She’d made a grave mistake.
Sure of it, Kira felt disbelief beat through her, damning and unwelcome. How could she have lived her life, so certain she was better suited to a long ago, more quiet and distant time, yet feel so out of place in the very world she’d yearned for so powerfully?
It was a truth that cut her to the quick.
An unexpected revelation she didn’t like at all.
She took a deep, lung-filling breath, needing calm. The backs of her eyes stung, her misery reaching new heights as she stood near the hearth of Aidan’s ice-cold bedchamber and watched a parade of young, flush-faced boys carry pails of steaming water into the room. Careful not to look at her, each one tipped his burden into a wooden bathing tub that bore a strong resemblance to a sawed-in-half wine barrel.
A linen-lined wine barrel, praise God for small mercies.
The last thing she needed was a medieval splinter in her behind.
Her ordeal in Castle Wrath’s dungeon had been torture enough. She’d been treated to a side of medieval Scotland she’d never imagined when she’d fantasized about slipping back in time, even telling herself she’d been born in the wrong place and century.
Now she was no longer sure.
Being an old soul had lost some of its allure.
She winced just remembering her rescue. How Aidan had tossed her over his shoulder and charged out of the cell, pounding up the stairs with her and then flying through his great hall. He’d knocked over benches and sent people jumping out of their way. Poor Ferlie had loped after them, barking furiously at anyone who didn’t leap aside quickly enough.
It’d been a crazy scene. Pure chaos, causing her a humiliation she wasn’t sure she could swallow.
And not because he’d saved her.
Not even because he’d gone so caveman wild.
Far from it, she’d rather liked that part. His heroics had taken her breath, actually. Wind-torn and travel-stained as he’d been, with his sword clanking and eyes ablaze, he could’ve burst from the pages of a book about ancient clan warfare. He’d reminded her of the medieval Highland chieftains she’d always loved reading about. Better even, his rage made him fierce and magnificent.
But when he’d raced through the hall, cursing and shouting for a bath to be readied for her, his rubber-necked kinsmen all gaped at her, bug-eyed and slack-jawed. Every last one of them gawked as if Aidan had gone mad and she’d turned into a two-headed alien.
Now she was supposed to take a bath.
She felt her brow pleat. She didn’t want a half-barrel bath. She wanted to close her eyes and wake up in the medieval Scotland she’d mooned over. The romantic world she’d imagined while devouring books about the Highlands of old, or gazing awestruck at framed, second-hand Edinburgh castle tea-towels. She’d never have believed that her fantasy was nothing like the real thing.
Shivering, she rubbed her arms against the chill bumps rising along her skin.
She couldn’t do anything about the cold spreading across her heart.
It hurt to be so disillusioned.
Across the room, Aidan threw off his plaid and unlatched his sword belt, placing both atop the iron-bound chest at the foot of his bed. He ordered the last of the pink-cheeked water boys on their way, then closed and bolted the door behind them. Turning, he strode over to her, no longer looking angry, but not smiling either.
“Dinnae grieve, lass.” He gripped her shoulders lightly, looking down at her. “The horror is over and willnae happen again. My people will come to accept you. Wrath is no’ bad, you must believe me.
“This could be your home, Kee-rah.” His voice was soft and warm, his burr rich with a note of delicious enticement, tempting and wooing her. “I ken how much you love this place. That Scotland means as much to you as to those of us who have called the hills our own since before time. When you walk here, you see more than rock and heather and mist. Your heart recognizes the true spirit of the land.” He paused, studying her so intently that she caught her breath. “I know this from our shared dreams.”
Kira swallowed, not wanting to think about their dreams. Or her great passion for Scotland. Last she’d heard being a card-carrying Scotophile didn’t include half the things she’d endured since landing here.
Glancing down, she fussed at the folds of her skirts, still finding them as cumbersome and awkward as she had the moment she’d first slipped into them. Even worse, the bottom six inches or so were soiled with goop from the dungeon. As were her feet, since somewhere during the ordeal, she’d lost the blasted cuarans.
