by Jessi Gage
Chapter 13
Melanie’s pulse picked up at Constance’s words. And her accent. She was from modern-day America, somewhere in the midwest. She knew about traveling through time.
But more importantly, Darcy didn’t deny what she’d just said. He planned to return to Ackergill alone. As in, without her!
“Darcy?” she asked, her delicious meal forgotten. She didn’t care that he’d advised her not to speak in front of Wilhelm. Keeping her accent a secret didn’t matter anymore. Not when it was so similar to Constance’s.
He turned to her with resigned eyes. “I gave ye my word. I intend to keep it. We may have lost your box, but I willna stop until I find the maker. If he could make one magic box, he can make another.”
A surge of hope at the thought of returning home warred with a pain in her chest at the thought of leaving Darcy. When she’d talked him out of putting on the Murray tartan, she’d thought they could find a way to get back to Ackergill together. It shocked her to realize she hadn’t thought of Charleston once during their strategizing session. How was that even possible?
Maybe she had been too distracted by seeing Darcy’s full torso for the first time, as he’d slid down the wide swath of wool that usually covered most of his golden, muscled chest to put on the shirt. Or maybe it had been the look in his eyes, all at once heated and shy, when she’d dropped her ripped dress to the floor, leaving herself in nothing but the thin shift Fran had given her before finding her way into the intimidating tent of the Renaissance-style gown. They’d talked while they dressed, but their eyes had roved over each other as though talking were the only thing keeping them from more kissing.
Lust. It was only lust, she told herself. Of course she still wanted to go home. Of course she still wanted Darcy to help her.
Too bad the thought had the flavor of a lie.
She gave him a thin smile. She ought to thank him for his devotion to her cause, but her tight throat couldn’t form words.
Constance spoke, saving her. “So it was a magic box for you?”
“Aye,” Darcy answered for her, not bothering to deny her association with magic. Apparently, he knew Constance and Wilhelm weren’t strangers to this kind of thing. “But Steafan has the box now.”
“Which doesn’t matter,” Melanie piped in. “The box wouldn’t work for me again. We tried, but it didn’t work.” Her voice got small toward the end as Constance’s gaze met hers. Those eyes were a mite too shrewd for her liking, as if they might see all the way through to what she didn’t want to face. She looked at her plate and pushed some fish around with her spoon.
Wilhelm spoke. “So your laird married ye but then he found out about the box and decided your Malina was a witch and wouldna make a good Keith after all. And ye stole her before he could carry out her sentence.”
Darcy nodded.
Wilhelm scoffed a humorless laugh. “And ye think he’ll take ye back after you’ve helped your witch of a wife use her magic to travel through time?”
Darcy grimaced. “I dinna plan to tell my uncle I helped her use magic. I will simply go home once she is safe, tell Steafan my wife left me, and beg his forgiveness.”
Wilhelm arched an eyebrow in what might have been amusement.
Constance said, “I wonder what Malina thinks of all this. Or is it Melanie? Where are you from, dear?”
“Charleston,” she answered. “And yes. It’s Melanie. Melanie Burns.”
“Melanie Keith,” Darcy corrected, taking her hand. “Ye may always keep my name. ’Tis my gift to ye. If ye want it.”
She bit the inside of her lip to keep her rising emotion at bay. Melanie Keith. She liked hearing that way too much, and she liked the sentiment behind it even more.
How could she be having verklempt thoughts about last names when she was sitting at a dinner table with a woman who had traveled through time like she had? A woman who might know how she could get home.
A woman who hadn’t returned home, herself, and was looking at her with twinkling eyes.
“Come, Melanie,” Constance said, rising. “Let’s leave our husbands to hammer out their contract.”
She looked between Constance and Darcy, torn.
“Go,” Darcy said. “I’ll find ye later.”
She squeezed his shoulder in parting and left with Constance, who led her to an upper room lined with gilt mirrors and boasting a large marble tub that looked remarkably modern with its bronze faucet and heavy, lever-style handles.
