While she freshened up, he broke open the stones he'd collected during their hike. Inside each was a core of brilliant dust, which he scraped carefully into a tin and blended with water to form a thick paste.
"Paint rocks," she said, intrigued enough to pause in her ablutions. She'd never seen one but knew the ancients had used them to paint with. They were small and craggy, and deep in the center a dust formed over time that made, brilliant colors when mixed with water.
"Aye,'tis what we call them as well," he said, rising to his feet.
Gwen watched as he moved to one of the megaliths and, after a moment's hesitation, began etching a complex design of formulas and symbols. She narrowed her eyes, studying it. Parts of it seemed somehow familiar yet alien, a perverted mathematical equation that danced just out of her reach, and there was little that did that to her.
A beat of nervous apprehension thudded in her chest, and she watched intently as he moved to the next stone, then the third and the fourth. On each of the stones he etched a different series of numbers and symbols upon their inner faces, pausing occasionally to glance up at the stars.
The autumnal equinox, she reflected, was the time when the sun crossed the planes of the earth's equator, making night and day of approximately equal length all over the earth. Researchers had long argued over the precise use of the standing stones. Was she about to find out their real purpose?
She eyed the megaliths and pondered what she knew about archaeoastronomy. When he finished sketching upon the thirteenth and final stone, her breath caught in her throat. Although she recognized only parts of it, he'd dearly stroked the symbol for infinity:
∞
beneath it. The lemniscate. The Mobius strip. Apeiron. What knowledge did he have of it? She scanned the thirteen stones and felt a peculiar itchy sensation in her mind, as if an epiphany was trying to burrow into her overcrowded brain.
Watching him, she was struck by a stunning possibility. Was it possible that he was smarter than she was? Was that his madness?
Gorgeous and smart? Be still, my beating heart…
As he turned away from the last stone, she shivered. Physically, he was irresistible. He was wearing his original costume of plaid and armor again, having shed "such trews that doona let a man hang properly and an inar that canna conceal an oxter knife" as soon as he'd awakened that morning. Hang properly, indeed, she thought, gaze skipping over his kilt, mouth going dry as she imagined what was hanging beneath it. Was he in that seemingly permanent state of semi-arousal? She'd like to kiss him until there was nothing "semi" about it…
With effort, she dragged her gaze to his face. His sleek hair was a wild fall about his shoulders. He was the most intense, exciting, and erotic man she'd ever met.
When she was around Drustan MacKeltar, inexplicable things happened to her. When she looked at him, his powerful body, his chiseled jaw, the flashing eyes and sensual mouth, she heard Pan's distant pipes and suffered an irresistible compulsion to tithe to Dionysus, the ancient god of wine and orgy. The tune was seductive, urging her to cast aside restraint, don her crimson kitten thong, and dance barefoot for a dark forbidding man who claimed he was a sixteenth-century laird.
He glanced back at her, and their gazes collided. She felt like a time bomb ready to explode, ticking, ticking.
Her face must have betrayed her feelings, because he inhaled sharply. His nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed, and he went quiet, with the perfect stillness of a mountain lion before hurling itself at its prey.
She swallowed. "What are you doing with those stones?" she forced herself to ask, flustered by the intensity of what she was feeling. "Don't you think it's time you tell me?"
"I have told you all I can." His eyes were cool slate, the crystalline light that usually danced within them subdued.
"You don't trust me. After all I've done to help, you still don't trust me." She didn't try to conceal that it hurt her feelings.
"Och, lass, doona be thinking such. 'Tis merely that some things are… forbidden." Not really, he amended silently, but he simply couldn't risk revealing his plans yet, lest she abandon him.
"Bullshit," she said, impatient with his evasions. "If you trust me, nothing is forbidden."
"I do trust you, wee lass. I am trusting you far more than you know." With my life, possibly even with my clan's very existence…
"How am I supposed to believe in you, when you won't confide in me?"
"Ever the doubter, are you not, Gwen?" he chided. "Kiss me, before I sketch the final symbols. For bonny fortune," he urged. Shards of crystal glittered in his eyes, reminding her that although sometimes he banked his passionate nature, it was always simmering just beneath the surface.