Page 71 of Sinbound to the Highlander
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Evan was up before dawn, and went to meet his men, trudging back to the castle in the misty hours of daybreak. The report was not comforting; his men had traversed half of the loch’s length, but had not found any sign of Elspeth.
He swallowed the bitter news over an empty stomach, and after sending the sodden divers up to the healing hall to make sure they wouldn’t get ill, he dispatched another set of men to the loch. After a quick pass through the kitchen, he went back to his room, carrying warm broth and buttered brown bread for Freya.
To his surprise, the bed was empty, and he heard noises come from the adjoining room. Freya came in, her face still heavy with sleep. She attempted to smile, but it dropped flat. “I can see in yer face that they havenae found her.”
“Sadly,” Evan shook his head while Freya slipped into the bed again.
Perched at the edge of the bed, he handed her the pewter bowl of broth, “I’ll have yer maid sent up when she arrives.”
Freya nodded as she sipped the broth. While watching her eat, Evan noticed her using her right hand as her dominant one—but he knew Freya used her left mostly. Then, his eyes flitted to her face, and he noticed that the spots on her face were not the same pattern he had memorized from the days and nights with her in his arms.
But this was Freya. Her impulsive push for coupling aside, this was the woman he loved. Perhaps his mind was tricking him. She finished the broth and nibbled on the bread. “Are ye going back to the loch this morn?”
“I gave yer Faither me word,” Evan said, “and I’ll follow up on it.”
Her lips twisted into a grimace, “What if…what if ye daenae find her?”
Rubbing his face, Evan sighed, “I willnae lie,mo ghràdh, it daenae sit well with me that we havenae found her already. As this winter is cold and getting colder by the hour, there is a distinct chance she has died, but I have faith we will rescue her. What we do ken is that she missed the rocks and went into the water, and the only conclusion is that she washed downstream. That is our best chance of finding her.”
Twisting away from him, Freya rested her head on the pillow, “And the worst?”
“If she washed out into the coast, we might never find her,” Evan added, biting back the horror he felt at uttering those words. The mental image that Elspeth’s body would be out there, in the middle of the sea, bloated and drifted did not sit right with him. Reaching out, he grasped her hand. “We can only pray.”
Freya’s maid arrived, and Evan gave her the room Elspeth had once had when she was there. At least, Freya would have a familiar face when he was out with the men.
Dropping a kiss on the back of her hand, he said, “Rest as long as ye need.”
Dressed in thick winter clothes and hardy boots, he did a quick turn in the kitchen for something to eat and then rode out to the loch. His men and Laird Lobhdain’s were already there, picking through the bushes, and once or twice, he saw the wet head of a diver surfacing to get more air.
Time crawled, and an icy pit of despair was settling into his chest as no one saw Elspeth. Not a rip of her clothing, not a clump of her hair—and not her body. Dusk passed, and they searched till midnight, but still nothing. The full moon up above had an ominous shine to its light, and the faint howls of ravenous winter wolves he could heard over the mountainside gave Evan little comfort.
There is another problem—the wolves. They’re starving now, and any flesh is meat for them. God’s teeth!
Tired, hungry, and filled with despair, Evan joined his men on the ride back home, making sure to send the divers for medical attention and the men to rest.
“Another day,” he sighed into the murky depths of his glass of wine. “Another day of grief. If I can’t find her, Freya will be terribly upset …”
It felt so improbable that they could not find a trace of Elspeth anywhere. Surely, there had to be something they had overlooked or dismissed. No one could just disappear from the face of the earth without a trace, and Evan dismissed the thought that a kelpie had dragged her off to the depths of the lake.
And if so, what can I tell her? That she’ll never see her sister again?
One thing bothered Evan—Freya was one to her emotions, so why hadn’t she cried? She did look upset, but with the level of trust and faith he knew Freya had invested in her sister, he thought there would be more than distressed looks.
Looking back on the minute things he’d noticed about Freya—her eating pattern, her speech, her direct attempt to be intimate with him—he had a traitorous thought, one so despicable, contemptible, andheinous, that he tried to dismiss it right away. But it lingered…what if the woman in his bed was not Freya?
Resting the goblet, he trailed a finger around the rim. Knowing how vicious Elspeth could be, he could not deny that staging such a ruse was not too far for her. She might have taken Freya’s place, but for what? Did she think she could keep up this trickery all the days of her life?
If this is so…where is my real Freya…did they kill her? Am I searching for a ghost?
The very thought had his fist clenching around the goblet in a vice-grip. His jaw went rigid, and he raged against—God, fate, himself—for this cruel deception, if that was what it was. If Freya was gone, the purest happiness he had ever known had slipped out of his hand like water through his fingers.
Slamming the goblet on the table, Evan’s eyes narrowed. If Elspeth was in his bed, and Freya was the one suffering out there in the cold, in danger of being mauled by a wild beast, the fires of hell would pale to his wrath.
“If ye’re playing this game, lass, I’ll be happy to play it with ye,” Evan swore.
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