“Are ye consorting with these lot?” Pietro asked, looking horrified. “Are ye not only sleeping with their women, but gambling with them as well? And winning? Mother of God.”
Quinn shrugged. “I can see no end in sight to this— what is it we’re doing here, Lachlan? I canna help getting bored.”
“Bored? Are ye mad? Our lives are in danger and ye’re treating this like a game. Someone stabbed ye today!”
“And I made certain they’ll no’ be doing it again,” he said, ducking Lachlan’s swing.
Pietro wasn’t as quick or as lucky and took most of the swipe full in the face. He released a string of both modern and eighteenth century swear words, earning him a look of begrudging respect from Quinn.
“Are ye two finished?” Lachlan asked, nodding apologetically to Pietro. He turned to Quinn. “Ye must stop it,” he said. “All of it. The gambling, the drinking, the … consorting.”
Quinn grumbled, but didn’t disagree and Lachlan turned to Pietro. “What are they saying?” he asked. “Do they trust ye at all yet?”
“Perhaps a bit. I had to say some pretty nasty things about ye. I’m trying not to get too personal, but they get suspicious if I don’t laugh at their jokes about your land.”
“What could they possibly have to say about our land?” Quinn asked, standing up in his outrage. Lachlan pushed him back into his seat.
“They’re not very clever about it, really. Mostly that it’s small and north.”
“Bloody idiots,” Quinn said. “I pity that ye’ll have to lead them one day soon.”
“Yeah, about that.” Pietro looked hopefully to Lachlan.
He cracked his neck and frowned. “Truthfully, I didna think this would take so long. I’m going to start giving ye orders again. Carry them out, but grumble about it as much as ye like. I want people to think I still trust ye, while ye make sure they know ye’re no’ really on my side.”
“Like a double agent.” Pietro seemed to like the idea. “That’ll be easier actually. I can make it seem like I’m giving them information they wouldn’t have got without me.”
“Aye, that’s a good way to put it. Now, after a bit of that, I was thinking to take Bella home with me and leave ye behind as advisor.” He held up his hand at Pietro’s lack of enthusiasm for that plan. “Once on my own land, we could annul the marriage and she could come back in a tiff. And then ye can sweep her off her feet. If the Glens are warming up to ye, and ye do a good job as advisor while I’m away, it should work just fine.”
“That actually sounds like a really good plan,” Pietro said, a little too amazed for Lachlan to feel flattered. “It’s totally believable. Bella’s always in a tiff about something. And everyone hates you so much already, I’m sure they’ll get behind her on leaving your ass.”
Quinn laughed into his hands while Lachlan nodded stiffly. He knew it was difficult for Pietro to watch him sit beside Bella at meals every day, and go off with her to bed each night.
Ever since the folly in the woods, he hadn’t allowed them so much as a chance to pass each other in the hallways, so he understood that Pietro was frustrated, which couldn’t help turn to anger, which had to be aimed at him. Still, it rankled.
“Aye, it’s a sound plan, and I’m pleased ye’re doing your part in fueling their flames of hatred,” he said, meaning to sound sincere but unable to keep his words from dripping with sarcasm. He closed his eyes and started again. “Ye have to know that I want what’s supposed to be? Ye and Bella together?”
Pietro looked chagrined. “Of course.”
“I think if we keep our noses clean,” Lachlan looked pointedly at Quinn, “we shall have the makings of a verra tidy and peaceful coup in another month or two.”
Pietro pressed his lips together at the time frame while Quinn slumped and leaned his head against the back of the chair.
“‘Tis a long time, brother. We’ve been here almost a month already.”
“Just keep it in your pants, Ferguson. If anyone screws this up …”
“Enough,” Lachlan said tiredly. “Save it for the yard. Ye may beat each other as much as ye like when there’s witnesses to see ye, just dinna kill each other. I need ye both for one thing or another.” He stood up to take a look outside his door. Bella must have been extremely charming or else buried the poor man in other errands, because the hallway was still clear. “I wish it could be sooner as well, but a peaceful outcome is more agreeable to me than a bloody one. Let them settle down a bit from Tavish’s death. We’ll have a few feasts, call in a storyteller or a piper. Keep them stuffed with food and entertainment. When I feel safe to leave Pietro in charge, we shall go.”
