The Highlander's Touch (6 page)

When Circenn had realized the knights’ downfall was inevitable, he had hastened to meet with Robert the Bruce and, with Robert’s approval, had sent word to the Order that they would be welcomed in Scotland. Robert had offered them sanctuary, and in return, the powerful warrior-monks had turned their fighting skills to the battle against England.

The Templars were formidable warriors, trained in weaponry and strategy, and they were essential to Scotland’s cause. Over the past few years, Circenn had been stealthily slipping them into the Bruce’s troops as commanders, with the Bruce’s assent. Already the Scots were warring better, implementing cunning strategies, and winning minor battles.

Circenn knew that if he faltered now, if he began to break oaths or did anything that jeopardized the Templar’s loyalty, he might as well throw away the past ten years of his life, along with his love for his motherland.

*   *   *

Lisa had no idea how much time had passed since she’d sat on the floor. But it was long enough for her to realize that time didn’t pass in such a fashion for dreamers. If one sat still in a dream and did nothing, the dream either ended or moved on to some new and incredible adventure colored by shades of the absurd.
Absurd like the proportions of that man’s body
, she thought irritably.

Pushing herself up from the floor with her hands, she paused in a crouch, observing the wide, flat stones beneath her palms. Cool. Hard. Dry, with a skimming of stone
dust.
Entirely
too tangible. Rising to her feet, she began to examine her surroundings.

The chamber was large, lit by fat, soapy candles. The walls, fashioned of massive stone blocks, were hung with random tapestries. A huge bed occupied the center of the room, and several chests were scattered about with neatly folded fabrics piled atop them. The room was spartan, tidy. The fireplace was the only concession to atmosphere; there was not a single woman’s touch in the room. Pausing near the bathtub, she dipped her hand in the water; tepid—another sensation too tangible to deny.

She moved to the fireplace and flinched at the confoundingly real sensation of warmth. She studied the flames a moment, marveling that the rest of the room was so chilly when the hearth was throwing off such a blaze. It was as if the fire were the sole source of heat, she thought. Struck by that notion, she briskly walked the perimeter of the room. Her suspicion was quickly confirmed: There was not one heating vent in the entire chamber. No radiators in the corners collecting dust. No little metal vents in the floors. No pipes or, for that matter, a single electrical outlet. No phone jack. No closets. The door was made of what looked like solid oak; no hollow-core veneer there.

She took a deep, calming breath and assured herself that she must have overlooked something, at least in terms of the heating. Circling the room a second time, she surveyed every nook and cranny as she trailed her hand along the wall—another way of testing the solidity of her prison. Her fingertips brushed a thick tapestry that yielded beneath them and felt far colder than the stones. The rough fabric shivered beneath her palm as if the wind were batting at it from the other side. Mystified, she tugged it aside.

She lost her breath in a sudden rush of air. The view from the window struck her as intensely as an unexpected blow to her stomach.

She gazed out upon a misty night from ancient history.

Fifty feet above the ground, she was in a stone castle that stood on an island promontory surrounded by a thundering sea. Waves hurled themselves at the rocky crags, breaking into foam and becoming one with the mist that swirled up from the black surface of the ocean. On a cobbled walkway, men carrying torches moved silently between the castle and small outbuildings. The distant cry of a wolf competed with faint strains of bagpipes. The night sky was blue-black, tinted purple where it met the water, dancing with thousands of stars and a thin scythe of a moon. She’d never seen so many constellations in Cincinnati; smog and the halo effect of the brilliantly lit city dimmed such beauty. The view from the window was breathtakingly stark, majestic. A bitter wind howled up from the sea and across the promontory, buffeting the tapestry in her hand.

She dropped it as if she’d been burned and it fell across the window, blessedly sealing out the inexplicable vista. Unfortunately, as her eyes focused on the tapestry, she discovered a new horror. It was brilliantly woven and far too detailed: a warrior riding a horse into battle while an army of men clad in bloodstained plaid cheered. At the bottom of the hanging, embroidered in crimson, were four numbers that chipped away at her sanity: 1314.

Lisa moved to the bed and sank limply onto it, her energy sapped by the successive shocks. She stared blankly at the bed for a moment, then her hand flashed out and poked frantically at the mattress as she tested another part of her environment.
Not your run-of-the-mill Serta Sleeper
here, Lisa
. Filled with a growing sense of panic, she pulled back the tightly tucked blankets and was momentarily sidetracked by the fragrance that clung to the linens.
His
scent: spice, danger, and man.

Firmly ignoring a desire to bury her nose in the sheets, she tugged at the mattress, which was little more than thin pallets laid atop one another encased in bristly fabric. One crunched like dried brush, the next seemed stuffed with lumpy wooly stuff, and the top had the feel of limp feathers. For the next twenty minutes Lisa scrutinized her surroundings, driven by increasing desperation. The stones felt cool, the fire felt hot. The liquid in the cup near the bed tasted vile. She heard the bagpipes. Every sense she possessed was activated by her tests. Absently, she swiped at her neck with the back of her hand, and when she drew it away a single drop of blood lay crimson upon her skin.

She understood with sudden certainty that she should never have touched the flask. Although it defied rational explanation, she was neither in Cincinnati nor in the twenty-first century. She felt the last of her hope that she was dreaming slip from her tenuous grasp. Dreams she knew well. But this was too real to be a dream, detailed far beyond her mind’s ability to fabricate.

Give me the flask
, he’d demanded.

You see this? This is part of the dream?
She’d been astonished.

