Read A Bewitching Bride Online
Authors: Elizabeth Thornton
A Bewitching Bride (6 page)
The voice changed, became harsher, insistent, and another layer of darkness peeled away. She waited for the velvet voice to speak again, but there was no sound, only silence. On a panicked cry, she opened her eyes. Fluttering above her head were ghosts or angels. It took her a moment to realize that the ghosts were nothing more sinister than laundry hanging on a pulley to dry. She turned her head on the pillow and looked into the bluest eyes she had ever beheld, not blue like the sky, but the midnight blue of a Scottish loch, fathoms deep and impenetrable.
In a matter-of-fact voice, the man with the blue eyes said, “Drink this. It will make you feel better.”
When he spread his fingers behind her neck and raised her head, she winced in pain. Her head ached, her shoulder ached, her eyes ached from too much light. But worst of all was the dryness in her throat. Her tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of her mouth.
He put a cup to her lips, and she drank greedily. Hot sweet tea, she thought. When she drank it to the dregs, he refilled the cup and offered it to her again. All the while, her eyes were moving around the cramped interior. For a moment, she thought she might be in one of her father’s estate cottages, but this one was smaller.
Dark rafters crisscrossed the ceiling. The fireplace was an immense affair with a stool at either side for, she supposed, the children to sit and warm themselves. One wall was taken up by a dresser and table. The other wall was taken up by the bed she was lying on. A long rug of indeterminate pattern covered the stone floor. She could smell the pleasant scent of peat.
As she slowly came back to herself, she recognized her dress hanging to dry on the pulley and became aware that she was in a strange bed with nothing more substantial than a flimsy piece of fine linen to cover her nakedness. Her eyes focused on the man hovering over her. Gavin Hepburn was the man whom Juliet had warned her against. She had never felt safer in her life.
When he turned away to tend to the fire, she allowed herself to drift into a blessed unknowing.
Four
The sound of his voice penetrated the haze in her mind. She wouldn’t have cared if he had spoken to her in Greek, Latin, or ancient Hebrew. The words were not important. What mattered was the sense of well-being that flowed through her at the sound of his voice. He had a mesmerizing voice.
The voice changed. Or maybe it was her perception that changed. He stopped soothing her and started calling her to account.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I’m not letting you slip away again, else you may never wake up. Open your mouth. Wider! Drink this!”
With those harsh words, her woolly reveries suddenly unraveled, and she opened her eyes. There was no sign now of the voice that had charmed her as she slept. This man’s jaw was tight. His eyes bored into hers. Had she felt more like herself, she would have fought him, but she didn’t even possess the strength to sit up.
She could have wept. As a child, she’d had an imaginary friend who was more real to her than her own sister. He was always there to comfort her when things went wrong.
Friend
, she called him. He didn’t desert her; she deserted him the day she learned that her mother was locked away for hearing voices in her head. Was she mad, too?
Friend
, she called him. He didn’t desert her; she deserted him the day she learned that her mother was locked away for hearing voices in her head. Was she mad, too?
There was no friend. He was a figment of her imagination, a means of protecting her fragile psyche from harm.
Reality was this hard-eyed man who held the rim of a cup to her lips.
She opened her mouth and promptly choked on the tea, not because it was too hot, but because it was too sweet. How many cups of tea had she drunk, anyway? There was no relenting in him. He forced her to drink the cup to the dregs.
“Good girl,” he said, as though she were his pet dog.
He helped her raise herself a little, with her head and shoulders propped against a pillow. When she was settled, he turned away and added more logs to the blaze. It looked to her as though it would be a long night.
She gave a shivery sigh. There was no escape into sleep now. Everything had come back to her. He was Gavin Hepburn, and she owed him an explanation. If it had not been for him and his dog, she would be as frozen as one of the icicles that hung from the eaves. But before she took the plunge, she wanted to make quite sure that she could trust him. After all, there was a faint possibility that he was the one who had pursued her over the moor.
To what purpose? He hadn’t killed her. He had saved her. Or was there some devious point to this cat-and-mouse game?
Emptying herself of all distracting thoughts, she opened herself to what her senses were telling her, but all that she received were mixed messages. He wasn’t dangerous, but he wasn’t harmless, either.
What was she supposed to make of that?
He pulled a stool up to the narrow bed and sat with legs spread and his arms resting on his knees. He was getting ready to fire off his questions. It just so happened that she had a few of her own that she wanted answers to before she took him into her confidence.
“This cottage,” she began and had to start over because her voice sounded as weak and wobbly as an old woman’s. “Who does it belong to, and what are you doing here?”
He spread his hands. “A man with a dog is not welcome at the hotel, so Juliet offered Macduff and me this cottage. It’s not far from the hotel, but in this weather, we might as well be on the moon. If it’s any consolation, it has stopped snowing, so we may get out of here and back to civilization by morning.”
Macduff, who was toasting himself in front of the fire, had looked up when he heard his name mentioned.
“He saved me, didn’t he?” she said quietly, turning her head to look at Macduff.
“What do you remember?”
“A ferocious beast, with fangs bared, standing over me.”
“That would be Macduff. He’s a herder, you see, and bred to protect the flock whatever the cost to himself. Leastways, that’s my opinion. He came to me as a stray, so I have no way of knowing.”
“Has he done this kind of thing before?”
“Yes, but only if he takes a fancy to you.”
Her smile was fleeting, but as memory returned, she shuddered. “He howled,” she said. “I’ve never heard anything like it. It didn’t sound, well, earthly. I thought, in my dazed state, that he was a banshee.” She could have bitten her tongue off. Now she’d made herself sound like a hysterical, scatterbrained idiot.