He shoved Quinn out first, turning to give Pietro a last bit of encouragement. Pietro’s face was twisted with worry and he grabbed Lachlan’s arm.
“I’ll do whatever it takes,” he said. “But please let me see Bella. I don’t think she’s well. She looks paler than usual.”
“I shall make sure she’s all right,” Lachlan said, feeling like a world class lout. “But it’s too dangerous, and ye know that.”
“Well, at least give her this.” Pietro pressed a crumpled bit of parchment into his hand. “Tell her I love her and think of her every moment.”
Ah, bugger. Lachlan watched him race down the hall and slip into the room that held the entrance to one of the secret passages. He put the love note on Bella’s pillow and sank into a chair, hoping Pietro and Quinn didn’t really get into a fight in the yard.
He had to put a brave face on things to keep them from falling apart, but a month or two seemed just as unbearable to him. Every day that he didn’t know what happened to his darling Piper was like peeling off a strip of skin.
Every day he held his vial of herbs and contemplated leaving this mess behind to find her. He went over the moment he’d killed Daria again and again, unable to understand why Piper had cried out in such fear, why she had wanted him to stop. Most of all, he didn’t know why she’d just disappeared.
He shook off his somber mood and went down for the evening meal. Bella had given up tasting his food a few days earlier. She hardly picked at her own plate anymore. Lachlan wondered briefly if there might be anything seriously wrong with her, other than constant worry and living a lie. It was enough to make anyone lose their appetite, but he would suggest she see the physician. If she passively agreed, he would call for the healer straight away, but hopefully she would tell him what she thought of his concern in her usual caustic way.
After so many days of having Bella and Gordon whisking his meal away from him for a poison check, he couldn’t help but be a little paranoid as he looked down at his roasted pig. It looked and smelled delicious, the skin shiny and crackling with juice. But he’d hate to die that way. He saw a man poisoned when he was just eight years old. That sort of thing stuck in the mind.
He considered calling up one of the serving lads to make him take a bite of everything, but he just couldn’t. Deciding he’d rather risk going out in gut twisting agony than be as suspicious and untrusting as a Glen, he tore into the meat.
“Do we have hours of gaiety ahead of us, milaird?” Bella asked him in a subdued voice.
In a bid to dull their minds and lull the Glens into complacence, Lachlan arranged for a different form of entertainment after every evening meal.
“I think it’s jugglers tonight,” he said. He turned to her at her sigh. “Ye dinna need to watch them. In fact, ye do look rather tired. Go to bed, lass.”
She merely nodded and pushed away from the table. Lachlan glanced down where Pietro sat, his eyes riveted to her as she trudged from the room.
Frustration welled inside Lachlan. Pietro may not get to be by Bella’s side, but he saw her every day, knew she was safe and well. Those two star-crossed lovers were trampling his last nerve with their cow eyes across rooms at each other, their sighs of longing, and dear God, the tears at night!
He didn’t even know for sure if Piper was alive, and he carried
on without emitting sad noises every five minutes. Two months, that was all he needed. His irritation bubbled into a full anger and he followed Bella to their chamber.
He’d been kind the last weeks— extremely tolerant, he thought. But now he was going to lay down the hard truth for her. He didn’t think being overwrought counted as a real affliction. She was going to have to buck up for two more months, eat a decent meal and get some sun on her face so Pietro could stop worrying.
Slamming into their rooms, he found her huddled in the middle of the giant bed, crying. As usual. He shut the door behind him and paced back and forth, trying not to lose his resolve.
“Bella, lass, I know ‘tis difficult for ye, but we have a plan in motion. It’s just going to take some time. Ye must eat so Pietro doesna fret himself to death.”
