Revenge (Book 3 of Lost Highlander series) (3 page)

Pietro could see she was miserable at having to admit what she had said to her father, and it was clear that Quinn was more than upset by it. As for himself, it seemed like a good thing. It would clear Lachlan’s name as a whoremonger and keep Bella from any gossip about not pleasing her husband. And, he liked that people would know he wasn’t really an adulterer, not that it should matter to him what anyone thought. But if any of this was ever to be sorted, he liked to think he could end up Bella’s husband and have a clean slate about it.

“Did he believe ye?” Quinn asked. His voice was rising dangerously and he stood up to begin pacing again. The silence was almost unbearable. Quinn stopped his restless pacing and repeated his question. “Did. He. Believe. Ye.” Each word a staccato burst.

“Aye, I believe he did,” Bella said.

She shrank into Pietro’s embrace as Quinn threw up his hands and growled furiously.

“Yer father believed ye when ye told him ye didna consummate yer marriage to my brother?” He stormed back and forth as he bellowed.

“What is the big deal?” Pietro asked, pushing himself up and standing for a moment to see if he would fall over. Feeling confident enough to take a step, he reached out to try to calm Quinn.

Quinn rounded on him. “I shall tell ye the ‘big deal’,” he said with a tortured laugh. “‘Tis that Bella’s father now believes that she and Lachlan are no’ legally married.”

Pietro tried to understand, he really did, but he just shook his head and then stepped back in a hurry when it looked like Quinn might want to hit him. He’d taken enough punches in the last few days to last him a lifetime, and he was straight up done with it.

“It means,” Quinn said slowly, as if to a child, “that Tavish Glen thinks we have made off with his only daughter unlawfully, and if I’m no’ mistaken, against her will.” He turned his glare to Bella.

“I didna want to go with ye at the time,” she said. “I didna know the whole story, as I tried to tell ye. And I was angry and hurt. But Lachlan was yelling louder even than my father, and he just dragged me out of there before my father had a chance to think it through.”

Pietro’s stomach sank as he finally realized what was happening. All her life, Bella’s father had regarded her as valuable property, using her as a bargaining chip and dangling her hand in marriage for years to try to gain power. If a generations long feud could continue over stolen cattle, what manner of justice would be meted out for a stolen daughter?

“And after he thought it through?” Pietro asked, looking from Bella’s miserable face to Quinn’s near panicked one.

He didn’t need to hear the answer. Men were on their way to the Ferguson farm, armed and raring for a fight. He was surprised to find his headache was nearly gone, only to be replaced with a hollow pit in his stomach. If they got what they wanted, which was ostensibly to have Bella back, he would lose her. Tavish Glen was a man who cared only for wealth and power, and Pietro had none of either. He had the clothes on his back, and even those weren’t right for this time.

“I am sorry, now,” Bella sniffed.

Pietro’s heart softened and he sank down next to her, gathering her close to him.

“We canna go home,” Quinn said, looking to the sky for answers. Pietro had half a mind to take a peek to see if there were any up there. “My men will warn them to be ready. They are well prepared and should be able to hold them off or send them running home in defeat. I dinna like that there should be bloodshed over this though.” Once again he trained his gimlet glare on Bella.

Pietro wanted to shield her from the angry recriminations, but he hadn’t thought there might be lives lost over this. He imagined … what had he imagined? Things were too different here. He had no point of reference for how something like this might be settled. However, it seemed Quinn was an expert at clan feuds. If he thought there would be bloodshed, he was probably right.

“We could go back and I could try to explain,” Bella said, looking down when Quinn didn’t deign to answer that suggestion.

“If Lachlan was here, it might be easier,” he said. He nodded at Pietro. “Can ye ride?”

“Aye, I feel loads better, actually,” he said. “What are ye thinking? Shall we fight?”

Quinn frowned. “Ye are in no condition to fight these men,” he said. “I think we shall go to my aunt’s house, west of here. I can get ye safely hidden there and figure out what’s to be done after that.”