“I missed hot baths the most,” she said with a flip of one of the handles. Water poured from the spout, and to Melanie’s astonished eyes, it began to steam. Constance draped her cloak over an overstuffed brocade chair and flipped the other handle up halfway. She gave Melanie a wink. “Wilhelm insists this room remain secret, especially from the staff who keep a raging fire going under a tank below stairs from dark to midnight every night. We’ve endlessly debated whether Scotland is ready for heated indoor plumbing. I vote yes. He thinks it could unravel the fabric of time or some nonsense and I might never come into existence as a consequence. Thinks I might evaporate into thin air if I let the wrong thing slip. He’s so dramatic. Well, what are you waiting for? Take off your dress.”
The woman tried to hide it, but the faint lines around her mouth suggested the Lady Murray took a great deal of pleasure in sharing her little haven with her guest.
She shucked her dress and shift, the hot water beckoning her past any issues she might have had about stripping in front of a stranger. “How?” she asked, dipping her fingers into the water. The temperature was perfect. She sank in with a sigh and let the tub fill up around her.
“I was a mechanical engineer. Before. 1981 is when I came through the stones. And Wilhelm is no slouch in the brains department. That, and he’s very wealthy and determined to give me anything I want.”
As remarkable as the hot water was, something else in what Constance had said caught her ear. “Through the stones?”
“Standing stones.” Her hostess seated herself on the edge of the tub. “You know, like Stonehenge? The circle that brought me through is near Inverness. When I was vacationing with my mother and sister, it was called Druid’s Temple. It has no name today that I know of.” She waved away the enormity of time travel via ancient stone formation and raised her eyebrows at Melanie’s belly. “Your first?”
She nodded, her hands rubbing her baby bump beneath the steamy paradise. Despite the gentle flutters deep inside that usually made her ridiculously happy when she was still enough to feel them, a deep melancholy overcame her. She had a woman from close to her own time, who’d gone through a similar experience to her own, making herself graciously available, yet her thoughts kept turning back to the way her heart had ached when Constance had said, “You plan to send her back through time,” and only incriminating silence had followed.
“You’ve got it bad, darlin’.”
She looked up with a start and realized her hostess had been talking and she’d been spacing. “I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
Constance gave her a knowing smile. “I was saying I was terrified about giving birth here, but it wasn’t so bad. I managed it quite a few times. But I have a feeling giving birth isn’t the top totem on your pole right now.”
She felt herself blush and let her head rest back on the tub as she focused on the woman before her instead of the man across the castle. “How many is ‘quite a few?’ Boys? Girls?”
“Later. Let’s talk about that top totem. You thought you wanted to go back, but now you’re not so sure.”
The truth of the other woman’s words kicked her in the gut. She wanted to deny it. Wanted to say, “That’s absurd. Of course I want to go back.” But she couldn’t. She could only soak there and look guilty.
A soft laugh parted Constance’s lips. “Boy, have I been there, darlin’.”
“Did you look for a way back?”
“No,” she said softly. “At first it was all I could think about, but I didn’t have the
opportunity. Within an hour of coming through the stones, I was imprisoned under suspicion of being an English spy.” They shared a sympathetic smile. “There was no trial. No opportunity for escape. The word witch was thrown around. Before I knew it, I was naked and tied to a stake with a pile of wood on fire at my feet.”
As she continued her story, Constance’s hazel eyes went back to that day. But for Darcy’s snatching her from Steafan’s clutches, she’d have died like this remarkable woman almost had. “Wilhelm had been riding through the clan-lands educating the lairds about alternatives to unnecessarily cruel punishments–my husband has always been a thinker out of place in time.” She beamed with pride and added with a conspiratorial wink, “It’s one of the reasons we get along so well.”
She rose and rifled through a cupboard while Melanie tried to reconcile the man with the compassionate agenda with the ruthless laird Darcy had told her about. “Well, as you can imagine,” Constance went on, “his ideas weren’t too popular. But being the oldest son of the laird of Dornoch, he was humored, though no one took him seriously. Until he rode through that crowd, sliced the head off my executioner, and pulled me from the flames like a warrior possessed by righteous justice.”