“Come lass, you cannae deny you belong here.” His words were persuasive, making her heart flutter. “I’ve seen you go misty-eyed just watching cloud shadows drift across the heathery moors.”
“Of course, such beauty gets to me.” She dug her toes into the floor rushes. “I’ve always loved Scotland.” She glanced up at him, her breath hitching. “It’s been my greatest wish to be here. I’ve yearned for that, in my time and, yes, in our dreams. The reality is different.
“It unsettles me.” She couldn’t lie.
“Ach, lass.” He smoothed the hair back from her face. “Surely you’ve seen that I willnae let aught happen to you? None of my men would dare touch you. Geordie and Ross….” He slid his knuckles down the side of her face, his touch sending ripples of pleasure through her. “Those fools willnae so much as look cross-eyed at you, ne’er again.”
She wanted to believe him. “Did you know they brought me food in the dungeon?”
When he only looked at her, his expression unreadable, she went on, “A bowl of slaked oats, I think you call it. Porridge. It didn’t look too bad, but I couldn’t eat, so I set it in a corner. Within minutes, three mice crawled out of the floor rushes and ate it.” She paused, her throat beginning to thicken. “Or rather, they would have, if the biggest rat I’ve ever seen hadn’t appeared to claim the porridge for himself.”
“Kee-rah….” He took her hand, twining their fingers. “The like will ne’er happen again. I promise you.”
She bit her lip. “How can you? It’s impossible for you to be at my side every minute and your men don’t like me. They’re afraid of me and think I’m a-”
“Then we shall change their minds.” He drew her close, tightening his arms around her. “You already have a strong champion in Tavish and I’ve a promising young lad in mind to give duty as your personal guard.”
“If only it were that simple.”
“I will make it so.”
Kira tried to smile, but her smile muscles wouldn’t cooperate.
Instead, she rested her head against his shoulder. “You are a medieval warrior chieftain,” she began, trying to ignore how good his arms felt around her. “You live in a world of clan feuding, sword fights, and cattle raids, a time when a mere bad tooth or ingrown toenail could kill someone, not to mention battle wounds and childbirth. You have enough to deal with without worrying about-”
“Do you not trust me to care for you?” He pulled back to look at her, his dark eyes narrowing. “I’ve dealt with the things you name since I drew my first breath, as has any other Highland chieftain worthy of the title. What I need—” he paused, holding her gaze. “—is for you to relax and then tell me what happened with Geordie and Ross. Only when I understand what frightened them enough to take you to the dungeon, can I dash the fear from their hearts. Your bath will-”
“Wash away dungeon goop.” She could feel the ick between her toes. “It won’t change-”
“It will soothe you,” he countered, the buttery richness of his accent almost letting her believe him.
Smooth, husky, and deep, his voice slid through her, its soft Highland beauty seducing her, making her forget her worries, lulling her into doing whatever he asked.
Almost.
Biting her lip again, her gaze slid to the half-barrel, its steaming water scented and waiting. Truth was, she did want a bath. Desperately. But taking one meant getting undressed and she was suddenly more aware than ever that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.
She didn’t need her sixth sense to know that even if Aidan turned his back, he’d peek before she could clamber into his wooden bathing tub.
He had that look about him tonight.
The dangerous, hot-eyed rogue look that could only mean one thing, no matter how hard he was trying to play the chivalry card.
As if to prove it, he put his hands on her shoulders again, this time easing her onto a stool next to the bathing tub. The determined gleam in his eyes held her in place as he knelt before her, then reached for a basin and a pail of heated water.
“Give me your foot.” He glanced at her as he filled the basin. “It willnae do for you to get into the bathing tub until your feet are clean.”
Kira tensed. “I can wash them myself. You needn’t help me.”
In answer, he cocked a brow and flipped her skirts up over her knees. Making it worse, he flashed an arrogant smile, then clamped a strong hand around her left ankle, lifting her foot and placing it in the basin.
