A Bewitching Bride (23 page)
Read A Bewitching Bride Online
Authors: Elizabeth Thornton
The scowl became a glare. “I have been grossly misled,” she hissed.
“Not by me,” he quickly replied.
“By the clinic’s female patients. By my own married friends. They should have warned me.”
“They could hardly do that. They didn’t know you were getting married.”
Her lips flattened, but he could hear her breathing, dragonlike, through her nose. He braced himself for her righteous anger, a tongue-lashing that he thought he deserved. He would allow her that much, but she couldn’t deny that she’d been a willing participant in what had happened in this bed.
There were no fireworks, no recriminations. When she finally broke the silence, she said in a more controlled tone, “I should get something to put on those scratches.”
“Don’t forget, you bit me as well.” He was trying to coax a smile from her, but his words only earned him a baleful glare.
He watched as she crossed to the table where the ubiquitous bottle of whiskey and glasses were laid out. She returned with a towel and a glass half-filled with his favorite brew.
“What are you going to do with that towel?” he asked suspiciously.
He was reaching for the glass of whiskey when she suddenly exclaimed, “What’s wrong with the light?”
He turned his head to look at the gas lamp on the wall, then he sucked in a breath when a fiery liquid splashed into the scratches on his back. “What in blazes, woman?” he roared, turning to face her. That was when she poured the dregs of the whiskey on the bite on his shoulder.
As he sucked in air, she smirked.
“You . . . you . . . you enjoyed doing that! You wanted to pay me back.”
“I could hardly call you out. Oh stop fussing. You’ll live.” She set the empty glass down on the table by the bed, gave him the towel to dry himself off, then proceeded to shake out a quilt in front of the fireplace.
“Kate,” he said, “it will soon be dawn. The servants are stirring. What will they think when they see that makeshift bed?”
Her voice was clipped. “I don’t care what they think.”
She took one of the pillows and crossed to the bed. He watched her pound it into shape, and the thought that passed through his head made him bite down on a laugh. He said carelessly, “I did what you asked me to, didn’t I? I chased the ghosts away. There is no murky matron lurking in the shadows . . .”
He knew from the way she froze and her spine straightened that he’d made a colossal blunder. She was motionless for several seconds, then she turned and came toward him with all the grace of a jungle cat ready to spring on her prey.
“How did you know about Matron?” she asked.
His mind worked furiously, but the only answer that made sense to him was the stark truth. “Because,” he said, “I’m a seer, and I’m susceptible to your dreams.”
Sixteen
It was unbearable. Someone meddling with her mind! And not just anyone, but Gavin, the person she trusted most in the world. She felt as though a nest of squirming worms had invaded her insides. She was going to be sick.
The stricken look on her face had him leaping from the bed. “You’re not alone, Kate,” he soothed. “It’s all right. I’m here.”
When he tried to put his arms around her, she shoved him away. Her voice was shaking so hard, she could hardly get the words out. “A seer?” she scoffed. “Yes, I’ve heard the rumors about you and your crazy granny Valeria, that she was a witch and you inherited her powers, and I don’t believe a word of it!”
He was beginning to feel the indignity of reasoning with an angry woman when he was naked. Keeping a wary eye on her, he wriggled into his clothes. He needn’t have worried. She looked as though she had turned into a pillar of stone. Only the harsh sound of her breathing indicated that she was in the grip of some violent emotion.
He spread his arms. “Look,” he said in his most soothing voice, “how could I have known about Matron if I had not the power to—”
“Meddle in my mind?”
“I don’t see it like that. I’m susceptible to your thoughts, that’s all.”
Her fear converted to a white-hot fury. He would probe and probe until he had learned all her secrets. “A seer you call yourself? A wizard? I’d call you a cheat and a thief! I don’t want you to steal my thoughts. If I have something I want to share with you, I’ll say it out loud.”
He was beginning to lose patience with her. “You don’t believe I’m a seer?”
“No,” she said emphatically. “I don’t believe in witches and wizards. They’re charlatans!”
“Then you have nothing to worry about. So, why are you worried, Kate?”
She was worried because she’d sensed that there was something different about her dream tonight. What had been vague before—the hospice, her mother, Matron—was more clearly etched, as though she had looked at them with new eyes. His eyes.
“No!” she said as to herself. “It can’t be true.” Her eyes narrowed on him. “I have been known to talk in my sleep. That’s how you know about Matron.”
“And your mother? And your escape from the asylum?”
“It wasn’t an asylum!” she fiercely denied. “It was a hospice!”
He said quietly. “It was an asylum, Kate.”
Hardly aware of what she was doing, she snatched the empty glass from the table by the bed and threw it against the wall, where it shattered into a stream of sparkling crystals. It wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to spring at the man who was causing her so much pain. She wanted to break him, too.
Gavin didn’t give her a chance. Before she could move, he had pinioned her arms and forced her into the chair beside the fire.
“Now you listen to me, Kate Cameron! This is important. You’re going to sit there, without opening your mouth, until I’ve had my say. Otherwise, I shall bind and gag you and make you listen to me.”
He would do it, too. She could see it in his eyes and the muscle tightening in his jaw. How had it come to this? It was her own fault. She knew better than to let down her guard, but she’d been caught up in something beyond her ken, in sensations she’d never experienced. She hadn’t been thinking of consequences. Now they rushed in with an alarming velocity.
She’d made love to him, and her reward was to have her dreams and thoughts stolen by an intruder. There was something else that irked her—the notches on his bedpost.
Disgruntled, angry, she folded her arms across her breasts. “I shall never forgive you for this,” she said.
He raised one finger, silencing her. “You’re one breath away from being gagged.”
She pressed her lips together. She hated him, really hated him.