Pietro was rankled that Quinn didn’t think he could fight, and that he would stand being hidden away at a doddering old relative’s house. He set his jaw and carefully untangled himself from Bella, then stood up, getting toe to toe, if not exactly eye to eye with Quinn.

“We should settle this, not run,” he said.

He’d been in a war, was a fighter pilot in his own time. He understood duty and protecting his own. He was trained to fight and the thought of running and hiding settled on him about as agreeably as a moldy, wet horse blanket.

Quinn merely took a step back and rested his hand on Pietro’s shoulder. “Too dangerous. Ye’re verra brave, but I can see how sick ye are still. Lachlan says I must keep ye two safe and together at all costs. There is nothing more important.”

Well, that was all very nice. Nice and patronizing. It bristled Pietro that a man who had beat the living daylights out of him two days before was now dictating from afar what was best for him. Pietro shrugged off Quinn’s placating hand and took another step toward him. Damn the man for being so tall.

“And do ye always do what your brother says?” he taunted childishly, hoping to get a rise out of Quinn so he would change his mind about fighting.

Quinn just laughed and made a sweeping gesture around Pietro’s mincemeat of a face. Swollen eye, split lip and more bruises than normal skin tone, all courtesy of Lachlan Ferguson. “Ye’ve met my brother,” he said, turning to check the saddles.

It was settled. To Pietro’s distaste, they would be running to Quinn’s aunt’s house. His half sister had been living there since she turned thirteen two years earlier, when their aunt had visited them and saw that the poor motherless girl needed womanly guidance, not to continue running roughshod over her two brothers, who couldn’t say no to her if a crossbow was pointed at their heads.

After Quinn made his way stealthily to the road to make sure the warring party was long past, they set out toward the sea, tense and anxious. Pietro was grateful his headache was almost gone, but he was left weakened by the extremely painful episode, and the longer he rode, the more he worried he was heading for a relapse instead of a full recovery.

Bella rode between the two men, keeping her head down, and was uncharacteristically quiet, not even complaining when the sun started to go down and Quinn refused to stop for the night. All in all, everyone seemed varying degrees of miserable.

Piper turned off the hot water tap and looked at the full tub with almost carnal desire. Every muscle and bone in her weary body was screaming to get in and soak away all the pains.

Lachlan came up behind her and started untying the laces from her beautiful, though somewhat worse for wear, eighteenth century gown. She would have it carefully cleaned and mended and either pack it up or send it to the village textile museum for display. As his fingers slid over the exposed back of her neck, she shivered with anticipation and leaned against his strong, chiseled chest.

“Are ye glad to be home, my love?” he asked needlessly.

Still she nodded, furrowing her brow. Eight months had somehow passed while they were gone, instead of the short few days they had actually been in Lachlan’s time. She didn’t want to dwell on all the time they’d lost, most likely due to her incompetence in casting the spell they used to time travel. She’d missed her best friend Evelyn’s entire pregnancy and birth of her first child, and now Evie and Sam had mysteriously broken up.

There had been so much hubbub surrounding their homecoming that she didn’t have the heart to make Evelyn rehash the breakup, so she didn’t have a clue what went wrong. And she couldn’t help but bitterly think she may have been able to keep it from happening if she’d been here.

They’d only been in Lachlan’s time for three days! Why had they jumped so far ahead on the return journey? It was plaguing her, no matter how hard she tried to stuff it into the dark recesses of her mind. She was buzzing inside with a barely controlled anger, making it difficult to stand still as Lachlan continued freeing her from her gown.

Once the dress was completely unlaced, he stepped away so she could let it fall in a puddle of brocade satin at her feet. She looked at it pityingly. It was too pretty to let it sit on the bathroom floor, but her spine probably wouldn’t let her lean over to pick it up. She still had half a dozen articles of clothing on and Lachlan was assiduously untying her corset with speedy fingers, knowing how badly she wanted to submerse in the steaming hot water of her oversized spa tub.

