"I am not trying to get you to postpone it so you'll marry me. I'm telling you because they're going to die if you don't do something. In my time, you told me Dageus was killed in a clan battle between the Montgomery and the Campbell when returning from the Elliott's. You also told me that you'd been betrothed, but that she died. I think she must have been killed coming back here with Dageus. According to you, he tried to help the Montgomery because they were outnumbered. If he interferes with that battle, they will both die. And you'd believe me then, wouldn't you? If I foretold those deaths? Don't make it cost that much. I saw you grieve—" She broke off, unable to continue.
Too many mixed emotions were crashing over her: disbelief that he wouldn't believe her, pain that he was engaged, exhaustion from the stress of the entire ordeal.
She cast him a last pleading glance, then darted into her bedchamber before she turned into the emotional equivalent of Jell-O.
After she'd slipped inside and closed the door, Drustan gazed blankly at it. Her plea for his brother had sounded so sincere that he'd gotten chills and suffered an eerie sense of disagreeable familiarity.
Her story couldn't be true, he assured himself. Many of the old tales hinted that the stones were used as gates to other places—legends never forgotten, passed down through the centuries. She'd like as not heard the gossip and, in her madness, made up a story that held a purely coincidental bit of truth. Had she faked the blood of her virginity? Mayhap she was pregnant and in desperate need of a husband…
Aye, he could travel through the stones, that much of it was true. But everything else she claimed reeked of wrongness. If he'd ever gotten trapped in the future he would never have behaved in such ways. He would never have sent a wee lass back through the stones. He couldn't begin to imagine the situation in which he might take a lass's maidenhead—he'd vowed never to lie with a virgin unless'twas in the marriage bed. And he would never have instructed her to tell his past self such a story and expected himself to believe it.
Och, thinking all this future self, past self was enough to give a man a pounding head, he thought, massaging his temples.
Nay, were he to get into such a situation, he would have simply come back himself and set things aright. Drustan MacKeltar was infinitely more capable than she'd made him out to be.
There was no point in getting unduly upset about her. His primary problem would be keeping his hands to himself, because addled or no, he desired her fiercely.
Still, he mused, mayhap he should send a full complement of guard with Dageus on the morrow. Mayhap the country wasn't as peaceful as it appeared from high atop the MacKeltar's mountain.
Shaking his head, he strode to the boudoir door and slid the bolt from his side, locking her in. Then he grabbed the key from a compartment in the headboard of his bed, left his chamber, and locked her in from the corridor as well. Nothing would jeopardize his wedding. Certainly not some wee lass scampering about unattended, spouting nonsense that he'd taken her virginity. She would go nowhere on the estate unaccompanied by either him or his father.
Dageus, on the other hand, he didn't plan to allow within a stone's toss of her.
He turned on his heel and stalked down the corridor.
* * * * *
Gwen curled up on the bed and cried. Sobbed, really, with hot tears and little choking noises that gave her a swollen nose and a serious sinus headache.
It was no wonder she hadn't cried since she was nine. It hurt to cry. She hadn't even cried when her father had threatened that if she didn't return to Triton Corp. and finish her research, he would never speak to her again. Maybe a few of those tears leaked out now as well.
Confronting Drustan had been more awful than she'd imagined. He was betrothed. And by saving Dageus, she was saving Drustan's future wife. Her overactive brain busily conjured torturous images of Drustan in bed with Anya Elliott. No matter that she didn't even know what Anya Elliott looked like. It was clear from the way things were going that Anya would be Gwen's antithesis—tall and slim and leggy. And Drustan would touch and kiss tall leggy Mrs. MacKeltar the way he'd touched and kissed Gwen in the stones.
Gwen squeezed her eyes shut and groaned, but the horrid images were more vivid on the insides of her eyelids. Her eyes snapped open again. Focus, she told herself. There is nothing to be gained by torturing yourself, you have a bigger problem on your hands.
He hadn't believed her. Not a word she'd said.
How could that be? She'd done what he'd wanted her to do, told him what had happened. She'd believed telling him the whole story would make him see the logic inherent, but she was beginning to realize that sixteenth-century Drustan was not the same man that twenty-first-century Drustan had thought he was. Would the backpack have made that much of a difference? she wondered.