Highlander’s Curse (30 page)

Thinking to distract herself, she rolled to her stomach and flattened her face against the mattress.

That worked no better. If anything, it was worse. The linen cloth tangled in her legs and felt much more like a binding now than the toga she’d imagined earlier.

This was likely all she had to look forward to if she couldn’t return to her own time. Night after night in cold, drafty castles, using a stone bench toilet and shutting herself into a dark little tomb to sleep. And that was a best-case scenario.

Moment by moment, the panic built, like fingers tightening around her throat. Her mind filled with images of long-dead bodies wrapped in linen, hidden away in airtight boxes to preserve them.

But she wasn’t ready to be preserved.

“I don’t think I can do this.” She sat up, twisting onto her knees. “I absolutely know I can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

Any of it. “I can’t breathe in here. I need out.”

Desperation peaked. Completely disoriented by the dark and the panic, she flailed her arms in search of the drapery opening, stopping only when she smacked into Colin’s shoulder.

He was on his knees next to her, holding her, when the trembling began. She collapsed against him, shutting her eyes against the encroaching black void.

“It’s this dark little box. It’s closing in on me!”

“Calm down,” he ordered, his voice low and soothing. “I’ll help you.”

She heard a
swish
of fabric and swiveled her head in the direction of the noise.

Thank God!

The wavering light of the fireplace shone through the break in the draperies, and she scrambled toward it like a drowning man toward the water’s surface. Just like that drowning victim, she gasped for air as her feet hit the floor. Her arms locked around her middle and she bent at the waist, hanging her head forward to take in great gulps of air as if she’d just reached the end of a marathon run.

“You’ve a problem with enclosed spaces?”

Colin was at her side, his large, warm hand rubbing up and down her back. She could only nod her answer.

“You should have told me. Here.” The hand at her back urged her toward the fire and down onto the rug. “Sit. Relax. Yer going to be fine now.”

Of course she was. Out here in the open, in this big room, with all this space and all this air, she could feel her heartbeat slowing to normal.

He rejoined her, sitting down at her side and pulling her close to him before he draped a blanket he’d taken from the bed around their shoulders.

“There,” he comforted. His arm tightened around her as he pulled her head to rest on his chest and, with only a small shift of his body, he lay back, drawing her down with him. “Try to close yer eyes and get some rest.”

Rest? With the adrenaline she’d just pumped through her system in that panic attack? Not hardly. Not for a while. And certainly not with his heart pounding under her cheek and the heat from his chest searing her palm.
Searing her leg, too, now that she laced it over the top of his.

“I don’t think I’m sleepy anymore.” With her body ensconced in his embrace, she was about as far from sleepy as she could imagine.

Not that her imagination wasn’t busy picturing other activities.

“If no sleep, what would help you to relax?”

She bit back the groan that question brought to her lips and shifted against him, trying for something approaching comfort.

“We could talk,” he offered. “Would you like that? When my brother Drew and I were but lads, we’d lie in our beds and tell each other stories to see who could put the other to sleep first. We could—”

“Nope,” she interrupted.

Talk wasn’t at all what she had in mind. Stranded seven hundred years from home in the draftiest, most uncomfortable castle that had likely ever existed, lying in the arms of the sexiest man she’d ever met, she was in no mood for talk.

“I only thought that since it had worked so well for Drew and me, we might—”

“I’m not your brother,” she interrupted again, rubbing her toe against his ankle.

“I ken the truth of that well enough,” he muttered.

“Good.” She lifted her head to watch his eyes as she ran her finger along the top of his linen toga, playing with the flap that ran over his shoulder and tucked into the wrap. “In that case, if you’re up for it, I have an idea of what we can do and I’m pretty sure it’s not something you and Drew would ever have considered.”

With a flip of her finger, she untucked the flap and tossed it over his shoulder, watching his eyes narrow as she waggled her eyebrows up and down.

“If yer suggesting what I think you are, I’m up for it, as you say.”

Before she could even begin to try to come up with another double entendre, he had her on her back, his big body looming over hers.

“More than up for it.”

The hard bulge pressing against her lower stomach was absolute proof of his claim.

He shifted to his knees and pulled her up into his arms. Their bodies pressed against each other, face-to-face. His mouth captured hers, sending her off on another flight of fancy as his tongue swept her mouth before his lips left hers to travel down her neck.

She lifted her arms to his neck, twining her fingers in his hair. A cold shiver took her body, and she realized her wrap was gone, pooled at her knees. An instant later, it was joined by his, and he pressed his heated body against hers as he lowered her once again to her back.

His mouth traced a path from her neck to her breast and when he suckled, his tongue flickered over her nipple in lightning-quick touches that drove her wild with need. She lifted her legs, locking them at his back, pressing herself against the heated skin of his erection.

He groaned and lifted his head to search her face. Bracing his arms on either side of her, he lifted his weight from her body while his hands slid under her head to cradle her like a living pillow.

This was it. He was in position, his hot flesh pressed against her opening. Any second now, he’d enter her.
The anticipation built by his slow back-and-forth agitation over that opening was driving her mad with need.

