Chapter Eight
After gulping down most of the food on the breakfast tray, Catherine used the convenience one last time, then left the inn through the back door. She entered the stable exactly on time.
“Took you long enough,” Lachlan said while he tightened the leather cinches under the horse’s belly.
“You said a quarter of an hour. I am not late.”
“You’re not early, either. Come here, lass.”
He bent forward and picked up a woolen cloak that was folded neatly on a stool. With a flick of his wrists, he shook it out.
“Where did you get this?” Catherine asked.
“From Abigail. It’s not fashionable, she tells me, but her mother was willing to part with it, which was good enough for me.”
“She gave this to you? How very kind of her.” Catherine wondered what Lachlan had offered them in return. Perhaps he took his shirt off for half a minute and they all fell over with their legs in the air.
“It wasn’t charity,” he replied. “Her mother made a healthy profit on the sale. Turn around. I’ll help you put it on.”
He draped it over her shoulders, lifted her long locks of hair out from under, then turned her around and buttoned it under her chin. The wool, though mended in places, was soft and thick, and it boasted a wide hood that would keep her head warm and dry in the coming days.
“Thank you,” she said. “That was surprisingly kind of you.”
“So now you think I’m kind?” He gave her a skeptical frown, then turned back to the horse. “Up you go. His name is Theodore.”
Catherine moved forward and mounted the handsome chestnut gelding. The saddle pouches slung across his back were near to bursting with provisions.
“Where did you get the money for all this?” she asked as she gathered up the reins. “You didn’t trade my jewels, did you?”
He swung effortlessly up onto Goliath’s back. “Nay, I have my own money, lass. I don’t need yours.”
“Are you wealthy or something?”
He gave her another look of warning that suggested she stop asking questions, then urged his mount onward.
She, too, kicked in her heels, and was pleased at least to have her own horse, so that she wouldn’t have to feel Lachlan’s big, strapping body rubbing up against hers every minute of the day.
* * *
By midmorning, the mist lifted. A fresh autumn breeze was gusting through the forest, bringing out the clean scent of the rain-soaked leaves on the ground.
Lachlan rode a fair distance behind Raonaid, watching those long, bouncy locks of red hair.
He wondered with more than a little concern what would happen if she never regained her memories or remembered the person she once was.
What would he do about the curse? How would he live?
He’d be alone for the rest of his days, for if he ever let himself love a woman, he would be forced to relive the pain of his wife’s death.
He simply could not bury another.
All at once, he felt a more urgent need to reach Kinloch as quickly as possible. He needed to know the truth about this woman. Was she playing him for a fool, pretending to be without knowledge of her life as a witch? Or was she truly lost and in need of his help?
Either way, he did not wish to spend any more time alone with her than was absolutely necessary, for she stirred too much chaos in his mind.
She reminded him of what he could not have, and it was torture, all of it, especially because she was his enemy.
It made no sense that he was attracted to her.
They trotted through a shallow burn, where the horses’ hooves splashed through the rushing water.
“We need to move faster,” Lachlan said, galloping past Raonaid. “Can you keep up?”
She nodded, and he led them deeper into the forest.
* * *
After a grueling day of travel with few breaks to rest and water the horses, Lachlan and Catherine stopped for the night in a quiet glade near a slow-moving river.
Lachlan built a fire and warmed the salt pork in a pan while Catherine, exhausted to her core, laid out the bedroll that was tied to his saddlebags.
While the meat sizzled, she divided up the bread and poured them each a cup of wine. She sat down on the bedroll, sipping the wine slowly and rubbing the sore muscles of her thighs. “I am so tired,” she said, “I can barely move.”
“I’ll not hear any complaints from you, lass,” he gruffly said. “You wanted to come. You begged me to take you.”
“I am not complaining,” she adamantly replied.
“I am merely making conversation. It wouldn’t hurt you to try.
