Chapter 41 #2
She paused for a minute in the living room and looked at the painting Patrick had hung over the mantel.
It was a painting of their little castle that he had had commissioned from some struggling artist he’d met on the street in Inverness.
It was quite good, actually, and the artist had imbued the view with a great deal of that Highland magic Roddy MacLeod was so convinced of.
Madelyn looked at the picture, just sure that at any moment, things would show up in it that hadn’t been there at painting time.
Time travelers.
Sprites and elves from Moraig’s neck of the woods.
Ghostly pipers tramping about happily atop Patrick’s hill.
Ghosts appearing at other times and places in their house.
Nothing she had anticipated that first day in Inverness when she’d exited the train station and taken her first deep breath of Highland air.
She smiled, grabbed her coat, then headed toward the kitchen. Sunny had made a list of things she was perpetually in need of, and Madelyn never went out into the garden that she didn’t look hopefully for something on that list to be popping up from its winter slumber.
She picked up one of the baskets that seemed to have taken up residence all over her kitchen and headed out the back door into the garden. It was actually quite cold outside, but she could handle it. What was a little residual snow in the garden when a woman had morning sickness to escape?
She walked along, keeping a close watch on the terrain under her feet so she didn’t slip.
She followed paths she and Patrick were beginning to painstakingly lay out and smiled at the sight.
It might never look like Dewey’s garden, but it had its own charm.
And it was theirs. You couldn’t argue with that.
Though she did have to admit she missed Dewey’s garden, which was so beautiful even in winter.
Well, it was in good hands for the present.
She and Patrick had loaned it out for the year to one of her cousins, a gardener by trade, who was trying to get back on her feet with her two kids.
Madelyn had wondered, often, if that wouldn’t be the best use for Dewey’s house.
A place to heal. The garden alone would be enough to soothe a troubled soul.
And at least there, you could just walk where you wanted and not worry about hot spots on the ground. Here, you just never knew.
Even in her own garden, she was never sure. All she needed was to accidently find one of Jamie’s gates while on an innocent walk outside to pick a few flowers. It was almost enough to convince her to be more careful where she was putting her feet, so she didn’t run into anything scary.
And then she found herself running into something scary just the same.
For a moment, she thought she’d run into the house.
She looked up and realized she’d just run into Gilbert McGhee.
She didn’t have time to even blurt out a pleasant “how do you do” before he had grabbed her by the hair and was jerking her along after him. She wondered if he was going to kill her right there between rosebushes or if he would drag her into a car and take her somewhere less thorny to do the deed.
She screamed, just on principle.
“Shut up,” he snarled in Gaelic, giving her hair another jerk.
She clutched her head to save herself pain.
Then she found herself hauled in front of him with his arm across her throat.
She tried to grind her heel into the top of his foot, but he was wearing boots and her slick move didn’t pan out.
She tried for his groin, but he grabbed her arm and wrenched it up behind her back.
He shoved her forward, toward the garden gate.
Too bad Patrick hadn’t gotten around to teaching her some of his more lethal moves. She also wished that she’d taken to wearing a dirk in her waistband as he’d tried to convince her to do.
Her mistake.
Gilbert stopped suddenly. Madelyn found it in her to look up from where she was walking.
Patrick stood just inside the wall, a vision of fury in black. His sword was bare in his hand. His expression was chiseled straight from granite.
She almost wet her pants and she was his wife.
Gilbert, unfortunately, was less impressed. “Too late,” he spat. “Too late to save her, MacLeod.”
“Coward,” Patrick sneered. “Do you have the bollocks to come at me truly, or will you hide behind a helpless woman?”
Madelyn wished, absently, that he hadn’t said that. She was just certain Gilbert was going to slit her throat, but he bellowed suddenly and grasped his head with both hands. Madelyn found herself pulled out of the way by Ian, who boosted her over the rock wall, then quickly followed.
“My contribution to the cause,” he called to Patrick. He looked at Madelyn. “Had a rock to hand and couldn’t stop myself from using it.”
She looked at him in shock. “Well, why didn’t you completely disable him?”
“And have Pat furious with me for the rest of his life?” Ian asked, wide-eyed.
“Ian!”
“Patrick can see to himself.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“If he truly begins to look as if he’ll fail, I’ll offer him a bit of aid.”
It wasn’t a good answer, but it was an answer. Madelyn stood there and watched her husband and his former father-in-law go after each other as if they had every, every, intention of killing each other.
“What in the world are they doing?”
Madelyn looked at her sister, who had come to stand next to her. “Fighting.”
Sunny’s mouth was working but nothing was coming out. Madelyn understood completely.
“He’s trampling your rosebushes,” Sunny managed finally. “They both are. And all those lovely herbs. Of course, not that the herbs are up yet, but there are seeds in those weeds and those seeds will eventually—”
“Sunny, you’re babbling.”
Sunny shut her mouth, took Madelyn by the arm, and clung.
Madelyn understood that as well.
She also understood, quite suddenly and forcefully, how awful it must have been to have been married during the Middle Ages and have to watch your husband go off to war.
Or have had war come to him.
Only she wasn’t in the Middle Ages, she was in the middle of her husband’s garden. War wasn’t coming to him; his former father-in-law had come, with no good intent.
And there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.
“So he finally showed himself,” Jamie said.
She looked around Ian to find that Jamie and his wife’s brother Alex had somehow found their way to the scene of the disaster as well. They were leaning on the wall casually, as if they watched nothing more interesting than a mildly entertaining sporting event.
“We knew he would,” Alex said.
“Should have killed him sooner,” Ian intoned. “I was for that from the beginning, you know.”
“I’d imagine Patrick will see to that today,” Jamie said.
Madelyn felt Sunny’s fingers dig into her arms. “Kill him?” she whispered. “Patrick’s going to kill him?”
Madelyn didn’t have a good answer for that. All she could do was stare at the horrific sight in front of her and pray.
Patrick had shrugged out of his leather jacket and thrown it toward them. He was now standing there in a black turtle-neck, black jeans, and black boots.
If he didn’t scare the hell out of Gilbert McGhee just by that alone, Madelyn wasn’t sure what would.
Then again, Gilbert looked every bit as comfortable with his very medieval-looking sword as Patrick did, so maybe he’d seen worse.
And if she hadn’t been so dry-mouth scared, she might have found the scene before her to be quite interesting.
It wasn’t every day a woman watched her modern-day husband wielding a sword with as much ease as he might have a Weedwacker.
And if there was anyone who made it look like a dance, it was Patrick.
He was, she had to admit in a detached way that frightened her but seemed like a good way to cling to her sanity, a very lethal man.
He held his sword easily, he parried without effort, he seemed perfectly comfortable with the fact that the man facing him had every intention of trying to do him in.
Only she’d seen what Patrick was capable of, that morning in the Fergussons’ hall, with Simon Fergusson’s men.
Gilbert’s brother’s men.
Did Gilbert have any idea whom he faced?
Or was he sure enough of his skill that he didn’t care?
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but she knew she would be finding out the answer soon enough—whether she wanted it or not.
She could only pray it would be the one she wanted.