“Nay, sweetling,” he replied, looking back at her. “She’s come to help us but then she needs to go home.”
“Oh.” She sounded sad at that. “I’d like it if she stayed.”
“Well, she canna. She’s got her own family to get back to.”
“What family?”
Cailean realized he had absolutely no idea. He knew next to nothing about their guest. “Enough questions,” he replied. “Go to sleep. And dinna forget what I said about brushing yer teeth.”
He closed the door and padded silently down the corridor towards his own room. He was tired and his muscles ached. He wanted nothing more than to fall into bed and sink into oblivion for a few hours. Yet he suspected that wouldn’t be easy. He felt wrung out and on edge and his thoughts kept going round in circles. The sickness. Lir’s intervention. Catriona and his people.
Rose MacFinnan.
He stopped. To his left, a corridor led down to the guest quarters. He ought to carry straight on to his own rooms, go to bed, and try to sleep. That would be the sensible thing to do.
Instead, he found himself turning on his heel, striding down the corridor into the guest quarters, and stopping in front of a large, polished door. He rapped his knuckles lightly on the wood and heard footsteps approaching.
The door pulled wide, revealing Rose standing there, blinking in surprise. Her midnight hair was a riot of dark waves falling across her shoulders and her eyes seemed big enough to drown in as she gazed up at him in surprise. She was wearing a shapeless nightdress that covered her from neck to toes but candlelight was spilling from behind her, making the nightdress seem almost transparent and casting the curves underneath into stark silhouette.
Cailean’s mouth went dry. What was he doing here? Why had he come?
“I… um…”
Oh hell.
He cleared his throat and tried again. “I… um… I just came to thank ye.”
“Thank me?”
“For what ye did today. For helping Drew.”For bringing hope to my people and my daughter.
Rose shook her head. “You don’t need to thank me for that. It’s why I’m here, remember?”
Cailean wondered about that. Whyhadshe agreed to travel into the past to help people she’d never even met? What did she get out of it? In his experience people didn’t do things without some kind of reward. So what was hers? She’d asked for nothing but Cailean wasn’t stupid enough to think her help would come without a cost.
“Er… was there anything else?” she asked.
Aye, he thought.I want to know what you’re doing here. I want to know who you really are and why you came. I want to know why you make me do stupid things like come to your door when I have no reason to be here.
But all he said was, “Nay. That was all. Sleep well, Rose MacFinnan.”
“Sleep well, Cailean MacNeil.”
He gave a curt nod then spun and strode away. As he reached his own rooms and closed his door, he got the feeling that sleep would be a long time coming.
*
Castles, Rose haddecided, were noisy, drafty places and they were nowhere near as romantic as the movies painted them.
As she lay in her ridiculously big bed, weighed down by the heavy brocade covers, she desperately wanted to sleep. But sleep seemed determined to elude her. It was late. The distant sounds of the feast in the great hall had dissipated some time ago, indicating that everyonehad gone to bed. Yet that didn’t mean the castle had fallen quiet.
There was the tramp of feet from the guards that walked the battlements outside. There was the barking of dogs from the kennels when some noise disturbed them. There was the stamp and whinny of horses in the stables.
And within the castle itselfeverythingcreaked. The floorboards. The doorframes. Her damned bed, every time she so much as breathed.
It was most annoying. Although, she reflected, staring up at the ceiling above her bed and counting the cracks in the plaster for the umpteenth time, the castle noises were probably not the real reason she couldn’t sleep.
Being in a strange bed and a strange time would probably account for that.