Hurry, hurry, she thought, bobbing on her toes. She wanted the water to cleanse her of the terrible feelings she couldn’t shake.

Finally, she was out of all her garments and she gingerly stepped out of the small mountain of cloth around her feet. Melting into the bath, she let out a lusty sigh as the hot water covered her and began to soothe the tightness in her muscles. If only the tension of her mind would be so easy to defeat.

“I have never been able to make ye sigh like that,” Lachlan said, taking off his own clothes.

Her cheeks prickled with rising heat and she hoped the steam of the bath water would hide her embarrassment. “I believe that statement to be untrue,” she said primly, enjoying the view as he pulled off his shirt, his kilt already tossed aside.

His powerful muscles rippled under his taut golden skin, a dusting of black hair spread across his chest and tapered lower. Her breath caught in her throat and her chest constricted when he carefully peeled away the bandage from the wound in his side. Instead of the stitched up, jagged sword slash he’d received while trying to find his way back to her a week before, all that was there was a dark, raised scar.

“It seems we must have aged the eight months after all,” he said, running his index finger over the scar. “It does no’ even itch.” He shrugged and swung his leg over the side of the tub, wincing at the heat.

A newly formed bubble of anger burst inside her. She was glad to see he was fully healed, and she struggled to focus on that. But the loss of time enraged her so completely her jaw began to ache from her inability to let it go. What if they had gone fifty years too far and ended up at the end of their lives, their best years stolen from them?

Lachlan lowered himself all the way into the tub, causing a bit of water to slosh over the side. Running his finger across her eyebrows, he smiled sweetly at her. “Ye must no’ think of it,” he said quietly. “We are safe and together. That is something, aye?”

She forced her face to relax and bobbed over to him in the deep water. He could always tell her thoughts. “Aye,” she agreed, trying not to sound begrudging, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pulling herself up next to him. Forcing the anger down, she shivered, not used to such ugliness taking over her.

Focus on the good things, she reminded herself. Like this delicious hot water and delicious hot man you’ve got.

He dunked himself under the water and shook his head like a dog when he emerged, getting drops of water all over the stained glass window she’d installed in place of a backsplash to the tub. It didn’t look out at anything, but she’d had it lit from behind and the lovely pastoral scene glowed. Before she’d renovated, the bathrooms were the worst rooms in the castle, all creaky and leaky and dismal. Now it was a soothing haven, one of her favorite places to relax at the end of each day.

“Oh, you’ll like this,” she said, reaching to turn on the jets and smiling a true smile when his eyes widened with glee as the forceful spray burbled against his shoulders and back.

“I would never leave ye, my love,” he said, sinking down, his deep blue eyes rolling back in ecstasy. “Especially now that I know what the baths are like in this time.”

She playfully punched him, her fist bouncing uselessly off his rock hard shoulder. He grabbed her hand and kissed the back of it, turning it to kiss her palm.

“I love ye,” he said, eyes serious. “I am glad to be home.”

His eyes grew darker as he took her by the hips and pulled her onto his lap. Yes, they were home. He had given up everything in his own time to make a life with her here and now. She traced her fingers over his collarbones and put her arms around his neck to kiss him.

She’d meant it to be little more than a peck, but when her lips met his, desire flamed through her tired bones, invigorating her as if she hadn’t spent the last three days on a horse or being pelted by rain, or both at the same time. His mouth made her feel renewed. For the first time since they’d returned and found out how much time they’d lost, she relaxed and her anger slowly slipped away.

He gently nipped her lower lip with his teeth, then ran his tongue along the spot as he ran his fingertips down her back, below the surface of the water to cup her bottom and pull her forward. Her senses blazed to life from his touch and she curled her body closer to him. If she were to turn and look in the mirror, she was sure her skin would be glowing with incandescent light wherever his hands had been.