The Dark Highlander

Then he’d stood at the edge of the bed a moment, gazing down at her with an unfathomable expression in his exotic golden eyes. Unnerved, she’d broken eye contact first and rolled—inasmuch as she was able—onto her side away from him.

Sheesh, she thought, blinking heavy-lidded, sleepy eyes. She smelled like him. It was all over her.

She was falling asleep. She couldn’t believe it. In the midst of such dreadful, stressful circumstances, she was falling asleep.

Well, she told herself, she needed her sleep so her wits would be sharp tomorrow. Tomorrow she would escape.

He hadn’t tried to kiss her again, was her final, slightly wistful, and utterly ridiculous thought before she drifted off.

Several hours later, too restless to sleep, Dageus was in the living room, listening to the rain pattering against the windows and poring over the Midhe Codex, a collection of mostly nonsensical myths and vague prophecies (“a massive muddling mess of medieval miscellany,” one renowned scholar had called it, and Dageus was inclined to agree), when the phone rang. He glanced at it warily, but did not rise to answer it.

A long pause, a beep, then “Dageus, ’tis Drustan.”

Silence.

“You know how I hate talking to machines. Dageus.”

Long silence, a heavy sigh.

Dageus fisted his hands, unfisted them, then massaged his temples with the heels of his palms.

“Gwen’s in the hospital—”

Dageus’s head whipped toward the answering machine, he half-rose, but stopped.

“She had untimely contractions.”

Worry in his twin brother’s voice. It knifed straight to Dageus’s heart. Gwen was six-and-a-half-months pregnant with twins. He held his breath, listening. He’d not sacrificed so much to bring his brother and his brother’s wife together in the twenty-first century, only to have something happen to Gwen now.

“But she’s fine now.”

Dageus breathed again and sank back down to the sofa.

“The doctors said sometimes it happens in the last trimester, and so long as she doesn’t have further contractions, they’ll consider releasing her on the morrow.”

A time filled with naught but the faint sound of his brother’s breathing.

“Och … brother … come home.” Pause. Softly, “Please.”

Click.

• 5 •

Dageus was perilously close to losing control.

“That means ‘bridge,’ not ‘adjoining walkway,’” she was saying, peering over his shoulder and pointing at what he’d just scribbled in the notes he was taking. Some of her hair tumbled over his shoulder and spilled down his chest. It was all he could do not to slip his hand into it and tug her lips to his.

He should never have untied her this morn. But it wasn’t as if she could escape him, and it bordered on barbaric to keep her tied to the bed. Besides, the mere thought of her tied to the bed was obsessing a dark part of his mind. Still, it was no better having her flitting about, examining everything, pestering him with incessant questions and comments.

Each time he looked at her, a silent growl rose in his throat, scarce repressed hunger, need to touch her and taste her and—

“Doona be hanging over my shoulder, lass.” Her scent was filling his nostrils, inciting a lustful stupor. Scent of lush woman and innocence. Christ, didn’t she sense that he was dangerous? Mayhap not overtly, but in the way a mouse took one look at a cat and kept wisely to the shadowy corners of a room? Apparently not, for she chattered on.

“I’m just curious,” she said peevishly. “And you’re getting it wrong. That says, ‘When the man from the mounts, high where the yellow eagles soar, takes the low … er, path or journey … on the bridge that cheats death’—how curious, the bridge that cheats death?—‘the Draghar will return’ Who are the Draghar? I’ve never heard of them. What is that? The Midhe Codex? I’ve never heard of that either. May I see it? Where did you get it?”

Dageus shook his head. She was irrepressible. “Sit lass, or I’ll tie you up again.”

She glared at him. “I’m only trying to be helpful—”

“And why is that? I’m a thief, remember? A barbarian Visigoth, as you put it.”

She scowled. “You’re right. I don’t know what got into me.” A long pause. Then, “It’s just that I thought if you really were going to return them”—she gave him a searingly skeptical look—“the sooner you finished with them, the sooner they’d go back. So I’d be helping for a good cause.” She nodded pertly, looking inordinately pleased with her rationalization.