“Are you saying you want to give in and go ahead and sleep with him before he’s your husband?”
“No. But I have to be sure he’s ready to give up wandering.” Kenna could hardly believe it herself, but a sense of certainty pounded through her with every beat of her heart. A single leap back in time and a heart-hammering tingle had sealed her fate. A mere couple of weeks ago, she hadn’t even been interested in dating. Now she felt sure she was ready to marry a man she had just met.
She propped her elbows on her knees and cradled her head in her hands. “At least, I don’t think I need to give in. I just don’t know. I’ve never . . .” She pulled in a deep breath and blew it out. How the hell could she explain it? “I’ve never felt this way about a man before.” She shrugged. “He tingled.”
Trulie slowly rose, eased her way across the room, and took hold of Kenna’s hands. “If it turns out he can’t do without and prove to you he’s changed, then the man doesn’t deserve you whether hetingledor not.”
“Why does Granny do this to us?”
“Because she once tingled too.”
* * *
“How did she know?”
“How did she know what?” Gray looked up from the parchments scattered across his desk.
“How did she know about the other women?” Colum leaned over and thumped his fist down onto the middle of the papers. “Who had the time to tell her before she came down from her rooms? God’s beard, man. The woman was only out of my sight for a mere two days, and most of that time was spent bringing yer daughter into the world and then sleeping off the weariness of her journey.”
Gray shoved Colum’s hand aside and thumbed through another stack of yellowed papers. “I dinna ken. I was with Lady Trulie and the wee one.” Gray tossed aside his quill and looked up. “Besides, all here know how ye are with the women. ’Tis common knowledge. At one time, Diarmuid and yerself had the guards taking bets on who would have all the maids first.”
Colum pushed off the desk and wandered around the room. He turned back when he reached the window looking out over the garden. A mere few days ago, such news would have made him quite proud. Now all he felt was ashamed. Lady Kenna’s scolding played over and over in his mind. “Why in the world would you want to be friends with that asshole? And why in the hell would you ever behave just like him?”
He turned and faced Gray, struggling to understand the foreign emotions battling through him. Never had he felt this sort of confusion before and he knew for certain he did not like it a whit. Though there was naught he could do to change the past, he could damn well change his future. “I never thought I would live to regret—and be so ashamed of—a wager.”
Gray leaned back in his high-backed chair and offered a wry grin. “From the look of ye, I would say the winner of that less-than-chivalrous bet was Diarmuid.” He rose from the desk and joined Colum at the window. For a brief instant, his eyes narrowed as he stared down into the gardens. “Ye asked how the Lady Kenna couldha discovered yer past. There is another way—a way that has nothing to do with tongue-wagging servants.”
Colum shoved his knuckles hard against the cold gray stone of the sill as if grinding the problem into the wall. He ached to make things right. Lore a’mighty, he would give anything to erase the choices of his past. “Aye, I have a fair idea of what happened. A maid with a heart filled with bitterness spoke of my ways to the lady.” He pushed away from the wall and let his fist fall to his side. “I thought Coira was the only maid allowed to tend to the needs of the Sinclair women?”
“’Twas not Coira nor a disgruntled lover, I feel sure of it.” Gray turned away from the window, clasped his hands to the small of his back, and paced across the room. When he drew even with the pair of cushioned benches in front of the hearth, he turned and studied Colum.
The man’s thoughtful expression chilled Colum to the bone. “What do ye hint at? I would ken yer thoughts. All of them.”
“Ye ken that the women of the Sinclair line possess unexplainable talents other than merely traveling across the web of time?” Gray waited for Colum’s nod, then continued. “Some would say they are gifted in the ways. Blessed by the verra Fates themselves.” The chieftain rolled his shoulders as he resettled his clasped hands behind his back. He walked in a slow circle around the edge of the lush, brown pelt stretched across the floor.
An unsettled feeling raked across Colum’s gut like the blade of a rusty sword. Were the Sinclair women witches too? He had oft wondered that before. He swallowed hard in an effort to wet his mouth enough to speak.
“We dare not—under any circumstances—ever call our women witches,” Gray said with such intent that his meaning was crystal clear.
Colum understood completely. He had never personally witnessed the horrors committed in the name of purging what was deemed witchery, but from all he had heard, he never wished to see such acts firsthand. The Sinclair women had to be protected from such atrocities. “What exactly be Lady Kenna’s gift of which ye speak?”
Gray clapped a hand on Colum’s shoulder and squeezed. “The woman can walk through yer thoughts and see all ye have ever seen, done, or known. According to my wife, yer fine lady can even erase yer memories and replace them with her own commands if she so chooses.”
“Oh, holy hell.” The enormity of what Gray suggested made Colum stagger backward. “Are ye certain? Pray tell me the Lady Trulie jests about this.”
Gray shrugged. “I wish I could, man. Lady Trulie and Mother Sinclair also possess a bit of that same talent, but they both assured me Lady Kenna is by far more adept at reading a man and bending him to her will than they ever could be.”
Colum slowly lowered himself to a short stool, buried his face in his hands, and groaned. “I am doomed straight to hell.” He cringed at the memories the Lady Kenna must have viewed while traipsing through his mind.
Gray slapped him on the back and returned to his desk. As he picked up his quill and returned to scratching ink across parchment, he thoughtfully nodded, “Aye, man, we’ll both surely burn in the fires of our talented women’s judgment.”
CHAPTER12
“Come on, little Miss Chloe.” Kenna shouldered her backpack against her side as she wrapped the squirming baby in a blanket and scooped her up. “We’re going to get some air in the garden while your mama gets a nap.”
“She’s fed and changed but . . . ” Trulie’s words disappeared into a yawn. She wearily rubbed the corners of her eyes and eased down onto the bed. “But if she needs anything, just bring her back and wake me up.”
Kenna patted the baby’s rump as she paused at the door and waited for Chloe’s owl to swoop out of the room ahead of them. “I have everything I need in my backpack. You saw all the baby stuff I smuggled back to you from the future. Mr. Owl, Chloe, and I are going to be just fine.”