He stood over her as he began to speak. “There was a time when my brother and cousin believed as I did, that witches and wizards lived on in the minds of the superstitious, and that educated, rational people like us were above such things. Of course, we made allowances for our granny. We thought that her so-called psychic powers were so much theater, a little drama to make her . . . unique. And she was unique. In spite of her little quirks, however, her three grandsons loved her dearly, and she loved us.”
He was gazing into space, remembering Drumore Castle, James’s domain, and the storm that rattled the tiny windowpanes, and the breakers beating against the rocky promontory on which the castle stood. Somehow or other, he’d thought that his granny would live for many more years. She’d always seemed so youthful and unlike the frail old woman in the bed who made her grandsons promise to take her deathbed prophecies seriously.
He cleared his throat. “But this is not a vindication of my grandmother’s character. Suffice it to say that she bequeathed her powers to her grandsons just moments before she died.”
She tried not to listen; she tried to pretend that she was completely indifferent to what he was telling her, but that was far from the case. She was interested in spite of herself.
“Each of us,” he went on, “was given a cryptic prophesy that meant nothing to us at the time. However, our granny’s prophecies caught up with us, James first, then Alex, and now me.”
She wanted to hear what the prophecies were, but she was too proud to ask.
“Our powers manifest themselves in different ways,” he said, “or they did at first. Cousin James has dreams that foretell of danger. Alex has only to touch an object, and he has visions of its past, present, and future—a valuable asset in his line of work. I was lazy. I didn’t want or trust Granny’s powers, though I will say that they came in handy in Alex’s last case. I discovered I could put thoughts into people’s minds, not demonic thoughts, but harmless suggestions to make them happy or feel better. You were an excellent subject, Kate.”
Her voice? Gavin Hepburn was the voice who had allayed her fears and made her feel better? It was intolerable! Her mind, her thoughts, her dreams belonged to her and only her. She didn’t want him inside her head.
Her eyes began to sting, and she turned her head to look out the window before the sting could turn into tears of self-pity. Dawn, she reflected, trying to divert her thoughts, was not always rosy and golden. Clouds obscured the rising sun, and she could hear the splash of raindrops on something below the window—a canvas awning, perhaps, or something like it. It would be another dreich day in Aberdeen, but that would not deter the spring flowers from pushing through the earth. They were obstinate and sturdy, much like the people of Aberdeen, much like her.
“Kate, look at me.” When she looked up at him, he went on softly, “The night you were pursued over the moor, I was asleep in my cottage. What wakened me was a vision I had of you running for your life. I could sense your panic, feel the stitch in your side. But I didn’t know where you were. Then Macduff set up his howling and led me to you.”
He took a step back and studied her expression. A gamut of emotions flitted across her face—guilt, a grudging gratitude, confusion, and finally a simmering resentment that heated her eyes and flushed her skin.
He rubbed his nose with an index finger. His little wife had a temper, and it was only going to get worse.
“I think we have established,” he said, “that I can read your mind when you are agitated or frightened. Strictly speaking, it’s not that I try. You’re the one who sends out a signal, and I pick it up. But something curious happened recently, and I’ve been mulling it over.”
He crouched down beside her and boxed her in with a hand on each arm of her chair. “That’s better,” he said. “Now we are eye to eye. I’m talking about Janet Mayberry. You were there, weren’t you, Kate?”
“Was that a question? Am I permitted to speak now?”
He inclined his head. “Please do.”
“Where was I supposed to be, exactly?”
“You were inside my head, reading my mind.”
She made a face. “I wouldn’t enter that sewer if you paid me to.”
He sat back on his heels. “It was you I wanted, not Janet. All that aside, you did something no one else has ever done. You read my mind.”
It was hard to keep her expression impassive when fear had tied her stomach in knots. She knew where this was going, and she refused to be led along that path. “You are mistaken,” she replied, striving to stay calm. “I know about Janet because one of my friends mentioned that she’d seen you leave her room.”
He shook his head. “Why are you so afraid? Why won’t you admit that you have a talent that few possess?”
She leaned forward slightly, and that brought them nose to nose. “You think you’re a seer? A wizard? I won’t try to change your mind. But don’t confuse me with someone like you. I’m just an ordinary girl with, yes, the gift of intuition, and my intuition is telling me you’re talking a lot of rot.”
He had come this far. There was no turning back now. This was one battle of wills he could not let her win.
“I should have known,” he said, “when you refused to tell me what was in the note from Will’s killer. ‘We burn witches.’”
“I told you!”
“Only when the other notes came to light. It didn’t matter, then. They all said much the same thing.” His jaw flexed. “You’re a witch. Admit it, Kate.”
He had expected a reaction from her, but not the one he got. She pushed out of her chair and launched herself at him. Because he was on his haunches, he didn’t have far to fall. He grabbed her, and they both went rolling on the floor.
Shaking with rage, she cried out, “I am not a witch! Now get off me you . . . you lunatic.”
She was bucking and kicking, and the only way to restrain her was to roll on top of her. To stay the spate of words, he cupped a hand over her mouth. “I know,” he said, “that you were Will’s patient.” When her eyes widened, he shook his head. “No, he didn’t tell me, but he spoke warmly of the work you did at the clinic in Braemar, the clinic for his mentally disturbed patients. Then there were the odd things your sister and your cousins let slip. Oh, your cousins don’t know you were a patient, but your parents do.”
She said coldly, “My father arranged it, not that it’s any of your business.”
He exhaled a slow breath. “You’re adopted, aren’t you, Kate? No one told me. I worked it out for myself.” When she was silent, he went on, “I think your mother died in the asylum. I think you’re afraid the same thing may happen to you. Kate, you’re not mentally disturbed. You’re just like my grandmother. You’re a witch, Kate.”
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