But now, reflecting upon it, she realized that he’d seen it because it was
not
part of a dream. It was part of reality, his reality, a reality she now shared. That it was the flask she had touched just before she’d started to feel like she was falling, and the flask that he’d demanded, seemed too logical a connection to exist within a dream. Had the flask
somehow carried her back to a man who had direct or indirect proprietary rights to it? And if so, was she truly in the fourteenth century?

With growing horror, she saw the frightening pattern: His odd manner of dress, his intent perusal of her clothing as if he’d never seen the like before, the primitive wooden tub situated before the fire, the strange language he’d spoken, the tapestry on the wall. All of it hinted at the impossible.

Stricken, she glanced around the room, reassessing it from a different perspective. She viewed it as her employment in the museum had led her to believe a medieval chamber would appear.

And all the oddities made perfect sense.

Logic insisted she was in a medieval stone castle, and according to the wall hanging, at some point in the fourteenth century, despite the improbability of it.

Lisa blew her breath out in a frantic attempt to calm down. She couldn’t be somewhere else in time, because if this was medieval Scotland, Catherine was some seven hundred years in the future—alone. Her mother desperately needed her and had no one else to rely on. That was unacceptable. Being stuck in a strange dream was now relegated to the minor problem it would have been, had it been true. A dream would have been easy to manage; eventually she would have awakened, no matter how awful things had been in the dream. If she was actually
in
the past, which was what all her senses insisted, she
had
to get back home.

But how?

Would touching the flask do it again? As she pondered that possibility she heard footsteps in the corridor outside the chamber. She moved quickly to the door, debated cowering behind it, then pressed her ear to it instead. It would
be wise to discover everything she could about her environment.

“Do you think he’ll do it?” a voice echoed in the hall.

There was a long silence, then a sigh so loud that it carried through the thick wood. “I believe so. He does not take oaths lightly and knows the woman must die. Nothing can come in the way of our cause, Duncan. Dunnottar must be held, that bastard Edward must be defeated, and oaths sworn must be honored. He will kill her.”

As the steps faded down the corridor, Lisa leaned limply against the door. There was no doubt in her mind exactly which woman they’d meant.

Dunnottar? Edward? Dear God! She hadn’t merely traveled through time—she’d been dropped smack into the sequel to
Braveheart!

I
T WAS LATE AT NIGHT WHEN
C
IRCENN QUIETLY EASED
his chamber door open a few inches. Peering through the narrow aperture, he saw that the room was dark. Only a faint bar of moonlight fell from behind the tapestry. She must be sleeping, he decided, which would give him the advantage of surprise. He would get this over with, quickly.

He swung the door open, stepped into the room with swift conviction, and promptly lost his footing. As he hit the floor of his chamber, he cursed; it had been cunningly littered with sharp pieces of broken stoneware. He scarcely had time to register that he’d tripped over a taut and cleverly tied cord, when he was smashed on the back of his head with a stoneware basin. “By Dagda, lass!” he roared, rolling over on his side and clutching his head. “Are you trying to kill me?”

“Of course I am!” she hissed.

Circenn could discern nothing more than a blur of motion in the darkness when, much to his astonishment and pain, she kicked him in a most sensitive part of his body—a part most women touched reverently. When he doubled over, his hands grazed more of the jagged shards on the floor, and he winced. She leaped over his body like a frightened doe, bounding for the open doorway.

Deadening himself to the pain, he moved swiftly. His hand flashed out and fastened on her ankle. “Leave this room and you are dead,” he said flatly. “My men will kill you the moment they see you.”

“So what’s the difference? You will too!” she cried. “Let go of me!” She kicked ineffectually at the hand clasped around her ankle.

He growled and banged the door shut with his foot. Then, pulling on her ankle, he caused her to lose her balance and brought her crashing down on top of him. He’d tried to roll her toward him as she fell to keep her from striking any of the stoneware she’d so deviously strewn about, but she bucked as she hit him and bounced over his side. A grapple ensued and she fought him with a surprising amount of courage and strength. Aware of his superior brawn, he focused his efforts on subduing her without hurting her or allowing her to harm herself. If anyone was going to be harming her, it was he.

They wrestled in silence, except for his grunts when she landed a particularly painful shot and her gasps when he finally captured her hands and held them above her head and stretched her on her back on the floor. His grasp nearly slipped when his hand closed around a band of metal on her wrist. As he forcefully restrained her arms, it slipped off and he closed his fist over it, then placed it in his sporran for later inspection—it might yield clues to her identity. He deliberately let the full weight of his body settle atop hers, knowing she would not be able to breathe.
Submit
, he willed silently as she bucked against him, trying to win her freedom. “I am stronger than you, lass. Cede this battle to me. Doona be foolish.”

“And let you kill me? Never! I heard your men.” She
panted, trying to draw air into her lungs while crushed beneath his weight.

Circenn scowled. So that was why she’d laid a trap for him. She must have overheard Galan and Duncan as they’d retired to their rooms; they’d obviously said something about his killing her. He’d have to speak with those two about discretion, perhaps encourage them to revert to Gaelic while within the walls of the keep. He suffered a momentary lapse in concentration while admiring her resourcefulness, and she exploited it by bashing her forehead into his chin, and it
hurt
. He shook her forcefully and was astonished when the woman didn’t yield, but tried to head butt him again.

She showed no signs of giving up the fight, and he realized that she would beat at him until she passed out from lack of breath. Since the only part of their respective bodies they both had free were their heads, he did the only thing he could think of—he kissed her. It would be impossible for her to head butt him with her lips pressed against his, and he’d learned long ago that the best way to control a fight was to get as far into his enemy’s space as possible. It took nerves of steel to handle six feet and seven inches of ruthless Brodie a breath away from one’s heart.