She surged from her hiding place, pressed the tip of the blade to his back, directly in line with his heart, and commanded, “Move. In the door. Now.” Placing her other hand at the small of his back, she pushed him forward.
His spine went rigid beneath her palm.
“Now, I said. Get in the room.”
Circenn kicked the door open and entered the chamber.
“Stop,” she ordered. “Do not turn around.”
“I saw you spying in the Greathall, lass,” he said easily. “If you doona like the gold silk, you needn’t get so fussy about it. You may select your own gown. It was not my intention to offend you with my choice.”
“Don’t be obtuse. You know that’s not what I’m upset about,” she hissed. “The flask, Brodie. Now. Get it.” She pressed the tip of the blade harder against his back to illustrate her resolve, and bit her lip when a drop of blood blossomed below his shoulder blade, spreading on the white linen of his shirt. She wished desperately that she could see his face. Was it dark with fury? Was he amused at her tenacity, or foolishly underestimating her resolve?
He sighed heavily. “For what purpose do you wish my flask? Are you in truth the traitor we feared?”
“No! I want to go home. I have no desire for your flask, I only need it to take me back.”
“You still believe the flask will return you?”
“It brought me here—”
“I have explained to you—”
“All you’ve said is that it isn’t the flask’s power, but you won’t tell me what it can do. Do you expect me to trust your word? Why should I?”
“I would not lie to you, lass. But I see that you will not believe me. Had I known you still harbored this foolish hope, I would have obliged you sooner.” He pivoted so swiftly that she fumbled, but recovered and jabbed the tip of the knife into his chest. More blood blossomed as the lethally sharpened blade slipped through his shirt as if it were butter.
“Careful with that thing, lass. Unless it pleases you to ruin my shirts.”
“Don’t move and I won’t have to cut you,” she snapped.
He dropped his hands to his side. “I must move to collect the flask.”
“I’ll follow you.”
“Nay, you will not. I will not take you to my lair.”
“I am the one with the knife,” she reminded him. “And it currently rests above your heart.”
If he moved, she didn’t see it. All she knew was that one moment she had the knife at his chest, and the next it was gone.
She blinked, trying to bring the room back into focus.
The blade was flush against her throat.
Her eyes flared wide and she gasped. “How did you do that?”
“You cannot control me, lass. No one can,” he said wearily. “If I give to you, it is because I choose to give to you. And, Lisa, I would choose to give you everything, if you would but permit.”
“Then give me the flask,” she demanded, ignoring the cold metal at her neck.
“Why do you seek it? To what do you wish to return? I have told you I will wed you and care for you. I am offering you my home.”
A groan of frustration escaped her. Nothing was working out as she’d planned. He had so easily disarmed her, stripped away her control. I am offering you my home, he had said, and a treacherous part of her was deeply intrigued by that offer. She was doing it again—vacillating. She glared at him, a sheen of tears clouding her vision.
At the sight of her tears, he flung the knife to the bed, where it landed with a soft thud. Pulling her into his arms, he caressed her hair tenderly. “Tell me, lass, what is it? What causes you to weep?”
Lisa pulled from his embrace. Thrumming with frustration, she began pacing between him and the door. “Where is my baseball cap, anyway? Did you have to take that away from me, too?”
He cocked his head. “Your base ball cap?” he repeated awkwardly.
“My”—what had he called it?—“bonnet.”
He moved to a chest beneath a window, lifted the lid, and retrieved her clothing. Her jeans and T-shirt had been neatly folded, and atop them was her cap.
She leaped toward him and snatched it greedily from his hand, clutching it to her breast. It seemed a lifetime ago that she and her father had sat in the third row, in the blue seats, directly behind home base. They’d laughed and yelled at the baseball players, drunk sodas and eaten hot dogs drenched with mustard and relish. She’d decided that very day that she would one day marry a man just like her daddy. Charming, smart, with a fabulous sense of humor, tender, and always willing to take time for his family.
Then she’d met this capable, mighty warrior, and in his shadow the real Jack Stone had come into sharper focus. As had her real feelings about him.
She was angry at her father. Angry at his irresponsibility: his failure to have cars serviced, to take out life insurance, to carry adequate auto coverage, to plan for a future that might stretch beyond his present. In so many ways her father had been an overgrown child, no matter how charming he was. But Circenn Brodie would always plan for his family’s future. If he wed, he would keep his wife and children safe, no matter the cost to himself. Circenn Brodie took precautions, controlled his environment, and built an impenetrable fortress for those he called his own.
“Talk to me, lass.”
Lisa dragged herself from her bitter thoughts.
“If you tell me why you seek so desperately to return, I will bring you the flask. Is it a man?” he asked warily. “I thought you told me there had been no one.”
The tension that had quickened in her veins while she’d sat in the doorway, clutching the knife and waiting for him, dissipated suddenly. She chided herself for her foolishness: She should have foreseen that force wouldn’t work with this man.
The primary reason she’d refused to discuss Catherine with him was that she hadn’t wanted to make a fool of herself, to start talking and end up weeping openly before the impassive warrior. But her emotions were no longer under her control, and the need to talk consumed her, the need to have someone to trust, to confide in. Her defenses slipped further, leaving her raw and exposed. She sank to the floor. “No. It’s nothing like that. It’s my mother,” she whispered.
