.”
Bram knelt beside his cousin, his breath hitching as he recognized the shape of a footprint. One that most definitely wasn’t his.
Behind them something scraped against a stone.
Both men sprang to their feet, weapons drawn.
“Hold,” Ranald called as he and Frazier emerged from the mist. “We come bearing gifts.”
Bram sheathed his claymore, his pulse pounding again as he examined the man struggling between Ranald and Frazier.
“And who have we here?” Iain queried as he too sheathed his weapon.
“Canna say. The man willna talk to us,” Ranald said, his eyes glittering with anger. “But I’m willing to bet he’s no’ here to make friends.”
As if to prove the point, the man made a concerted effort to break free. But he was no match for Ranald and Frazier.
“To be sure, laddie,” Frazier spat out, his grip tightening on the man’s arm. “He’s wearing Comyn colors.”
Bram studied the man for a moment, noting the worn plaid. “Aye, but his eyes are dark and his hair a reddish brown.”
“Not all of them are black haired and green eyed,” Frazier grumbled.
“True enough,” Iain nodded, his eyes too locked on the prisoner. “But whoever he may be, I’d be willing to bet he’s the one who tried to push Bram o’er the cliff.”
19
“Are you sure this is what you want to do?” Mrs. Abernathy asked, her forehead wrinkled in question.
“No.” Lily shook her head, unwilling to be anything but honest. The older woman had been her rock for the past few days, and Lily suspected that before this was all over she’d be glad to have a dose of Mrs. Abernathy’s wisdom. “I’m not sure of anything. But if there’s even the remotest possibility that I can do something to save him, I don’t see how I have any choice.” She paused, sucking in a breath.
“I canna argue with you there, but I feel compelled to remind you that Bram himself wanted you to stay on this side of time.”
They were sitting in Mrs. Abernathy’s office, sipping scotch-laced tea, the Scottish answer to everything that ailed one, while Lily tried to make sense of everything she’d learned at Ridge Manor.Tigh an Droma. Her mind whispered the Gaelic almost as if it were familiar. Then again, maybe it had been. In another life.
She shivered and took a gulp of her tea. “Bram doesn’t know the significance of this,” she said, holding up the ring on its chain. “He doesn’t know who I really am.”
And of course that was the really relevent fact. Lily was a Comyn. The great great to infinity cousin or some such of the very man who’d killed Bram’s father. And to the Macgillivray way of thinking, most likely the great odd granddaughter of the murderer of his somewhat fewer but still many greats grandfather Graeme.
It was slightly insane on the face of it, but when one added in the fact that they were separated by over five hundred years, it made her head spin and her stomach roil. Or maybe the latter was the scotch. Hard to say for certain. But either way she felt sick.
And afraid. For Bram. For herself. Hell, even for Alec Comyn. He was kin, after all.
“What if I go there and Bram rejects me?”
“What if he doesn’t?” Mrs. Abernathy queried, her gaze accurately reading the gist of Lily’s thoughts. “After all, he loves you.”
“You can’t know that for certain. I mean, all you’ve got to go on are my crazy ramblings. For all we know I dreamed the whole thing.”