She tried to jerk from his grasp, but he only slanted her a look of lairdly admonishment, his fingers tightening on her like an iron-cast ankle bracelet.
“You can see to yourself once we have you settled in your bath.”
She lifted her chin. “There will be no we about it. If I use the bathing tub, you can leave the room.”
“Och, you will bathe.” He dipped a soap-smeared cloth into the water and then plunged it between her toes, scrubbing vigorously. “I shall keep my back turned.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“Then you shall have to learn. As I, too, am trying to do.” He looked up, fixing her with a long, level stare as he carefully washed the arch of her foot. “Do not think it is easy for me to accept a place called All-den, Pen-seal-where’er, tiny flying disks, and zip-hers.”
Kira almost smiled, remembering his expression when her button went sailing through the air. “Okay. You’ve made your point, but no peeking.”
“I do not need to peek,” he observed, soaping her other foot. “I already know every inch of you. Including a certain bit of sweetness I can see just now.”
Kira’s eyes flew wide. “What do you mean ‘a bit of sweetness?’”
He only smiled.
Her own face flaming, she looked down, embarrassment crashing through her when she saw that her gown had slid much higher up her thighs than she’d realized. Even worse, she’d been sitting with her knees open.
“Oh!” She jumped off the stool. “I don’t want to talk about our dream-times and what you think you know about me.” Shaking out her skirts, she frowned. “You can’t compare something from a dream with the reality-”
“Nae, you cannae,” he agreed, standing. “The real you fires my blood a thousand times more than any dream vision.” He captured her chin and kissed her. Hard, rough, and fast. “Dinnae you e’er forget that, even when we must speak of unpleasant things.”
Kira angled her head, regarding him in the flickering glow of the hearth fire. “I think I’ve had enough unpleasantness for one day.”
“So you have.” He met her gaze, his expression serious. “There are still matters we must discuss.”
“Does it have to be now?”
He nodded, and then lowered his head to kiss her again, this time gently.
When he straightened, she pulled away, her heart thundering. There was something both unsettling and electrifyingly delicious about being kissed when she wasn’t wearing any panties. But now wasn’t the time to go all hot and tingly. A sensation that vanished when he began pacing between the wine barrel and the window embrasure.
Without breaking stride, he slanted her a dark look, all fierce warrior chieftain. “Remove your soiled clothes now, before the water cools,” he said, seven hundred years of authority shimmering all over him. “While you bathe, I would hear about your morning. You must tell me what frightened my men.”
“What I must do is find a pair of glittery red shoes.” Kira glanced at him, her fingers busy at her gown’s lacings.
He stopped pacing. “Glittery red shoes?”
“Never mind.”
“Ach, lass, but I do.” He stood watching her, another frown settling on his brow. “You must’ve said something the like to Geordie and Ross. Perhaps mentioned this future of yours, or the Na Tri Shean?”
“It was neither, but close.”
“That willnae do, sweet. No’ when your whate’er-it-was made my men gibber with fright.”
“I didn’t mean to scare them. I just wanted them to save what I thought was – oh, no!” She gasped when the bodice lacings ripped and both her gown and over-dress fell open to her waist.
Aidan’s eyes darkened again, his men’s upset apparently forgotten as his gaze lowered to her breasts. She didn’t need to look down to know that her thin excuse for a medieval undershift hid nothing. It was practically transparent. Equally bad, the room’s chill was tightening her nipples. She could feel them thrusting against the delicate linen, just as she felt the heat of his stare.
An intense, heavy-lidded perusal that only made them pucker all the more.
“You said you’d turn your back.” She wasn’t surprised he hadn’t.
Instead, he stepped closer and touched her face, once again smoothing his knuckles down the curve of her cheek. “Now hie yourself into yon bathing tub, lest I forget my vow to woo you properly.”
The words spoken, he turned and clasped his hands as casually as possible behind his back. He fixed his gaze on the night darkness outside his bedchamber’s tall, arch-topped windows. He also tried to close his ears to the furious rustling of cloth and the sloshing of water as Kira rid herself of her garments and climbed into the bath.