“Your mother what?” he pushed gently, sinking down beside her.
“She’s d-dying,” she said. She dropped her head forward, creating a curtain with her hair.
“Dying?”
“Yes.” She drew a deep breath. “I’m all she has left, Circenn. She’s ill and won’t live much longer. I was taking care of her, feeding her, working to support us. Now she is completely alone.” Once the words had started coming, they tumbled forth more easily. Maybe he did care enough to help her. Maybe if she told him all of it, he would find a way to return her.
“She was in a car wreck five years ago. We all were. My daddy died in it.” She stroked the baseball cap lovingly. “He bought me this a week before the wreck.” A bittersweet smile crossed her face at the memory. “The Reds won that day, and we went to dinner afterward with Mom, and that’s the last time I remember us all being together except for the day of the wreck. It’s my last good memory. After that, all I see are the crushed, jagged pieces of a blue Mercedes covered with blood and …”
Circenn winced. Placing a finger beneath her chin, he forced her to look at him. “Och, lass,” he whispered. He traced her tears with his thumb, his eyes mirroring her grief.
Lisa was soothed by his compassion. She’d never spoken aloud of this, even to Ruby, although her best friend had tried many times to get her to talk about it. She was discovering that it wasn’t as hard to confide in him as she’d feared. “Mom was crippled in the car wreck—”
“Car wreck?” he asked softly.
She struggled to explain. “Machines. The Mercedes was a car. In my time we don’t ride horses, we have metal”—she searched for a word to which he might relate—“carriages that carry us. Fast, sometimes too fast. The tire … er, w
heel of the carriage came apart and we crashed into other machines. Daddy was crushed behind the steering wheel and died instantly.” Lisa blew out a breath and paused for a moment. “When they released me from the hospital, I found a job as quickly as I could, and a second one to take care of me and Mom and pay the bills. We lost everything,” she whispered. “It was horrible. We couldn’t pay the lawsuits, so they took our home and everything we had. And I’d accepted it—I had—I’d accepted that was how my life would be, until you took me away in the middle of something that I have to finish. My mother has cancer and only a short time to live. No one is there to feed her, pay the bills, or hold her hand.”
Circenn swallowed. He could not interpret much of what Lisa had said, but he understood that her mother was dying and she had been trying to take care of everything for quite some time. “She is entirely alone? There is no other of your clan left alive?”
Lisa shook her head. “Families aren’t like yours in my time. My father’s parents died long ago, and my mother was adopted. Now there’s only Mom, and I’m stuck here.”
“Och, lass.” He drew her into his arms.
“Don’t try to comfort me,” she cried, pushing against his chest. “It’s my fault. I’m the one who had to work in a museum. I’m the one who had to touch that damned flask. I’m the selfish one.”
Circenn dropped his hands and expelled a frustrated breath. There was not one selfish bone in her body, yet she was lambasting herself, carrying the blame for everything. He watched helplessly as she rocked back and forth, her arms wrapped around herself—a posture of deep grieving he’d seen far too many times in his life. “No one has ever been there to comfort you, have they?” he asked grimly. “You carried the weight of it all alone. This is untenable. This is what a husband is for,” he muttered.
“I don’t have one.”
“Well, you do now,” he said. “Let me be strong enough for both of us. I can, you know.”
She wiped angrily at her tears with the back of her hand. “I can’t. Now do you see why I must return? For God’s sake, will you please give me the flask? You promised when we were at Dunnottar that if there was a way for me to return, you would help me. Was that something you said merely to placate me? Must I beg? Is that what you want?”
“Nay, lass,” he said violently. “I never want that from you. I will give you the flask, but I must collect it. It is in a safe place. Will you trust me? Will you go to your chambers and await me there?”
Lisa searched his face frantically. “Will you really bring it?” she whispered.
“Aye. Lisa, I’d bring you the stars if it would cease your tears. I did not know. I knew none of this. You did not tell me.”
“You never asked.”
Circenn scowled as he mentally kicked himself. She was right. He hadn’t. Not once had he said, Excuse me, lass, but were you doing something when I snatched you out of time with my curse? Were you wed? Did you have children? A dying mother who relied upon you, perhaps? He helped her to her feet, but the moment she had her balance she tugged her arm from his hand.
“How long will it take you to retrieve it?”
“A short time, a quarter hour, no more.”
“If you don’t come to me, I will return with a bigger knife.”
“You won’t need a knife, lass,” he assured her. “I will bring it.”
She left silently, carrying part of his heart out the door with her.
* * *
Circenn opened his secret chamber and grimly retrieved the flask from the hidden compartment in the stone floor. It had never occurred to him that she’d had a full life in her time; he’d been so selfish that he’d never once asked her what he’d taken her away from. He had seen her only as proud, tenacious, sensual Lisa, as if she’d lived nowhere before she had come to him, but now he understood clearly. She had sacrificed most of her adult years caring for her mother, carrying burdens a laird would stagger beneath, nurturing the only clan she had left. It explained much: her resistance to adaptation, her continued attempts to search his castle, her illogical unwillingness to give up on the flask as a way to return home. He knew Lisa was an intelligent woman, and he suspected that deep down she realized that the flask wouldn’t return her, but if she formally gave up on the flask, she would have no hope. People often clung to irrational hopes to avoid despair.
