She ran to the window, looking out to the night beyond. There was no sign of him. She pressed the stone on the secret door just beyond the window and looked down into the stairway. The stairway was blacker than ebony, and not even the slightest sound echoed back to her from it.
Had he departed the normal way—by the door?
She returned from the balcony and threw open the door to her room, scampered into the hallway and then to the balustrade looking down on the great hall below. Again, there was no sign of him.
She couldn’t stand around in the hallway, she determined. Her gown was damp and shredded, and she was half-naked, and if any of her kin were to appear, she might well find herself residing in an asylum for the insane.
She slipped back into her bedroom, closing and bolting the door, and pacing the floor.
David had returned. It was impossible.
She shivered, discarded her torn, wet gown, and dressed quickly in a fresh one while staring at the remnants of the old. She realized she had to get rid of the ripped gown.
Only if she intended to keep secret the fact that David was alive. That he had returned.
David was dangerous.
Maybe he had a right to be. Where had he been for the last five years? What had happened to him? How had he managed to come home and rise from the loch at precisely the moment she needed him?
Had he really been there at all?
She groaned softly, rolling up her shredded gown, determined to hide it until she decided what to do with it. Shestuffed it beneath her bed for the time being. She couldn’t report to anyone that David was alive.
She had no proof. Already, there was no sign that the man might have been in her room. If she betrayed him, she realized, she’d definitely be sorry. For one thing, no one would believe her. They would all doubt her sanity, as she was beginning to question it herself. No one would believe what had happened to her tonight. She had run out She had been chased and nearly killed by a tall dark shadow near the Druid Stones. But she hadn’t been killed because a dead man had risen from the loch to slay her would-be assailant…
She needed a drink, she decided, if she was ever going to sleep for the rest of the night. And she had to have some rest. The world, at the very least, had gone mad. And she had to cope with it all somehow.
She slipped from her room, returned to the office, found the brandy bottle, and returned with it. The fire in her hearth had burned down to practically nothing, but she sat in front of it, shivering, trying to rouse up the last of the embers.
She was going to drink the brandy properly out of a glass, sit calmly in front of the fire, and think.
She did pour the brandy into a glass. Throwing her head back and swallowing down the contents in one long sip wasn’t exactly proper.
She’d do better with the second glass.
Actually she did do better. With her feet and legs curled beneath her, she stared into the small, flickering flames. He’d come back. He was alive.
Or was he? She shivered fiercely. Her nightmares had been torturing her for so long. He was gone again without a trace. How could she be so certain…
In the morning, there would be no doubt. Someone would find the corpse by the loch. And what? Was she supposed to pretend that she knew nothing about it?
David believed that she had been part of a conspiracy. That she had been the lure, the bait, so that someone else could come along and murder him unaware, in cold blood. He was watching her now to see who she would go to…
There was no murderer, she tried to tell herself. A rafter had fallen, another man’s body, burned beyond recognition, had been discovered, and it had been assumed that the charred remains had been David. No one would have tried to kill him.
But David was alive. How could he be alive, back after all this time?
She drank another very long swallow of the brandy.
Her limbs, at the least, were no longer cold. What remained of the fire, and what sweet flames the brandy could create, warmed her at last. Any more and she was going to awake with a pounding headache just when she would need to have her wits about her.
She set the glass down on the arm of her chair, leaving the brandy bottle by the side of it. She stood in the middle of the room for a long moment. Nothing was different. Nothing had changed. She might have truly dreamed that he had walked back into her life.
She knew she hadn’t just dreamed of David. He had walked back into her life.
For revenge.
CHAPTER 5