After an uncomfortable pause, Gaspar continued. “This is the problem with our kind, Clellan. We have condemned innocent women for less, have we not?”
Through the edge of her veil, she watched the priest nod until he grasped what he was confessing to. His head stopped and his eyes widened.
Gaspar raised an imperious brow. “We must work harder to find the truth. Must we not?”
Clellan nodded quickly, then looked awkwardly about him. James stood and the priest started, then offered Gaspar ashallow bow. “Forgive me, Signore. I have Mass to prepare. Godspeed to you and… He waved a hand toward her and James. “I am at St. Mary’s.” He started backing away. “If you have any need of my services, you need only send word.”
Gaspar nodded. Clellan turned and scurried away like a nervous rat.
Once the man was gone, Isobelle sat again and struggled to breathe normally. Clellan had been the priest to whom young Orie had confessed. And the bastard who’d condemned her to die had come from St. Mary’s as well. The one whose hands Montgomery had offered to cut off if he didn’t contain his unholy glee.
And he was probably still there in Edinburgh, within minutes from her! But she wasn’t thinking of discovery just then—she was contemplating revenge.
Gaspar and James, no longer squabbling, stood over her protectively. She opened her mouth to tell them…something, but she couldn’t form the words. She was both terrified and seething with hatred. There was little doubt—if she asked them—that the two men beside her would send the man to Hell…
But the words would not come.
Unfortunately, her tears had no such trouble and poured freely down her cheeks to splash on her veil now bunching at her neck.
Gaspar pulled her up and into his arms in spite of a wide room filled with witnesses. After pressing her head briefly against him, he pulled back to look into her eyes.
“Je suis désolé,” he said in French. “There is no English way to express it accurately. I am desolated for you, that you should have suffered such torture at the hands of men…like me. And then, for the benefit to fall to me—one of them.” He shook his head feverishly. “How can you possibly forgive me, sweet Isobelle?”
Suddenly, she felt much too wonderful looking into Gaspars warm eyes, and all thoughts of revenge melted through her fingers. As close as she was to vengeance, as easily as she might reach for it, she knew that there was a choice to make—one and not the other. Gaspar and happiness and love, or hate and anger and vengeance. An easier choice had never been.
She smiled and put her hands to the sides of his head to sooth him. “I found Paradise, my dragon. It matters not how I found it.” She rose to her toes and kissed him long enough for him to believe her. Then she sighed. “Now. Let us go home, aye?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Monty stood with Ivar in a room dubbed The Man Cave by his modern wife and her sister, though the only stone in the room surrounded the hearth. And if it weren’t for his insisting against it, Jillian might have allowed the contracting man to use false stones. Why would the world have invented false stones when true stones lay on the ground for the taking?
It was one of the symptoms of an ill civilization, he was certain.
He and Ivar turned at the sound of ice tinkling against glasses.
“The Muirs are coming,” Jillian announced as she entered the newly painted room.
Monty hastened to take the tray of drinks from her, then he gave her a scowl. “Firstly, ye shouldna be toting heavy things about in yer condition, and not in a newly painted house, aye? The fumers?—”
“Fumes,” she corrected and rolled her eyes. “And the paint is dry. The fumes are gone.” She took one of the glasses from the tray and handed it to Ivar.
“And secondly, ye should never walk into a room and announce that those meddling old women have come to call. Ye should invite us to sit and brace ourselves before ye share the bad news, aye?”
Jillian nodded. “I see your point there.”
“And thirdly.”
Her brows rose in the way they did when he lectured overmuch. She had issues with being ordered about, whatever that meant. After all the months he’d spent in her century, he was beginning to have issues with the wordissues.
“And third,” he said again. “I dinna care to hear ye lie, Jillian. Even when ye’re but jesting with me.” He set the tray on a chair and took a glass for himself. Lemonade, they called it. He was fair to certain it was puckering his innards, but he couldn’t seem to quit the stuff.
His wife grinned. “I wasn’t lying, Montgomery. My aunts are here.”
Lemonade spouted from his lips and he fought to keep it from climbing up his nose. He glared at Jillian, then looked around him at the damage done. He’d sprayed the stuff all over the floor and Ivar was wiping his face with the back of his sleeve, his eyes promising some sort of revenge.
“Ye see what happens when ye call them family?” Monty pointed at the wet little circles on the subfloor. “It is good the carpenters have yet to arrive.”
“Carpetlayers,” she corrected.