At Pietro’s name she sobbed harder, throwing herself into a coughing fit. Lachlan was perplexed. Certainly she was upset, but it wasn’t like her to act so undone. She’d been quite courageous, in fact. He sat on the very edge of the bed and patted her foot.
“Two months at the most, aye? Can ye no’ put on a brave face for that wee amount of time?”
She shook her head violently, jerking her foot away from his hand. “No,” she choked. “I canna put on a brave face for such a length of time. I dinna have that much time.”
Lachlan felt dizzy with fear. Had she already seen the physician? Was something really terribly wrong with her? He gripped the bed post, his thoughts shattered and tossed in his mind. He was going to lose her, lose Piper.
“Why, lass? What is wrong?” He forced himself not to shake her when she refused to answer. “Please tell me, Bella, so I might help ye.”
She looked at him with red rimmed eyes that were full of despair. “I am with child.”
Never had good news turned sour so fast. His smile barely formed before it slid from his face. Bugger.
Chapter 8
Piper scrambled for the papers Evie and Sam had pored over the whole night, flinging the diary at her so she could start reading it.
“Ugh, just tell me,” Evie said, bouncing on the bench. “I can’t believe Daria was in that time.”
“No way, you need to tell me about my mom,” Piper said, instantly giving up on the densely packed, tiny handwriting on the page. Even the notes Sam had written in his tidy script were too much for her excited mind to register. “That trumps Daria.”
“I have to admit I was feeling pretty smug up until a minute ago. I can’t believe we both have such explosive information.”
“I wish things could be less explosive,” Piper said, sitting down. “Now what in the hell do you mean, the baby was my mom?”
Evie ran her finger down the page in front of Piper, stopping midway. “This is a birth certificate from 1771. That is your grandmother’s name right there.” She leaned over and squinted, finding another spot on the page. “That is your mom’s maiden name. Finley Temperance MacGregor. Who else has that name in the history of ever? Rose never changed it when she came back, she kept her married name. She wasn’t really a widow— well, I guess technically she was, since her husband lived more than two hundred years earlier. But she never married anyone else when she first got back. Your grandfather is from the eighteenth century, Piper.”
That outlandish information went in one ear and out the other as Piper stared down at her mother’s name. A practically unheard of first name for the eighteenth century, unusually modern even for her mom’s birth year in the twentieth. Then that old fashioned middle name.
“Could it really be her?” Piper asked, trailing her finger over her mother’s name written so long ago with ink and quill. “That would make her so old, like vampire old.”
Evie giggled. “No it wouldn’t. She might have been born there, but you’ve seen baby pictures of her in her own century. They must have come back pretty soon after she was born.” Evie looked down at Magnus, who was gnawing clumsily on the corner of his blanket. “And she’s perfectly normal and healthy.” She turned to Piper and looked embarrassed. “I couldn’t help but worry about him, you know. That the time travel might have residual effects.”
Piper nodded. “No, she never gets sick. No weird twitches or bizarre extra limbs, either.”
“Shut up.” Evie opened the diary. “So, grandma Rose loved this guy from the past? Why’d she come back at all, I wonder? Though I’m glad she did, of course. It just seems like such a sad ending.”
Piper gave her a look. “Daria,” she said. “Daria’s why she came back. I think she might be the one who pulled her to the past in the first place.”
Evie scooped Magnus out of his bassinet and began to pace with him propped up on her shoulder so he could see around him. She spoke in a soothing, calm voice even as her brow furrowed in confusion. “I don’t know where to start. How? Or why? Okay, how. How could Daria be in 1770 when she was killed in 1729?”
Piper shrugged. “No idea. It hurts my brain to even guess.”
“She wasn’t dead yet,” Sam said without opening his eyes.
They both waited for him to continue, Piper thinking she might toss the heaviest book within her reach at him as he sat up and took his time stretching.
“Come on, Sam,” Evie said, still using her baby-soothing voice, completely undermining all the urgency that Piper felt.
