Adrienne raised her hands helplessly. "Fine. Guard me. So can I get up now?"
"No."
"When?" she asked plaintively.
"When I say so." He smiled disarmingly and ducked to steal a kiss. His face came smack up against both her hands. It took every ounce of her willpower not to cradle it with her palms and lead him to the kiss he sought with shaking hands.
He growled and gave her a long measuring look. "I should treat you like one of my falcons, wife."
"Let me get out of bed," she bartered prettily. No way was she going to ask how he treated his falcons.
He growled, lower in his throat, and left then. But the elite dozen stayed at her door.
After he was gone she remembered one thing he'd said most clearly. You need never fear again. The man was just too good to be true.
* * * * *
The days of healing were pure bliss. Lydia overrode the Hawk's objections and had a chaise carried out to the gardens for Adrienne. Although she was still heavily guarded, she was able to curl up in the golden sunshine like a sleepy, smug cat, which went a long way toward healing her. The rose-drenched days of conversation with Lydia, as they came to know one another through small talk and small silences, healed more than her exhausted body. Sipping tea
(she would have preferred coffee, but that would have brought the Hawk and his boons into the picture) and sharing stories, occasionally Adrienne would shiver with the intense feeling that this was where she'd belonged all her life.
Love can grow among the rocks and thorns of life, she thought in one of those small silences that was comfortable as a favored, love-worn blanket. From the desolate barrens of her own life, somehow, she had come to be here, and here life was blessed—peaceful and perfect and simple.
Adrienne healed more quickly than anyone imagined possible. Tavis pointed out that she had the resilience of youth on her side, as he flexed and studied his time-gnarled hands. Not to mention an indomitable nature, he'd added. You mean stubborn, the Hawk had corrected him.
Lydia believed there might have been just a blush of love on her cheeks. Ha! Hawk had scoffed. Love of the sunshine, perhaps. And Lydia had almost laughed aloud at the seething look of jealousy Hawk had turned on the bright rays as he'd gazed out the kitchen windows.
Grimm offered the likelihood that she was so angry with the Hawk that she hurried her healing just to fight with him on equal footing. Now there's a man who understands women, Hawk had thought.
None of them knew that with the exception of missing her cat, Moonshadow, those days were the happiest she'd ever known.
While she lazed in the peace and sunshine, Adrienne enjoyed a blissful kind of ignorance. She would have been mortified had someone told her that she'd talked about Eberhard in her drugged stupor. She would not have understood if someone had told her she'd spoken of a black queen, for her waking mind hadn't remembered the chess piece yet.
She had no idea that while she and Lydia were passing sweet time, Grimm had been sent to, and was now on his way back from, Comyn keep, where he'd discovered shocking information about Mad Janet.
And she would have packed up a few things and run for her very life, if not her soul, had she known how obsessively determined the Hawk was to claim her as his wife, in all the aspects it entailed.
But she knew none of this. And so her time spent in the gardens of Dalkeith-Upon-the-Sea would be lovingly placed as a precious jewel into the treasure chest of her memory, where it would twinkle like a diamond amid the shadows.
* * *
CHAPTER 12
it wasn't much fun snooping around the castle with a dozen hard-boiled commandos trailing along behind her, but Adrienne managed. After a while she pretended they weren't there. Just as she pretended the Hawk was nothing more than an annoying gnat to be brushed away repeatedly.
Dalkeith Upon-the-Sea was as lovely a castle as she'd ever imagined when as a child she'd snuggled under a tent of blankets in bed with a pilfered flashlight, reading fairy tales long after lights out.
The rooms were spacious and airy, with brightly woven tapestries hung on the thick stone walls to smother any chill drafts that might seep through the cracks, although Adrienne hadn't been able to find so much as one crack in a wall—she'd peeped behind a few tapestries, just to see.
Historical curiosity, she'd told herself. Not that she was hunting for imperfections in either the castle or the castle's laird.
Hundreds of beautiful mullioned windows. Obviously the people who inhabited Dalkeith couldn't bear to be cooped up inside when there was so much lush landscape to be enjoyed outdoors in Scotland's mountains, vales, and seasides.
Adrienne sighed wistfully as she paused by a vaulted window to savor the view of the unceasing slate-silver waves crashing against the cliffs at the west end.