“What in the hell have you been doing?”
The girl was still as a stone.
“Kirsty?”
“Me?” the child asked in a hoarse tone.
“Aye.”
She looked away and mumbled something about plaids and thieves and guns and saving relics like medieval knights had.
It was utter nonsense.
But the oaf was distracted. Her perfect chance.
Cautiously, Georgina started to slide back and out from under both of them. But her feet felt oddly numb. She tried again.
His hand shot out and clamped onto her arm.
She stared down at his hand. It was so large he almost held her entire upper arm in that one tight grip. Her breath was a lump in her throat when she glanced back at him.
“Don’t move.” He pinned his daughter with another cold look. “I want the truth, not one of your stories, Kirsty.”
The girl’s teeth began to chatter and she was shaking the way Georgina wanted to.
All of them were soaked and surrounded by cold damp fog and even colder wet sand.
The oaf seemed oblivious to it.
Georgina’s mind flashed back in time to the chilling image of another little girl sitting on a sand dune shaking from fear and exertion.
No one had noticed her either.
Something snapped inside of her and she pulled the little girl so close against her that the child’s wet head slipped snugly beneath Georgina’s chin. “For God’s sake, lecture her later!”
He gave her a sharp look.
“Get the poor child inside before she freezes to death.”
The child tilted her head for a moment and stared up at her, still shaking stiffly with those cold and shimmying kinds of shakes that your body won’t let you control. Georgina knew then because she was shaking with them too.
But she was silent. She met Eachann’s hard look with one of her own.
His hand fell away. His gaze flicked from her to his daughter. He muttered another curse, then grabbed something that was lying in the sand and wrapped it around them.
It was his coat. Before she could blink he was standing above them. A second later he scooped them up in his arms and carried them off through the mist.
Chapter Nineteen
Be respectful of your superiors, if you have any.
—Advice to Youth, Mark Twain
Kirsty scowled at the black-haired woman huddled in a scratchy blanket like hers and sitting near her on the wool rug. The two of them were locked in the bathing room with a toasty fire burning in the corner woodstove.
The woman had been staring at her hands, which were knotted into tight fists and pressed against her belly as if she were angry. If Kirsty had liked her, she might have said the woman was very pretty, maybe even beautiful.
The lady looked up as if she somehow knew she was thinking about her.
