Instead, he found himself scowling up at the niche’s smoke-blackened ceiling.
Naught had gone as he’d planned.
Torcaill’s dire words rolled around in his head, robbing him of his night’s rest, while a persistent pinch in his gut warned that it’d been purest folly to order a sumptuous bridal feast carried to his bedchamber.
No good would come of his nonappearance at such an intimate table. He rubbed a hand down over his face, drew a long breath, and released it slowly. Trying to explain why he’d absented himself, both from the repast and from his dazzling bride’s bed, struck him as being as unwise as it was unpleasant.
His scowl deepened. He’d rather walk naked through a thorny bramble patch.
He’d suffer the same and worse if he could spare himself the occasional bursts of his grandfather’s laughter. Late though it was, Valdar’s gleeful hoots and guffaws still rang out from the opposite end of the hall.
Duncan MacKenzie’s voice reached him as well, deep and congenial, though the words were indistinct. Not that he needed to hear them to guess that now that the two old friends apparently conversed alone, the Black Stag’s animosity had lessened.
Few were the men who could resist Valdar’s gregarious charm.
Fewer still the men able to resist Lady Gelis.
Ronan folded his arms beneath his head, his gaze fixed on a crack in the ceiling. He needed to sleep. He would not, could not, spend the night’s remaining hours lying here thinking about her. Closing his mind, he concentrated on the cold wind racing past the hidey-hole’s narrow slit window. Turned his ears to the steady patter of rain against the keep wall, the granite cobbles of the bailey.
The sounds lulled him, bringing sleep nearer.
He turned on his side, weary now. His eyes drifted shut, but more than slumber sought him.
Something strange was happening.
Along with sleep, unaccustomed warmth stole into the musty little niche where he’d spread his pallet. A sensation that seemed to intensify each time his grandfather gave another bark of laughter.
The warmth of bright spring days when broom and whin cloaked the hills in a mantle of gold and the Highland air was softer, sweeter than the finest wine.
Days the like of which hadn’t graced Glen Dare since his earliest childhood and were best forgotten.
Even if he’d swear he could feel that warmth now.
Smell the wild Scottish roses growing in such profusion on his mother’s trellised arbor, her own personal challenge to the demons of Castle Dare: a tiny but well-tended garden nestled against a far wall of the bailey.
A boyhood refuge gone the way of all other bright and good things at Dare.
Nothing remained of his mother’s pride but a woody tangle of thorny root-stumps and a fallen jumble of moss-grown stones.
The memory — and the strange sensation of warmth — woke him and he flipped onto his other side. The wind seemed to have gusted in through the window slit, its icy passage stinging his eyes.
He set his jaw, glowering once more at the ceiling crack. Truth was, he intended to do so until all such mummery left his thoughts.
He had no business thinking about spring days alive with birdsong or a brief span of years when Dare’s hall was no stranger to soft chuckles and smiles.
Nor his grandfather’s agony when his current jollity turned again to tears.
Such ponderings served naught.
But hecouldfeel the warmth.
And the scent of roses filled his senses on every indrawn breath.
Even more strange, the ceiling crack was suddenly gone andshefilled his vision.
A dream, he knew, but she was there all the same.
His high-spirited bride, standing on a narrow shingled strand with what looked to be an imposing curtain wall looming behind her. All ardent woman and desirability, she watched him, her flame- colored hair bright in the autumn sunshine, her magnificent breasts and shapely hips more than apparent.
