“I—I don’t know. I paused to catch my breath…oh god! You’re—you’re all right.”
“Aye, my brother lives.”
It was all that he said, yet she was aware that he believed his brother was fine despite her efforts to harm him. Angered, she leaped to her feet. She instantly wavered, feeling again thedizziness and the nausea. She nearly fell— and would have, had Hawk not caught her.
“Shawna, what is the matter with you?” David demanded skeptically.
“Shawna?” Hawk inquired.
“Shawna, talk to us!” David warned. “We’ll not play games here as we did five years ago!”
“You must…you must leave me be,” Shawna whispered to Hawk. “I’m…sick.”
She pushed away from him, staggering along the tunnel. When she burst out of the main shaft, Skylar, who had been waiting and watching from the very edge of the entrance, came hurrying after her. “Oh my god! What’s happened, are you all right?—”
She broke off as her husband emerged, followed by David. She spun around nervously, trying to assure herself that they remained alone by the mine’s entrance. “David, you can be seen here. Hawk, what’s going on? Shawna, tell me! What has happened?” she demanded, her voice rising anxiously at the sight of them, Shawna gray, Hawk soaked and muddied, David disheveled and caked with coal dust.
Without waiting to hear the men’s answer, Shawna hurried to the nearest bushes. Her stomach constricted in vicious torment, and she was violently sick, so much so that she fell into the long, cool grass once her retching had stopped.
“Poor thing!” she heard. She tried to sit up. The effort was too much. She fell back as Skylar knelt down beside her. She’d had the presence of mind to bring a bucket of water from the mine entrance and dipped her handkerchief in it to bathe Shawna’s face. “There…” she murmured. “You’re not…well, you’re not…”
“Not what?”
“Expecting?”
“Expecting what?” Shawna inquired, then realized just what Skylar Douglas thought she was expecting.
“No, oh, no! I was attacked, drugged!”
“Drugged?” Skylar demanded, alarmed, and Shawna realized that neither Hawk nor David had really told Skylar anything.
“We were tricked in the tunnel. Led toward a gap in the flooring that led to the caverns below that fill with high tide from the loch. When I ran for help…someone drugged me.”
“With wine?” came a sardonic voice.
David stood behind her. She knew it. She made it to her feet, though she had to pray that she would maintain the strength to stand. And to move.
“Pray, Skylar, tell your brother-in-law how terribly sorry I am that he does not reside in hell!” she said furiously and started for her horse.
She was going to make it. She was still trying to move too fast. She heard a cry, though it seemed distant. Skylar, she thought.
She started to fall again.
She was swept up. She tried to open her eyes.
David. David was carrying her.
And for a brief moment, his green eyes seemed forest deep with concern.
“Bastard,” she mouthed to him.
Then her eyes closed again.
When she awoke next, she was in the tower room at Castle Rock.
Sunlight was shining through the window, and Skylar was seated by her side, reading as she kept watch.
Thinking they were alone, Shawna groaned. She tried to smile at Skylar, who instantly looked at her with concerned eyes.