“Do you think it was a memory?” she asked. “It felt very real.”
“Dreams often do.”
To her surprise, he knelt down and curled up behind her. He tucked the blanket in all around her and laid his heavy arm across her hip.
“You’ll be all right now.” His voice was unexpectedly soothing.
“After I was missing for two years,” she confessed, “I was presumed dead. My family gave up the search. Perhaps that’s why I dreamed such an awful thing.”
She felt his warm breath against her hair at the back of her head. Soon her fears began to diminish, and she closed her eyes, taking comfort in his warmth—and his surprising, unexpected tenderness as he brushed the hair away from her forehead and stroked a light finger back and forth across her brow.
“You seem very different now,” she whispered, looking over her shoulder at him, as confusion welled up inside her.
“Don’t get used to it,” he softly replied. “We are still enemies, Raonaid.”
Yet he snuggled closer, tucking his hips tight up against her bottom, while holding her securely in his arms. She could feel the beat of his heart against her back and realized he was breathing very fast. So was she. Butterflies fluttered in her belly.
For a long moment he did not move, and it seemed as if the whole world went quiet and still. Then he nuzzled her hair and lifted his head. He paused a moment and slid away from her. “This isn’t wise,” he said.
“Why not?”
“You know why, lass.”
She felt all the warmth and blissful serenity pull away from her as he stood and returned to his own bedroll. Again he watched her from afar with those sweltering dark eyes, until at last she drifted back into a dark and dreamless sleep.
Chapter Nine
Drumloch Manor
John Montgomery galloped down the drive to the groomed path at the lake, where Aunt Eleanor always took her morning stroll. Rain or shine, she packed her two silly lapdogs into the coach, drove to the bridge, where she was let out with her walking stick, and circled once around the lake.
This morning there was a crisp autumn chill in the air, and John sniffled before he trotted up beside his aunt. The dogs yapped and barked at him, and his horse reared up and nearly threw him.
“Quiet, you rascals!”the dowager commanded, pointing her stick at them. “Or I’ll boil you both for dinner.”
The dogs continued to growl at John and his skittish mount, but anything was better than their incessant yapping.
“Have you come with news?” the dowager asked, shading her eyes to squint up at him.
He dismounted and walked beside her. “Nothing yet. Not a single word from anyone.”
They had sent a few of their own men in various directions to search for Catherine, and the magistrate had his people searching as well—those who had survived the Highlander’s escape.
“I am confused, John. How could our girl go missingtwice? You don’t suppose this Highlander is the same one who abducted her before? Perhaps it is a scheme to hold her for ransom, now that the inheritance is finally within reach. But no one ever asked for money the last time.”
“It’s impossible to say,” John replied, “for we haven’t the slightest idea what happened five years ago, or how she ended up in Italy. You have your theories, of course.”
“That she simply ran off, for some kind of wild adventure?”
He removed a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and dabbed the perspiration on his brow. “Yes, but that does not explain her memory loss. Nothing seems to explain it, other than a spell of madness.”
“But we mustn’t ever say such a thing to others. It’s enough of a scandal without adding talk of lunacy. If she is declared mentally unfit…”
“The inheritance will be lost.”
The dowager tapped her walking stick lightly along the gravel path. “Are you paying Dr. Williams well enough?”
“Aye. More than enough, and he knows it.”