The way I see it, we are both prisoners here, each of us cursed in our own way, and we have no choice but to be together for the next few days.
And I certainly did not accompany you because I imagined it would be good fun.
Good Lord! I came because I am desperate to know who I really am. ”
He sat utterly still, his eyes almost diabolical. “Do not compare your plight to mine, lass. You may not remember your past, but at least you have a future. Once you collect that inheritance, you can do whatever, or be whoever, you bloody well please.”
She frowned at him. “Are you jesting when you imply that this is less important for me than it is for you? Or do you genuinely not understand how it might feel to have no identity, and no sense of yourself? I have been told a hundred times that I am Catherine Montgomery, and I yearn to believe it. If only I could. But in fact I believe nothing. Not in my heart. Ever since the moment my grandmother collected me at the convent, I have felt as if half of me was still missing. I see a ghost of myself in the looking glass. I have dreams that I am somewhere else, in another place, in another woman’s body.
I’ve had doubts about my home—and how am I supposed to feel about the people who claim to be my family?
I feel as if they are hiding something from me—hiding the real me.
So when you appeared in the stone circle yesterday, I thought my prayers had been answered.
At last, here was a man who knew the truth!
” She was growing fevered with frustration and began to shout.
“A man who could prove that my feelings were justified—that I was not, in fact, the person they alleged me to be. That there was more of me, yet to be discovered! But now, sitting here with you, I am beginning to think that you don’t know me at all, either, and that you, too, are mistaken.
For I am certain that I cannot be a soulless witch. ”
Lachlan regarded her in concerned silence from under a deeply furrowed brow. Then without a word, he served up the pork and handed her the pewter plate.
She wondered uneasily if she had just confirmed everyone’s fears that she was a raving lunatic, who would be better off at an asylum. Had she really just told him that she saw ghosts of herself? She wouldn’t be surprised if he decided to abandon her right now and take his chances with the curse.
“It’s been a long day,” he said, watching her carefully while she poked at her supper. “You’re exhausted, lass.”
“I most certainly am.”
Reaching for the jug of wine, he rose to his feet, circled around the fire, and refilled her glass. “Are you cold?”
She shook her head, but shivered. He went to fetch a blanket from one of the saddlebags and wrapped it securely around her shoulders.
“You’ll have to prepare yourself for tomorrow,” he told her, sitting down on the opposite side of the fire and reaching for his plate.
“It won’t get any easier. We’ll ride around the Gargunnock Hills in the morning, stop for supplies in Kippen, and maybe get a hot meal, but once we reach the Great Glen, we’ll be sleeping and eating under the stars. Will you be able to manage?”
She looked down at the bedroll, then across at him in the firelight, taking some comfort in the fact that he was, to some extent, concerned for her well-being.
“I suppose if I have come this far,” she heartily replied, “I can survive the rest, for the sake of recovering my memories. It hardly matters anyway, where I rest my head. My joints are groaning with agony; my eyes feel like they are full of sand. Even if there were cannons going off over my head, I’m quite sure I would sleep like a baby. ”
“Good.” He stared at her for a moment, then dug into his supper. They spoke no more after that.
Later, after washing the dishes in the creek, Catherine returned to the fire and lay down on her side.
The last thing she remembered as she drew the blanket over her shoulders was the sight of Lachlan on the other side of the fire, lounging back on an elbow, sipping a cup of wine, watching her through the iridescent flames with those smoldering dark eyes, before her own weary lids fluttered closed.
* * *
Sometime during the night, Catherine tore the blanket off and scrambled to her feet. “Get off me!” she shrieked, slapping at her cheeks and arms, spitting out the dirt she could still taste on her tongue.
She was aware of the campfire and the trees, and part of her knew that she was somewhere in Scotland, traveling with Lachlan MacDonald, the Highlander who had attacked her in an ancient stone circle—and that she’d had a dream.
But the effect upon her mind was so vivid and disturbing, she could not yet escape it.