He nodded. “Sometimes I wonder about that myself. I heard that howl and knew that something was far wrong. Macduff doesn’t make that sound unless he is in mortal danger.”
“He wakened you?”
She noted a slight hesitation before he answered. “I was sleeping fitfully.” The hesitation was short-lived and he went on with relentless deliberation, “Now it’s your turn. What made you leave the safety of the hotel, on such a night, without a wrap to keep you warm?”
“I had a wrap,” she answered quickly. “My tartan shawl. I must have lost it in the struggle. And I had no intention of leaving the hotel.”
“Was there a struggle?”
She was taken aback. “How do you think I got that cut on my shoulder? Do you think I did it to myself? And what would be the point?”
“Calm yourself,” he said. “I believe you.” He patted the waistband of his trousers. “See? I don’t usually go to sleep with my revolver ready to hand.”
He had to move his arm before she could see the butt of his revolver protruding out of his waistband. Did that mean that he suspected that the person who had attacked her was still out there, waiting for the right moment to finish her off? At least he was taking her seriously.
“No,” he said, as though he could read her mind. “Whoever attacked you will be long gone, or he has turned into a block of ice. No one can survive in the open in this kind of weather.”
She felt dizzy with relief.
“Now,” he said, “begin at the beginning, and tell me exactly what brought you out in such a night.”
She nodded, but that did not mean that he had persuaded her to tell him the whole story. Some things, such as the contents of the note, were too personal to share. “I received a threatening note,” she began, and went on to tell him how Dr. Rankin had seemed agitated when she told him about it. “He wanted to talk to me about it, so we arranged to meet in the conservatory when everyone had gone to bed.”
“What did the note say?”
She shook her head. “It’s not my place to say. You’ll have to ask Dr. Rankin about that.”
“Where is the note now?”
She couldn’t hide her dismay. Until he’d mentioned the note, she’d never given it another thought. “I don’t know. I think I dropped it in the chase.”
He regarded her coolly.
“I had it in my hand,” she protested, “but when I picked up my skirts to make a run for it, I must have dropped it.”
“I see.”
There was an interval of silence before he continued. “You say you agreed to meet in the conservatory? Do you mean the hothouse just off the dining room?”
“Yes.”
“Why not meet in your bedchamber or his? That would have been more convenient, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, much more convenient but far more perilous. You may have noticed that at night porters patrol the corridors? The scandal of being discovered in compromising circumstances may do nothing more serious than raise an eyebrow in your circles, but in mine, the wrath of my Fraser cousins would be implacable. In short, they’d beat the man to within an inch of his life.”
He arched a brow. “Then lead him to the altar? Isn’t that a bit extreme?”
She gave a drowsy smile. “You don’t know my family.”
And she was very happy to leave it that way. A man like Gavin Hepburn would only judge them and find them wanting. They were unconventional, quarrelsome, and slightly fey, but they had the money to command the respect of their neighbors, and that made all the difference in the world.
“What about your maid? Didn’t she try to stop you?”
“Elsie wasn’t there. She shares a room with Sally Anderson’s maid.” She put her hand to her mouth to cover her yawn.
“Don’t go to sleep yet. You haven’t told me what happened in the hothouse.”
She opened her eyes and tried to concentrate. “The French door was ajar,” she said slowly. “I thought Dr. Rankin might have gone outside to smoke. So I stepped outside. I think I said his name. That’s when I heard the door close. It doesn’t open from the outside, so I knew that I couldn’t go back in.”
She paused as she brought the scene into focus. “Someone was there. I knew it wasn’t Dr. Rankin. I smelled the tobacco and . . . and something else.” He was silent as she took herself through the experience one step at a time. “I smelled whiskey,” she said slowly. Shock rippled through her. “How could I have forgotten?”
“Why did you run? Anyone might have gone outside to smoke a cigar. And Dr. Rankin likes his whiskey.”
“He . . .”
“Yes?”
“He wouldn’t answer me. I’ve never been more afraid in my life.” Her voice trailed to a halt.
“Go on. What happened next?”
She swallowed hard. “He caught up to me at the dry stone dike beside the witches’ stone. Do you know it?”
“I know it.”
Her voice began to tremble. “I think I must have gone a little mad. I lay in ambush for him and leaped at him from the top of the wall.”
“You fought back?” He sounded incredulous.
“I didn’t know I had it in me.”
There was a long silence as he considered her words. Finally, he said, “Rest up. You’re safe now. Macduff and I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Her eyes closed. There was no dark now, no shadows behind her eyes. She felt as light as a snowflake floating on air.
Gavin adjusted the covers at her chin, then turned back to see to the fire. The stack of birch logs was low, but there was a scuttle of peat beside the grate to keep them going. He arranged the lumps, leaving enough space to allow air to ignite the peat. He wasn’t used to lighting and tending fires. There were always servants in the homes he visited to take care of the menial tasks. Oddly enough, when he was out on the hills or climbing the peaks, he had to do everything for himself and never gave it another thought.
He stayed up to see to the fire. Peat was not his favorite fuel. If it wasn’t placed just right, it would smother the flames, and the fire would go out. Birch logs were better, but they didn’t last long. Coal would have been his first choice, but hauling coal to the Highlands was a costly business. A true Highlander would scoff at him. He was a townsman while they were a hardy lot.
When he was satisfied that the fire was not in danger of going out, he spread his blanket in front of the fire, doused the lamp, and made to lie down. Macduff got there before him. Gavin elbowed him to the side and ignored the growls and baring of teeth that met his efforts.
“Any more of that,” he said, “and I’ll throw you outside to fend for yourself.”
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