His heart wept for her, because he knew that the only man who could return her would see her dead first. For the first time in his life he was furious with himself for refusing to learn the things Adam had so often offered to teach him.
Come train with my kind, Adam had coaxed on numerous occasions. Let me teach you the fae arts. Let me show you the worlds you might explore.
Never, Circenn had replied scornfully. I will never become like you.
But the magic is inside you—
I will never accept it.
Yet now he would have given anything for the art of sifting time. Anything Adam wanted at all. He straightened his shoulders, closed the hidden chamber, and moved to the door. How could he have been so blind as not to realize that she’d had a life and lost it? How could he have ever thought she was duplicitous? The image of her huge green eyes, shimmering with tears as she’d gazed up at him, refusing his solace because she’d obviously never been given comfort and didn’t know how to accept it, would burn forever in his mind.
He had a difficult path to walk with her now. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, bracing himself for her discovery that she was truly trapped. With a deep sigh, he left his chambers.
* * *
“Lass,” he said softly.
Lisa glanced up as he entered the room. She was huddled in the center of her bed, her pale face stained with tears. He fished about in his sporran and moved slowly to her side, making a journey he was reluctant to complete.
“Stand up, lass,” he said quietly.
Lisa rose swiftly.
He held out the flask.
“You brought it,” she whispered.
“I told you I would. I should have done so before now. I knew you wanted it. I saw the look on your face when we were riding from Dunnottar and you glimpsed it in my pack.”
“You can read me so easily?”
“Not always. Sometimes I can’t read you at all, but that night I could. You’d been crying—”
“I was not. I almost never cry. I only cried now because I’m so frustrated.”
“My apologies—it had been raining,” he corrected swiftly, protecting her pride. His heart was touched: She was embarrassed by her tears. There was no shame in weeping. He’d seen her cheeks wet with tears several nights on their journey, but they’d been quiet tears, and he’d assumed it was part of her acceptance of her transition, never suspecting she was grieving over her mother. He was amazed that she hadn’t wept openly before now But she was resilient and tough, and that gave him hope that she would recover in time.
“That night it was raining,” she agreed. “Go on.”
“You glimpsed the flask as I removed an extra plaid. To protect you from the rain,” he teased, hoping to lighten her grim mood.
She arched a brow, but her eyes were sad, filled with unshed tears.
He sighed and continued. “And I saw the hope in your eyes—a hope that centered upon my flask. I knew it couldn’t return you, so I dismissed the thought, but I should have realized that you would need to prove to yourself that it wouldn’t work,” he said gently.
“Give it to me,” she demanded.
He dreaded this, dreaded the moment when he would see in her lovely green eyes stark certainty that she could never return. He proffered the shimmering silver flask in silence.
She reached for it. “How does it work?” she whispered.
“It doesn’t,” he whispered back. “You only think it does.”
Her fingers closed on the flask. He watched as she wrapped her hand reverently around it. Wrapped both hands around it, did something funny with her feet, and closed
her eyes. She muttered softly.
“What are you saying?”
“There’s no place like home.” The words were half mumbled but painfully clear to his ears. He winced. Aye, there was no place like home, he agreed silently, and he would do his best to make this feel like home to her, since he was the one who’d uprooted her with his thoughtless curse. “I am verra sorry, lass,” he said softly, his brogue thickened by emotion.
She didn’t open her eyes, refused to move. Finally she crossed to the bed and lowered herself on it, tightly holding the flask. She looked as if she was mentally reciting every prayer or rhyme she’d ever learned. After a long time, she rose and stood by the fire.
She stood like that, frozen, clutching the flask, for so long he finally sank into a chair beside her. How much time passed, he had no idea, but he would not move an inch until she accepted it, and then he would be there to wrap her in the shelter of his body.
Full night had descended when she finally stirred, the dinner hour long past. Her hair shimmered in the firelight, her face was ashen, and her lashes were dark fans against her pale skin. He cursed when a tear slipped down her cheek.
When she finally opened her eyes he saw pain in the brilliant green depths. Denial and acceptance warred on her expressive features—acceptance the brutal victor. She had held the flask, she had performed whatever ritual she believed in, and she had experienced incontestable defeat.
“It didn’t work,” she said in a small voice.
“Och, lass,” he said with a sigh, helpless to alleviate her suffering.
She began to fiddle with the stopper on the flask.
“What are you doing?” he thundered, half rising from the chair, ready to rip the flask from her hand.
“Perhaps if I drink this?” she said hesitantly.
“Never, lass,” he said, his olive complexion paling. “Trust me, you doona wish to do something so foolish.”
“What’s in it?” she gasped, clearly stricken by his reaction.
“Lisa, what is in that flask would not only fail to return you to your home, it would be the purest glimpse of hell for you. I would not lie to you. It is a poison of the vilest origin.”