There it was, the missing piece. Wilhelm was ruthless in his compassion. The thought made her smile. She imagined Darcy would ride through flames, beheading executioners, to rescue her as well.
Constance turned from the cupboard with her arms full of pressed soaps, glass bottles, sponges, and loofas. “Dunk your head and I’ll wash your hair,” she said, uncorking a bottle.
She obeyed, her eyes drifting closed with pleasure as her hostess lathered her locks with the gentle fingers of a woman who had raised several children, the strong fingers of a modern woman who had made a life for herself five hundred years in the past. The sweet fragrance of honeysuckle drew her deeper into bliss.
“So, he saved you,” she said, her voice slurred with relaxation. “That’s so romantic. What happened then?”
Constance was quiet, so Melanie cracked an eye open. Her hostess smiled down at her, the mischief in the look hinting at sensual memories. “Well,” she said, “I found my rescuer verra handsome. And, as you can imagine, I was verra grateful.”
They sighed in unison, and she wondered if her hostess had ever been a reader of romance novels.
Pouring a pitcher of warm water over her head, Constance said, “Wilhelm’s father married us the next week, and I never did get around to looking for a way back to the corporate grind.”
Melanie availed herself of the soaps and loofas while her hostess told her about her six sons, the oldest three now married and with children of their own.
She let herself imagine Constance thirty years ago. The woman had a stately beauty about her now; she must have been absolutely ravishing back then. And Wilhelm, who still looked as though he could more than hold his own in a battle, must have been quite the warrior back in the day. What color had his hair been then? With his silvery-blue eyes, probably blond.
“And you never looked back?” she asked at last.
“Never.” She put away the bath things, and Melanie stood and toweled herself dry. “That’s not to say it wasn’t difficult at times. I grieved for the people I loved whom I knew I would never see again. I hated myself sometimes for not at least trying to find my way back to them.” She regarded her with serious eyes. “But whenever I thought about what it would do to Wilhelm if I left–” She shook her regal head as if the thought was too terrible to voice.
Her face softened. “And then we had our first son. Seeing Wilhelm as a father changed me. Made me realize that nothing mattered but us. Our family. Those who would have missed me would have forgiven me for taking this happiness for myself. I stopped beating myself up about it and just…lived.”
Constance’s story sat like a stone in her gut. It both anchored her and made her feel ill. “Didn’t you ever worry about how your life would likely be shorter here, without modern medicine? Didn’t you think about all the conveniences you would miss?” Even to her own ears, those concerns sounded trivial in contrast to the love Constance had found.
The older woman cocked an eyebrow in response, showing she felt the same way.
“Let’s keep the hot water just between us girls.” Her hostess showed her back to the bedroom then left her to contemplate all they’d talked about.
Darcy wasn’t back yet, so she sat before the dressing table and combed her damp hair. She didn’t know if she could stop looking for a way home. She had feelings for Darcy, sure, and her leaving would hurt them both, but in the end, her leaving would actually help him. He’d be able to go back to Ackergill if she wasn’t with him. The whole agreement he was working out with Wilhelm assumed he would eventually be allowed back. In time, he would be glad to have her gone so he could have his life back, and she would be glad to get back to Charleston and the museum and to the people she loved and who would be so worried about her.
But the way back home, if there was one, waited for her in Inverness. For now, she was in romantic Skibo Castle in picturesque Dornoch. And she had a husband to bend to her seductive will. Darcy had vowed to help her return home. Rising from the dressing table, she vowed she wouldn’t go without having given him as much affection and pleasure as he deserved.
With her hair all combed out and drying in chunky waves, she stretched out on the bed in her shift, lying on her side to face the door with her legs bent to alluring effect and one arm framing her breasts.
“Come and get me, you sexy Highlander.”