“So, Kee-rah.” He faced her only when he was sure she was fully submerged. “What was it that you wished Geordie and Ross to save?”
She looked at him, clouds of steam from the bath water rising around her like tendrils of faery mist. “A drowning woman.” She lifted her chin, as if she suspected he wouldn’t believe her. “I saw her death, apparently one that took place nearly a hundred years ago. She had seabirds tied to a rope about her waist and-”
“Her name was Annie,” Aidan finished for her, his innards twisting. “Her tale is a sad one and well known in these parts. She was married to Eachann MacQueen, a farmer who scratched a living off Wrath Isle’s barren slopes. He sustained his family by lowering his wife down the cliffs to gather seabirds and their eggs whene’er hunger drove them to such privations.”
“Whoever she was, I saw her.” She peered at him, her naked, soapy breasts jiggling as she gripped the edge of the bathing tub and leaned forward. “I didn’t see her as a ghost or because of witchcraft, but as a glimpse of the past. The once-was, as my gift of far-seeing reveals to me.”
Aidan began pacing again, too aware of the rivulets of water streaming over her full, lush breasts to wrap his mind around something that happened so long ago, and what it had to do with her and his gog-eyed, clack-tongued kinsmen.
“So you are a seeress.” He paused by one of the windows and stared across the dark water at the black, serrated cliffs of Wrath Isle. “The sight is common hereabouts and shouldn’t have fashed my men,” he said, keeping his back to her. “I’ll wager they fear you because of how you appeared atop the gatehouse arch. We must find a way to explain that. Then they will accept you.”
Behind him, Kira shifted in the water. “I don’t have second sight,” she argued. “At least not if you mean divination and prophecy. I told you, I’m a far-seer. Sometimes I’m able to look back in time, that’s all. Now I’ve obviously slipped through the centuries and that’s the only explanation I can give you. That, and my suspicion your gatehouse arch is a portal to the past.”
Aidan snorted before he could help himself.
“Scoff all you will.” She dipped a soapy cloth into the water, began scrubbing her shoulders. “If you have a better theory, I’m listening. Fact is, in my time, that arch of yours was half-buried in the grass, its top covered with moss and ferns. I was sitting on it, having a picnic, when suddenly my world vanished and I saw your men running across the bailey at me.”
Aidan considered telling her he wasn’t dimwitted enough to believe the like, but decided against it. The matter of their dream encounters and her zip-her made it difficult for him to doubt her.
Not to mention the wee flying disk.
He shuddered, his head beginning to throb with the immensity of it all.
“Ach, what a tangle,” he muttered, turning from the window and going to his table where he poured a generous cup of his strongest ale. A fine, rich brew flavored with just a hint of heather. He took a long swallow, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“I will not lie to you, lass.” He swirled the ale in his cup, looking down into its frothy, honey-colored depths. “What you claim is no’ easy to accept. Even when my heart tells me you speak true.”
“Then you believe me?”
Aidan let out his breath slowly. “Let us say I can think of no other explanation,” he said, setting down the ale cup. He wasn’t about to admit how much the zip-her and the little disk she called a button, bothered him. Instead, he folded his arms and tried to look worldly.
She put her shoulders back, soap bubbles winking at him from her smooth, wet skin. “There’s not another explanation because I’ve told the truth.”
“Be that as it may, my men will have to hear a different tale.”
She didn’t look happy at that, but before she could protest, he raised a silencing hand. “We will put it about that one of my allies brought you here, spiriting you onto the gatehouse arch as a jest. Many of my friends are bold enough to have attempted such foolery,” he said, thinking in particular of the Barra MacNeils.
Hebridean devils to a man, and great ravishers of women as well, any one of his friends from the Isle of Barra could have done the deed. Best of all, if ever his tall tale reached the MacNeils, they’d be quicker to throw back their heads and roar with laughter than draw their swords and demand he redeem their honor.
Och, aye, the MacNeils were the answer.
He smiled, his achy head feeling better already.
