Page 37 of A Celtic Secret
“Thank yourself for ‘twasyouwho saw to her comfort beforehand.” He led her along the circular path before they stopped, and he pointed at several narrow exits in one of the curtain walls. “You were very particular about those claiming that only the right people would be able to fit through them at the right time and only those from inside these walls.”
“Interesting,” she murmured, once again overly aware of him at her back. Of the way he brushed a curl away from her cheek. How his weapon-roughened fingers dusted her neck. “Why do you suppose that is?”
“Honestly?”
“Yes.” She met his eyes over her shoulder again. “Honestly.”
“As you started to realize downstairs, I think you knew this castle would someday be under siege,” he replied. “I think,know, you directed me to build it this way to protect you.”
“Not me, I don’t think,” she said softly, caught in his gaze. “But you and your people...most of all, you.” She pressed her lips together when more occurred to her. While tempted to keep it from him, she preferred honesty. “I think I felt I owed it to you.” She narrowed her eyes as the same sensation came over her she’d felt yesterday. “Because of a sacrifice you made.”
“Was that it then?” He traced the pad of his thumb along her jawline. “Might it not have been for love?”
“Aren’t they one and the same?” she murmured, certain she was on to something. “Isn’t self-sacrifice for another the highest form of love?”
“If we’re to believe I sacrificed my life to find you again,ta.” Yet he seemed troubled. “I sense there was more to it than that, though. Had to have been for Raghnall to do what he did.”
“I agree.” And she feared it was somehow an even deeper sacrifice on Declán’s part than either of them suspected.
Something that would be at the heart of all this.
She turned her attention back to their surroundings. To everything he had already done for her. Everything that made clear he had cared deeply for her for a very long time. That she had felt the same.
Sensing there was more she needed to see,remember, she kept moving around the turret until she spied something on the backside of the castle that made her blood run cold.
Chapter Twelve
DECLÁN KNEW THE momentRiona drifted to the backside of the turret and locked eyes on what lay below that she wouldn’t like it. How could she considering she had once told him in a dream that she would dislike it, yet it must be built. Must stand guard not in front of the castle but behind it.
“Why?” She shook her head and visibly shivered. “Why would I have ever asked you to build such a thing?”
He considered the tall stone totem pole that had stood there for over a decade with grotesque animal faces and Celtic symbols carved into it. There was nothing enchanting about it. Nothing welcoming.
“Because you said the greatest threat we would face would come from that direction.” The totem pointed north. “That if I did not build this, then our castle would no longer be ours. The enemy would rule it. Worse yet, an enemy so evil that those within these walls would soon perish.”
“What’s in that direction?” she asked before her eyes flashed blue with her inner druidess, and she answered her own question. “No.” She shook her head. “Impossible.”