“Are you ready for this?” he asked. “Talk about brain ache. I’m not sure I can explain it as I barely understand it.” He rubbed his eyes and continued. “So, we think the timelines are all concurrent, right, give or take a few months?”
Piper nodded. When Lachlan left the first time, on his side he’d only been gone six weeks, while she had lamented in loneliness for six months. There had been a loss of eight months that they couldn’t account for, on which Piper alternately blamed Daria and her own lack of spellwork ability.
“Daria was killed in our 1729, right?” Sam went on. “The one we went back to, from this time? Well, you have to remember, your granny was traveling from a different starting point, years before this one. So even though she ended up in 1770, from her starting point Daria would still be alive. In that 1729. Daria would still be able to travel about making trouble.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and made a pained noise. “Does that make sense to anyone but me?”
“Maybe,” Evie said, putting Magnus back in his bassinet.
“Not really,” Piper admitted. “But I’ll go with it. Because it’s clear she was there, screwing around with my family again.”
With a glance at the clock, Sam muttered something about the shop going to hell without him. “I really should get on,” he said.
Piper shooed him away. He’d been a great help. She couldn’t expect him to stay any longer. He packed up Magnus’s things and promised to bring the baby back after dinner, then seemed to remember something.
“Erm, actually, I guess it’s Thursday isn’t it?” he asked Evie hopefully.
Her face fell. Piper realized this was their custody arrangement and it was Sam’s turn to keep him overnight, or for the weekend. It was dumb and wrong and Piper had to turn away. She considered running down to see the horses so she didn’t have to see the long goodbye, but Sam made his exit with Mags mercifully quickly.
Evie had a lemon-sucking look on her face when she turned back around.
“What is it?” Piper asked. Had Sam asked her to move back in with him the night before and been shot down?
Evie wriggled as if her skin was too tight. “Nothing,” she said. “Just. Ugh. Nothing.” She looked at the empty bassinet and sighed. “I’m going to read the diary, is that okay? I’m dying to know everything.”
“What little there is to know,” Piper said, sliding back onto the bench. She rested her chin in her hand.
“Are you kidding?” Evie asked. “We learned so much. Your grandma went back in time before she ran off to America. Your mother was born in 1771.”
Yes, everything in the diary had been fascinating. She was glad her grandmother
had found happiness, if only for a short time. What little she knew of her, she had never seemed content.
Daria had stolen that happiness, chased her from her land and heritage, from her true love, and made her fearful and bitter so that she alienated herself from her own daughter, never knew her granddaughter.
“And Daria was there,” Piper reminded Evie.
Evie grunted, but didn’t look up from her rapt absorption in the diary. The disappointment left a solid ache in Piper’s stomach, sure that there would have been answers in it. But she didn’t understand how any of it could help her fight Daria’s spirit.
Was that the lesson her grandmother had wanted her to learn by having her find the diary? Never expect a happy ending, because Daria was always there.
***
Later that evening, after having to pretend not to hear an uncomfortable phone argument Evie had with Sam, she got her to admit he’d asked her to move back in with him. They went around and around, until Evie finally agreed to give it a chance.
Piper was more relieved than she wanted to admit, even to herself. She wanted Sam and Evie to get back together, but she also wanted everyone to be a safe distance from her.
Mellie dragged herself in shortly afterwards and began tiredly pulling items from the refrigerator. The girl worked endlessly, putting herself through a nursing course, and doing double duty as Piper’s live-in housekeeper and chef.
Piper adored her, and Mellie loved living in the castle. She had admitted to dreaming about it when she was a little girl. It was going to be difficult getting her out without hurting her feelings, but Piper couldn’t have her be the sole target of her possible evil intentions.
“Put it all away, Mel,” Piper said. She knew she’d have to find a way to get her to leave, but it didn’t have to be tonight. “We’re celebrating.”
“No we aren’t,” Evie said, giving her a death glare.
“What is it?” asked Mellie, putting away the food.
“Evie’s moving out,” Piper said, her voice cracking. Well, damn. That was unexpected.
Reckoning (Book 4 of Lost Highlander series) Page 7