Her heart was racing with terror. She felt as if she were suffocating.
She couldn’t get the dirt off her sleeves!
Suddenly Lachlan was there, holding her steady by the arms. “You’re dreaming, Raonaid. Wake up. Look at me!” The deep timbre of his voice compelled her to focus on his eyes, darkly luminous in the night.
It took a moment for her to accept that there was no dirt on her. Still feeling panicked, she held on to him, her hands curled tightly around his forearms.
“Are you all right?” he asked when he seemed certain that she was fully awake.
“I dreamed someone was trying to bury me,” she said, “as if I were dead. I was lying in a grave, and dirt was being shoveled onto my face. It felt very real.”
“It wasn’t,” he said. “No one was trying to bury you.”
“Am I going mad? I fear that I am. The nuns in the convent thought I was haunted by the devil. If my grandmother hadn’t come to claim me when she did, they might have sent me away, to someplace terrible.” Her body began to tremble.
Lachlan regarded her with concern in the moonlight. He was completely drawn in.
Was this a trick? he wondered, working hard to shake himself out of the spell. Was she making it up in order to convince him that she was truly in need of help?
It had occurred to him more than once that she might simply be seeking another chance to return to Kinloch and destroy his cousin’s marriage.
She had been obsessed with Angus before, to a murderous degree.
Perhaps she was out to finally seize everything she wanted—a dead heiress’s fortune and the powerful Chief of Kinloch as well.
A tear spilled from the corner of her eye, rushed down her soft, pale cheek, and all thoughts of theft and treachery tumbled from Lachlan’s mind.
“There’s no need to cry,” he heard himself saying as all his protective instincts came surging to the fore. “You’re going to be fine. I promise.”
“I’m not crying,” she insisted, lifting her chin, but she looked so frightened, he couldn’t bring himself to abandon her just yet.
He gently wiped the tear away from her cheek and looked into her eyes. It would just be for this one night, he told himself. He would give her the benefit of the doubt until she went back to sleep.
She placed a shaky hand on his chest, on top of his shirt, and he allowed her that liberty, covering it with his own to keep it warm. When at last the fear in her eyes began to subside, he led her back to the fire.
“Lie down now,” he said. “You need to rest.”
* * *
Catherine obeyed Lachlan’s quiet command, for she couldn’t seem to think clearly enough on her own. Dropping to her knees, she arranged her skirts, then curled up on her side and faced the fire. Lachlan covered her with the blanket.
“Do you think it was a memory?” she asked. “It felt very real.”
“Dreams often do.”
To her surprise, he knelt down and curled up behind her. He tucked the blanket in all around her and laid his heavy arm across her hip.
“You’ll be all right now.” His voice was unexpectedly soothing.
“After I was missing for two years,” she confessed, “I was presumed dead. My family gave up the search. Perhaps that’s why I dreamed such an awful thing.”
She felt his warm breath against her hair at the back of her head.
Soon her fears began to diminish, and she closed her eyes, taking comfort in his warmth—and his surprising, unexpected tenderness as he brushed the hair away from her forehead and stroked a light finger back and forth across her brow.
“You seem very different now,” she whispered, looking over her shoulder at him, as confusion welled up inside her.
“Don’t get used to it,” he softly replied. “We are still enemies, Raonaid.”
Yet he snuggled closer, tucking his hips tight up against her bottom, while holding her securely in his arms. She could feel the beat of his heart against her back and realized he was breathing very fast. So was she. Butterflies fluttered in her belly.
For a long moment he did not move, and it seemed as if the whole world went quiet and still. Then he nuzzled her hair and lifted his head. He paused a moment and slid away from her. “This isn’t wise,” he said.
“Why not?”
“You know why, lass.”
She felt all the warmth and blissful serenity pull away from her as he stood and returned to his own bedroll. Again he watched her from afar with those sweltering dark eyes, until at last she drifted back into a dark and dreamless sleep.