She raised her brows. “Really? Were you sworn to silence?”
“Something like that.”
She seemed to be thinking on that, so he said, “I would do the same for you—take a vow of silence that is, about all I’ve seen you do.”
She smiled, turning the full force of her pleasure on him. “Would you?”
“Aye, if you would do the same. Vow to never speak of it. Never to exercise it in the presence of others. To rarely take your gloves off.”
Her smile faded, and she looked away from him. She did not make any vows.
“Mistress MacDonell? I pray you to consider it.”
“It’s Mistress MacDonell now?” she hissed at him, pinning him with a green stare. “After last night I’d think we were more familiar.”
“We should not be so familiar, and you know it. Last night is something else we must both take a vow of silence about.”
She looked at him steadily, proudly. “I can vow never to speak of it—but I’ll never vow not to think of it.”
Heat washed through him at her words and her look. Bloody hell, but life was cruel. Now he could imagine her in her marriage bed with Kincreag, but thinking of him. He shut his eyes to force away the image that provoked.
He sighed deeply. “You’ll never learn to stop playing with fire, will you?”
A slow smile spread over her face. “Maybe I like getting burned.”
Philip shook his head. “That is not amusing.” He was thinking of bonfires, of course, but she just continued to smile impishly at him.
“Tell me,” he said, to change the subject. “When did you realize you were a seer? Were you born this way?”
“No, I remember many years where I could touch things and feel nothing at all. But once it started, the whole household was in an uproar.” She gave him an abashed smile. “I was something of a teller of tales—discovering things about my sisters or the servants and tattling on them. There was a period when Gillian and Rose didn’t speak to me for months without it dissolving into a spitting and hair-pulling brawl.”
Philip smiled, remembering his own vicious fights with his brothers—though they’d been out to cause each other serious harm more often than not. “Did it frighten you, the first time you saw something?”
Isobel exhaled thoughtfully, her brow furrowed. “No—it seemed…right—just like any other sense I possess—seeing, touching. I was seven when I first had a vision.”
“So you’ve been like this since you were seven?”
“Aye, my mother was also a seer, just like me. Well, notjustlike me, she was far better. She only used it for good. She taught me ways to control it. She had planned to teach me much more, but…” She trailed off. They both knew the remainder of her sentence—her apprenticeship had been cut short by Lillian MacDonell’s death.
“You said your mother only used her magic for good. When do you use it for evil?”
Isobel shrugged, obviously reluctant to talk about this, but he pressed her. He had seen no evidence that she used her magic for anything but good and so was curious as to her definition of evil.
“Tell me—what evil have you wrought in the world?”
She caught the teasing in his tone and gave him a sheepish look. “I’ve seen things I should not have—and I’ve oft gone looking for them—so it’s not always a mistake. And when I was younger I would sometimes use what I learned to get my way or get revenge on those who’d wronged me…even if others got hurt.”
“You’re too hard on yourself. Surely when your mother was young she did such things. No one is born a saint.”
“I don’t know,” Isobel said, not convinced. “She was quite adamant in her teachings.”
“Perhaps that’s why—she didn’t want you to learn the hard way. She meant well, but it’s an impossible task. Bairns will be bairns—naught we can do about it.”
She looked at him slyly from beneath her lashes. “Just as lads will be lads—flirting with lassies and becoming annoyed at their little sisters?”
He reined in hard, staring at her in shocked surprise. Not just that she knew, but what her words made him feel. When she said such things, he wanted her so desperately nothing else seemed to matter—not her father or her betrothed—he just knew he didn’t want to be without her. She filled an emptiness in him that he hadn’t known existed.
But how did she know? It was certain any number of people could tell her of how he lost his sister—but was that how she’dobtained her information?