* * * *
After discussing a contract with Wilhelm for over an hour, Darcy made his way back to the room he and Malina had been given. They’d finally agreed the Murray would provide them protection in Dornoch for up to two years, and in exchange, Darcy would serve the Murray with his sword for those two years and for the following five years, answering as many as four calls per year so long as the skirmish was not against the Keith or an ally of the Keith. When he eventually returned to Ackergill, he would send Wilhelm a quarter share of his take at the mill until the end of the seven-year contract. It was a larger percentage than Darcy was comfortable with. After Steafan’s take of thirty percent he would be left with just over forty percent for running the mill and to live off of, but he’d agreed to the sum thinking that it didn’t cost much for a man to live alone.
Mayhap it was optimistic to believe Steafan would abide his return, but he had value to his clan as a fighter, and being near kin to the laird may serve him well. So long as Malina wasn’t with him, he stood a chance, however small, though he wouldn’t be surprised to spend some time in Steafan’s stocks or to suffer a scourging for his rebellion. ’Twas only fair. He had defied his laird. But he didn’t fash overmuch about it. A little pain would be nothing compared to the ache of losing Malina. Any wounds his uncle saw fit to carve into his flesh would heal. Malina’s absence would be a never-healing agony.
He walked the grand halls of Skibo and pictured his wife’s bonny face and her sweet mouth. Would she mayhap kiss him again before he took his place on the floor tonight? Her kisses, her touch, the soft look in her emerald eyes that made him unashamed to stand to his full height, those would be the things he would live for until he had to say goodbye. He would spend however long they had together flooding his mind with memories he could cling to on the cold nights that awaited him after she returned home.
He came to the door and opened it quietly, not wanting to wake her if she was already asleep. But the faint glow of a shuttered lantern met him, along with an enticing honeysuckle scent. He stepped inside and his lungs forgot how to breathe.
Malina was lying on the bed in her shift lazily stroking a finger over the velvety bedcovers. Her hair surrounded her shoulders like silky ropes of silver and gold. And, sweet saints, her breasts plumped against her low neckline like cream about to overflow a pitcher. While he stood stunned in the open doorway, one of her delicate hands curled in her shift and tu
gged up her hem to reveal the pale, smooth lines of her shins. The gentle curves of her knees. Christ, higher.
“Shut the door, Darcy, and come to bed.”
He shut the door all right, sealing himself outside the bedchamber, eradicating the vision that had made his cock spring instantly to attention. ’Twas more than kissing his wee temptress of a wife had in mind. She would kill him with the wanting of her.
He turned on his heel and fled at the fastest pace that could yet be called a walk. Where he might go, he had no idea. It didn’t matter. So long as he got himself away from the temptation that was his beautiful Malina.
“Darcy! Where are you going?”
She was coming after him. His muscles coiled to run from her. But the Keith didn’t run. They faced what terrified them with bravery and honor.
He stopped and turned, facing the most terrifying and wonderful thing he’d ever laid eyes on.
Her silvery eyebrows slanted with concern. “Darcy?”
“Malina–” He didn’t ken what to say to her, so he said nothing.
She closed the distance between them and took his hand. He was too startled by the contact to yank it back.
“Come on, husband of mine.” Her smile did a poor job of masking her hurt. “I’d rather behave myself and have you stay with me tonight than try to seduce you and chase you away. Tell me about the contract with Wilhelm,” she said, leading him back to the room.
* * * *
Shee-yikes, could that have gone any worse? Doing her best not to take Darcy’s rejection personally, Melanie pulled a blanket around herself and curled into as unsexy a ball as she could manage against the bed’s many pillows. She listened as he paced the room and told her of his contract with Wilhelm. It pleased her that the meeting had gone so well and that he seemed to look forward to his eventual return to Ackergill.
“What did you talk about with Lady Constance?” he asked, hands on his hips, back to the brocade curtains pulled across the window. He offered her a smile that seemed to acknowledge the awkwardness of what had happened earlier.