Page 44 of Highland Crown
Cinaed guessed a week had passed, though it may have been less, he supposed. It seemed like it’d been adevil of a long time. For most of it, his body had felt as if he was lying one minute on a bed of ice and the next on a brazier of red-hot coals straight from the fiery pit. And when he was able to sleep, his mind had been tormented by a single nightmare that came back time and again. He couldn’t escape it. Trapped in the maze-like streets of a burning city with battered buildings looming over him, a thousand men and women and children followed him. Thick smoke at the end of an alley hid them from the enemy, but the sound of war drums was getting closer. He was the only one armed with a single pistol. The fate of all these people depended on him, and the smoke was growing thicker. There was no escape. Each time, he’d wake up in a panic. If it was the dream or the fever, it didn’t matter, he was chilled to the bone.
Isabella was his salvation. He recalled her feeding him broth to quench the thirst. During other brief moments of awareness, he’d be watching her as she changed the dressings on his wounds. Even now, he could feel the feathery caress of her fingers when she washed his scorched skin.
She was there with him the entire time. She never left his side. During the day, he heard her talking to Jean. When Searc’s voice filled the room, she became cautiously silent. At night, he opened his eyes and always found her curled on the bed of blankets on the floor, within reach of him.
Those were the times when guilt cut into him. What kind of a man was he to lie helpless in bed while she slept on the hard floor? He wanted to give Isabella his bed, give her his protection. No one took care of him; he took careof others. But here she was, turning the tables. Saving him.
He was whole again because of her, and a warm sense of gratitude filled his heart.
Cinaed tucked his good arm under his head and watched her as she gathered her hair over one shoulder and ran her fingers through the thick mass. She looked uninhibited, free, lost in her thoughts. She also looked beautiful.
He sat up slowly and swung his legs off the bed. It was good to feel the solid wood floor beneath the soles of his feet. Sometime after arriving, he’d had all his clothing stripped off. He was now wearing only drawers, tied at the waist and the knees. Not his, by the devil. He was no dandy and never had been. He had a vague recollection of a conversation between Isabella and a servant that she’d asked to help put Cinaed into the garment.
He wondered what the staff made of a wife demonstrating such modesty in her treatment of a sick and injured husband. No wonder Searc kept coming up here and questioning the veracity of their marriage claim.
Something beyond contentment stirred in him as she started braiding her hair. “Would you wait to do that until I have a good look at you? This is the first time I’ve seen my wife with her hair down.”
Isabella whirled. Seeing him sitting in bed, she smiled. “You’re awake.”
It was the first time he’d seen her smile. In every lucid moment, he’d found himself admiring her beauty. Each time he opened his eyes, her face was the only one he wanted to see. He’d come to know the perfect arch of her eyebrow, the length of her dark lashes, the color ofthe full lips that pursed when she was concentrating. Cinaed didn’t think he’d ever seen skin as smooth as Isabella’s.
She walked toward him, and he paid homage to the waves of lustrous hair falling to her hips. Her shining eyes and her smile dispelled the gloom and made this grim chamber a palace. Cinaed adjusted the blanket on his lap, realizing his mind wasn’t the only thing affected by her. She was an enchantress who had cast a spell on him, body and soul.
“I’m whole again.”
“You are not whole again,” she corrected. “Your fever broke yesterday evening, but you are far from healed.” She went to the bedside table and lit a candle before coming to him.
She checked his pulse, touched his forehead, carefully lifted the dressing away from his shoulder, and inspected the wound. Cinaed inhaled the scent of her hair as it brushed against his chin and fought the urge to thread his fingers into the soft, silky tresses. Her hair was damp. She raised his arm to check the shoulder joint and his hand brushed against the curve of her breast. Her lips were so near.
“You’ve taken a bath.” He stopped fighting his impulse and pressed his face into her hair.
She drew back slightly, but she didn’t release his arm. “I had to. I couldn’t stand myself.”
“Where did you bathe?” He needed to keep himself distracted. His hands itched to gather her in his arms.
She motioned to the tall, wooden screen that partitioned off a corner of the room. “The housekeeper had a tub sent up and they put it there for me. And Jeansomehow sweet-talked the stable hand into carrying up buckets of hot water.”
“Jean must have a diplomatic side to her that I haven’t seen,” he said. But his mind was envisioning Isabella sitting naked in a steaming bath and washing herself as he slept on this side of the thin wall. Why the deuce hadn’t he woken up sooner?
Not wanting to frighten her off, he arranged the blanket discreetly on his lap and forced his attention on their surroundings.
This was the room he always stayed in whenever he came back, and he realized how little it had changed from the first time he’d slept here as a lad. Except for the tub, of course. There had certainly been no thought of a tub for him when he came down from the hills. Searc had dragged him to the river and thrown him in to “wash the cow shit off.” Cinaed was sure he’d emerged from the water dirtier than when he went in.
The room had two ill-fitting windows, one facing the lane and the other facing the river. In the winter, the wind would howl through the chamber, and if Searc was withholding firewood for some boyish transgression he’d committed, the tower room would get colder than a witch’s teat. He’d only been here the one winter, though.
Curious, he thought, how the chamber’s contents had taken on a nostalgic quality. By the river-facing window sat the same scarred table and rickety chair. And next to the screen, the wee fireplace that wouldn’t draw if you built a bonfire in the tiny hearth. His eyes moved to his favorite feature in the room, the shelf above the clothes pegs.
It was here in this chamber and in Searc’s study that the world opened up to Cinaed. The shelf still held the books that he read over and over. Reading Macpherson’s tales of Ossian was like reading of his own ancestors. Sitting on the bed, he ploughed the fields of the Lowlands with Robert Burns and laughed with him at the church-going louse striving to reach the top of Jennie’s bonnet. And in the books he carried up from downstairs, he traveled the roads with Roderick Random and Matthew Bramble, reveling along with them in the adventures they found. He sailed the seas with Robinson Crusoe, escaped with him from slavers, and walked beside the unconquerable seafarer the fateful day he’d found those footprints in the sand.
“This place never really changes,” he mused.
“And Mr. Mackintosh is everything you warned me about.”
He put a hand on top of hers, stopping Isabella as she began to remove the dressing from his arm. “Has he been hard on you?”
She shrugged and the furrow on her forehead deepened. “After four days of it, I’m learning how to deal with him.”
He’d wondered how long he’d been delirious. Now he knew.