Kira Bedwell frowned.
She’d wrapped her arms around her knees and sat staring at him from the bathing tub, clearly not agreeing with a thing he’d suggested. “It means a lot to me that you don’t think I’m a witch, but whether you believe me or not, I still don’t belong here.”
“I say you do.” Aidan crossed the room in a flash. “Your place is with me and has been since that long ago day we first glimpsed each other. If there be any truth between us, it is that.” He looked down at her, her nakedness making his blood race to places that could prove dangerous. “Come, lass, you know as well as-”
“‘If there be any truth between us’ are words that prove there can be nothing between us.” She met his gaze, regret in her voice. “People don’t talk like that where I come from, and they sure don’t talk like me here.” Glancing down, she plucked at the tub’s linen lining. “Don’t you see? Much as I would have wished it otherwise, my being here is a mistake. A weird quirk of fate – a slip in time – that should only have been a fleeting glance. I’d hoped to catch a glimpse of you in your hall, but in my heart I wanted more.”
She looked up again, her eyes shining. “I think my longing was so strong that it caused a bump in our destinies, sort of like when the needle of an old-fashioned record player skipped to the wrong groove.”
Aidan dropped on one knee beside the bathing tub. He didn’t understand all the words she’d used, but he knew well enough what she meant. “The fates do not err,” he told her. “Leastways no’ Gaelic ones. If they saw fit to send you here, you can be sure that was their intention.”
To his annoyance, she didn’t look convinced.
Just the opposite, she drew back her hand when he reached for it, hoping to gentle her with a soft kiss to her palm.
“I’m not so sure ancient Gaelic gods have much control over Americans,” she said, tucking her hands beneath her bent knees. “We’re always told we make our own beds and this one” – she glanced around his sumptuous, candlelit room – “is a bed I’m not supposed to be sleeping in. Especially when my being here is causing you so much grief. I can’t allow-”
“Grief?” Aidan shot to his feet, pulling her up with him. Scowling, he lifted her from the tub, then swirled a linen drying cloth around her shoulders. “Misery was the long years without you. The empty nights when I wondered if you were indeed naught but a dream. I thought my heart would split when Tavish carried you into my hall and I recognized you.”
She gave him a look that made his head start to pound again. “You looked furious when you saw me.” She clutched the drying cloth to her breasts. “In medieval-speak, you’d probably say black-browed and ready to flay me to ribbons.”
“No’ you, lass. I was ready to punish my men, as I’ve told you,” he reminded her. “I was wroth with them for their treatment of you.”
“That’s the reason I must leave.” She moved to stand before the hearth fire, turning her back to its warmth. “I can’t stay on and see my presence cause such disruption in your hall. If I’m gone-”
“Without you, there would be no hall for I should spend my days searching for you.” He went to her, putting his hands on her shoulders. “My warriors would become rovers, broken men without direction-”
“You’re trying to make me feel good, but it won’t work.” She ducked away and snatched up another linen towel, using this one to dry her hair. “If I remained, you’d be miserable. You’d end up spending every night like this one, stomping about and scowling, grilling me because one of your men misunderstood something I said or did.”
Stomping and scowling?
Aidan shoved a hand through his hair. Was he truly guilty of the like? Half certain that he was, his brows snapped together, his head now throbbing in earnest. Frowning as well, he turned on his heel and did his best not to stomp to the window. Once there, he drew a deep breath of the bracing sea air and scowled all he wished.
Truth was, it felt good.
He didn’t need Tavish Long-nose to tell him that black moods and storming through halls weren’t ways to win a lady’s heart. What he needed was a clear head and a plan. A new approach, guaranteed to impress.
Stepping closer to the window, he braced his hands on the cold stone ledge and took another deep breath. And another. The chill air would surely help him think. Hopefully, when the answer came, it would be one he could stomach.
Something that wouldn’t make him look foolish.
Not that he’d allow such a trivial matter to keep him from gaining his heart’s desire.
He sighed. It was amazing what love could do to a man.