“I’d no idea before this moment how badly I wanted this,” he whispered, and dropped his head next to hers, nibbling at her earlobe. “Or how much yer commitment would mean to me, wife.”

Her brain was fuzzy with excitement. “I totally know. I feel exactly . . .”
Wait. Commitment?
“What commitment?”

“To us,” he breathed into her ear. “To the entwining our souls demand. To our lives together.”

His hands slid to her waist, clasping her tightly as he drove inside her.

Behind her eyelids, there were sparkles and fireworks. It felt that good. Her entire body trembled, held on edge waiting for that magnificent moment of release. He pulled out and prepared for a second assault.

If only she could let that last comment go and just lose herself in the moment.

“Our lives together?” she panted. “You mean you’ll come back to my time with me?”

He hung motionless above her as if frozen in the time she meant to travel through. “I’ve told you why I canna do that. There’s too much for me to accomplish here. Surely you ken the changes I can make that can be made by no other. No, my love, it’s you who’ll stay at my side, aye?”

No, no, this whole thing was going sideways, right at the worst possible moment.

“I never said I’d stay here. I don’t even want to stay here. I can’t. You should know that. Just like you can’t
go around changing history, Colin. You should know that, too. It’s wrong.”

A tension that was in no way sexual slipped into the stillness between them, and Colin rolled away from her to lie on his back.

“What might be history to you, wife, is but the future to me. A future that has yet to be written.”

“Oh, really?” She turned to her side to stare at him. “Well, while you’re busy contemplating all those big changes you’d like to write into that future of yours, just keep in mind that with every change you make to my history, you run the risk of making someone I care about blink out of existence. Maybe even me. Pretty damn hard for our souls to entwine if I don’t exist, don’t you think?”

He pushed up to stand, ignoring her question. “I’m going to bed. Are you coming?”

Abby lay on the floor, her body thrumming with frustration, the spot beside her resonating with its emptiness. He’d walked away. He’d simply gotten up, turned his back, and left her lying here in a pool of her own disappointment.

“You’re doing this to get even with me because I was the one who stopped everything last time, aren’t you?”

“This has nothing to do with last time. I stopped because yer no willing to give the commitment I seek. You want only a physical coupling with me. Sex, and nothing more.”

That wasn’t it at all. She wanted commitment as much as the next person, but not if it meant spending the rest of her life in the fourteenth freaking century. And not if it meant risking the world as she knew it.

“So?” she demanded. “What’s wrong with just sex? I can’t agree to the kind of commitment you’re asking. Why’s that so difficult for you to understand? You’re not willing to commit to the things I see as important.”

“It’s no at all difficult for me to see what you intend. My intent is something else entirely. Good night, Wife.”

He climbed up into the bed, pulling the draperies firmly shut behind him, and in what seemed like a matter of moments, soft snores emanated from the bed where he lay.

Abby, meanwhile, curled on the rug, cocooned in her blanket, thinking dark, spiteful thoughts about life in general and Colin MacAlister in particular.

Fine. He could sleep in his stupid little coffin box of a bed all by himself. There wasn’t enough money on the face of the planet to get her back into that dark hole. She had enough crap in her life at this moment without adding another round of suffocating claustrophobia into the mix just to try to appease him.

Who else but she could be unlucky enough to find maybe the one man in the entire world who seemed to fill all the empty holes inside her, only to discover that he was also possibly the only man in the whole world who insisted on commitment before sex?

Worse yet? In spite of all her big talk to the contrary, she was pretty damn sure she’d been stupid enough to let herself fall in love with the guy.

That she’d had to travel seven hundred years into the past to find all this out only added insult to the injury.

C
olin awoke in a foul, gray mood, more than ready to growl at anyone who crossed his path. He shoved back the heavy, dust-laden draperies with much more force than was necessary to greet a morning that was equally as foul and gray as he felt.

The shutters on the high windows had blown fully open during the night and rain sprayed in, soaking the entire room in a fine wet mist.

It would seem the dry spell had ended.

He rounded the bed to check on Abby and found her still asleep, curled up in a tight little ball with only the thin blanket he’d pulled from the bed last night to provide her protection.

And precious little protection it had been. A fine mist beaded on her hair, and as he approached, he could see that her body shivered with each breath.

Little wonder, since the fire had long ago burned itself out.

Some fine protector he was turning out to be.

He had made the fire his first priority, building it back to flaming warmth before he pulled another blanket from their bed to drape over her body, tucking it close. He’d briefly considered carrying her to the bed and slipping in beside her.

But that would have awakened her, and she needed all the rest she could get.

One last tug to cover her properly and then he slipped into his clothing and quietly out the door, pausing in the hallway to gather his thoughts, doing his best to beat back the guilt that washed over him in waves.

If he managed to get her through this journey and back to Dun Ard in one piece, it would truly be a miracle beyond even the power of the Fae.

Or maybe in spite of the Fae.

Halting his steps, he closed his eyes and dropped his guards, reaching out. He pushed away the cries battering his aura from within the castle, stretching out, far out into the countryside, until he found the one soul he sought.