It wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t. Patrick would never have allowed it.
“Tomorrow. We’ll be there tomorrow.”
He might have been able to push the worries turned to fear aside if not for one unanswerable question.
Why had Torquil kept him alive?
Thirty-one
AT LEAST SHEdidn’t have to pretend to be a nervous and worried new wife.
The feelings were all too real as Dani waited for the massive gate of iron bars to lift and allow their party entrance to Tordenet Castle.
They rode forward, into the mouth of the long tunnel separating freedom and the castle grounds. Dani fought the desire to turn her head and watch when she heard the heavy chains clanking behind them. She had no need to confirm with her own eyes what reason told her. The iron portcullis that had allowed them entry now barred their exit.
“Like a rat in a barrel of rainwater,” Elesyria muttered from her left.
Goose bumps spread over Dani’s arms at the analogy. She’d plucked too many dead, swollen rats from rain barrels back on the farm not to understand its meaning.
She swallowed hard, fixing her eyes straight ahead of her.
The tunnel through the castle wall had been strategically placed, framing the entrance of the keep so that anyone arriving might be properly intimidated. The keep itself, as well as the castle walls, had been covered in whitewash. Sunlight reflected off the whole, allowing Tordenet Castle to be seen long before it was reached, a shining beacon in the distance.
Rauf rode at the head of their little procession, leading them through the long tunnel. She couldn’t help but notice that Eymer drew his animal up beside hers as they passed out of the confinement of the wall’s tunnel. At the same time, Guy came forward to a spot on the left and, with Hamund close at their rear, the guards had formed a protective circle around her and Elesryia.
Any comfort she might have taken in their action was lost with one look at the numbers of armed soldiers surrounding them on their way across the courtyard. No wonder Malcolm had thought he needed the might of the MacKilyn on his side.
At Rauf’s signal, they drew their animals to a halt while he slid off his mount and hastened forward, dropping to one knee at the foot of a great flight of stairs that led up to the castle entrance. There he waited, head bowed, like a reverent statue.
Dani’s horse pawed the ground nervously. Whether it was because the animal felt hemmed in by Eymer on one side and Elesyria on the other or something else altogether, she couldn’t be sure. She only knew that she and her horse shared a similar choking apprehension.
After a few minutes’ delay, a man appeared at the top of the stairs. He paused, obviously surveying those who waited below, and, as impossible as it was to determine from this distance, Dani could have sworn he stared directly at her.
Nerves.
“A fine specimen of manflesh, that one is,” Elesyria murmured approvingly. “The elder brother, do you suppose?”
One and the same, Dani guessed.
He was beautiful, all right. A romance-cover version of Dermid. But where the younger brother was cherubic in his blond good looks, the elder was seriously heartbreaker handsome, with a come-hither confidence in his stride that could easily knock a cowgirl right off her horse.
If she needed more proof of who he was, the obsequious way Rauf followed after him as he passed down the stairs and headed toward their group of horses was it.
He paused not five feet from her horse, definitely staring directly at her now.
“You’ll do the honors, Rauf?”
She mentally added a voice like honey-coated candy to her description of him.
Rauf stepped forward, head still bowed. “Our lord, Torquil of Katanes, laird of the MacDowylt, chosen son of Odin. My lord, may I present yer brother’s wife, Mistress Danielle MacDowylt, of the MacGahan and her companion, Mistress Elesyria MacGahan.”
Three of the soldiers placed their bodies between Eymer’s mount and her own, pressing him back and away from her as Torquil approached.
He stopped beside her horse and held up his arms to help her down.
“Welcome to Tordenet Castle, my lady,” he said as he gripped her waist and lowered her to the ground.
It seemed to Dani that he held her a bit closer and perhaps a bit longer than absolutely necessary. Long enough that she began to feel the others watching. Long enough that she tilted her head up to meet his gaze.
