“Not to worry, Miss Drummond. You can sleep in peace.”
She nodded, turned, then turned back slightly. “There’s nothing I can do?”
The Earl of Assynt shook his head. “I’ll let you know if anything changes.”
She nodded, then walked back to her bedroom and shut the door behind her. She wasn’t sure she would sleep, but found that it was impossible to stay awake.
A man who had lifted a sword to defend her. Another man who had been completely unsurprised to find the first man had been wounded by an Elizabethan sword.
She wondered just what she’d gotten herself into.
Chapter 12
Derrick had never thought he would die on a frozen tundra, but perhaps he deserved it for all the times he had leaned on hapless collectors of antiquities to inspire them to relinquish their goods.
Or perhaps he was languishing on the burning Sahara. At the moment, he honestly couldn’t tell where he was. He was alternately parched and freezing, so perhaps he’d merely been consigned to a circle of hell he’d never read about.
And then the voices began.
“Aren’t you going to ask me if we should take him to the hospital?”
“Nay, Sunny, I’ll trust the herbs. And you.”
Derrick tried to frown, but it was too much effort. He was listening to Gaelic, but the cadence was slightly off. He’d learned the mother tongue, of course, because he was a Scot and because it had irritated his father . . .
He managed a frown then. He hadn’t thought about either of his parents in years. He missed his mother, occasionally, though he never thought of her without wishing that she had been a little more willing to stand up to his father. His father, that arrogant punter, had looked down on everything that smacked of Scotland as if it were less somehow than what was to be found south of the border. Or at least he had when he hadn’t been angling for the job of laird of what was left of the clan Cameron, though that had been merely for the power of it, not for the love of it. Derrick was sure that if he hadn’t had his grandfather there to instill a bit of proper Scottish pride into him, he never would have amounted to anything.
He drank something at one point that was so bitter, his eyes watered and his tongue took flight. Someone called him a useless woman. He was certain his retort to that nameless, faceless insulter had been brisk and to the point, but before he could recall the words and examine them for their beauty, they slipped away from him.
Time crawled.
“He thought you were a thief?”
“Yes. I can’t really blame him, though. I don’t think he knew anything about me except that I was staying with the Cookes.”
Derrick pursed his lips, but found they were slightly more numb than he would have liked them to be. That was a Yank speaking there. Her name was there as well, just past where his numb lips resided in a swirling vortex of swords and lace and Roman soldiers stomping through his brain, but it was too much trouble to reach for it. He closed his eyes and sighed.
A woman laughed lightly. “I’m surprised he didn’t have your entire life history at his fingertips.”
“It isn’t a very interesting life, and I’m not sure my degrees would have exonerated me.”
“And why is that?”
“Because they are, unfortunately, in antique textiles.”
Derrick realized he was listening to Sunny and Samantha. He was rather proud of that feat, actually. He struggled to open his eyes, but that was impossible.
“Oh, look, he’s awake,” Sunny said cheerfully. “Let’s get some more of that tonic down him.”
He tried to protest, truly he did. But all opening his mouth earned him was a gallon of Sunny’s worst brew poured down his throat. He swallowed, because he had to, then spat out a few choice curses. Unfortunately, that was all he spat, because that vile liquid was burning its way down his gullet to rest happily in a spot he might have called his belly at any other time. At the moment, his tum felt more like an enormous medieval hearth where there lay roasting half a bloody tree. He gasped out a plea for aid, but only had cackling laughter as a reward.
He slid into senselessness accompanied by what he was just sure he wasn’t hearing.
Double, double, toil and trouble.
He certainly had enough of both.
• • •
He woke. It took him several moments to become accustomed