“You do have fire—”
“I have a lighter,” she interrupted defensively. “But I don’t smoke,” she hastened to add, not in the mood to entertain the disdain of a man who was clearly an athlete of some kind. She’d taken up smoking two years ago during the Great Fit of Rebellion, right after she and her parents had quit speaking permanently, and then she’d ended up addicted. Now, for the third time, she’d quit, and by God she was going to be successful this time.
His fingers closed over the lighter, and he assumed possession of it. As she stood beside him in the darkness, as he took her lighter away and the flame flickered out, she sensed that he would do the same with anything he wanted. Casually assume possession. Wrap his strong hand around it and claim it.
She was surprised when he fumbled for several moments before he managed to press the little button that released the flame. How could he not know how to use a lighter? Even a health fanatic would have seen someone light a cigar or a pipe, if only on TV or in a movie. She suffered another attack of the shivers. When he resumed the pace, she followed him—the only alternative to remain by herself in the dark, and that was no alternative at all.
“English?” he said softly.
“Why do you call me that?”
“You haven’t given me your name.”
“I don’t call you Scotty, do I?” she said irritably. Irritated by his strength, his arrogance, his blatant sexuality.
He laughed, but it didn’t sound like his heart was in it. “English, what is the month?”
Oh, boy, here we go, she thought. I did fall down one of Alice’s rabbit holes.
3
Drustan MacKeltar was worried. Although there was nothing he could put his finger on—apart from the remarkable fire she possessed, her shameless attire, and her unusual manner of speaking—he couldn’t shake the feeling that an even more significant fact was eluding him. Initially, he’d thought mayhap he was no longer in Scotland, but then she’d informed him he was a mere three-day hike from his home.
Mayhap he’d lost several days, even a week. He shook his head, trying to clear it. He felt the same as he had once before when as a young lad he’d had a high fever and woken over a week later: confused, thick-witted, his normally lightning-fast instincts slowed. His reactions were further dulled because lust was thundering though his veins. A man couldn’t think clearly when he was aroused. All his blood was being sucked to one part of his body, and while it was one of his finer parts, cool and logical didn’t describe it.
The last thing he remembered, prior to awakening with the English lass sprawled so wantonly atop him, was that he had been racing toward the little loch in the glen behind his castle and growing unnaturally weary. From there, his memories were blurred. How had he ended up in a cave, a three days’ hike away from his home? Why couldn’t he remember how he had gotten here? He didn’t seem to have suffered any injury; indeed, he felt hearty and hale.
He struggled to recall why he had been running toward the loch. He paused, as a tide of fragmented memories washed over him.
A sense of urgency…distant voices chanting…incense and snatches of conversation: He must never be found, and a curious reply, We will hide him well.
Had his petite English been there? Nay. The voices had been oddly accented, but not like hers. He quickly discarded the possibility that she had aught to do with his plight. She didn’t seem the brightest lass, nor particularly strong. Still, a woman of her beauty didn’t need to be; nature had given her all the gifts she needed to survive. A man would use all his skills as a warrior to protect such lush beauty, even had she been deaf and mute.
“Are you all right?” English nudged his shoulder. “Why did you stop, and please don’t let the light go out. It makes me nervous.”
Skittish as a foal, she was. Drustan pressed the tiny button again and flinched only mildly this time when the flame issued forth. “The month?” he asked roughly.
“September.”
Her reply hit him like a fist in his stomach: the last afternoon he recalled had been the eighteenth day of August. “How near Mabon?”
She regarded him strangely, and her voice was strained when she said, “Mabon?”
“The autumnal equinox.”
She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “It is the nineteenth of September. The equinox is the twenty-first.”
Christ, he’d lost nearly a month! How could that be? He pondered the possibilities, sorting and discarding until he struck upon one that horrified him because it seemed the only explanation that fit the circumstances: once he’d been lured to the clearing, he’d been abducted. But assuming he had been abducted, how had he lost an entire month?