Love in the Time of a Highland Laird (A Laird for All Time Book 3), Angeline Fortin [top ten ebook reader txt] 📗

Or would the answers she’d provide only cause him to sink into madness? He could still hardly account for what he’d seen out there on the moors. These past days, he’d begun to wonder if it had all been a hallucination of sorts. A bit of madness springing from the grief of watching his beloved cousin perish.

That might explain it all.

Though it couldn’t explain her.

An odd wee lass with fetching gray eyes and an air of mystery about her. The stuttering miss from his dungeons taken over by a veritable termagant vocal in her opinions. Surely she would find the words now to put him out of his misery.

Her.

Ha, he didn’t even know her name.

*

Her trip through time had become even more surreal since she’d stepped into the library earlier and had her entire perception of this place and her captor turned inside out.

Trying to mesh this new reality with the old had thrown her for a loop. That imbalance had followed her through being scrubbed, dried, and dressed in multiples layers of ivory and blue linen with varying degrees of discomfort… both on a personal and physical level.

Now, Al followed the pointed fingers of the occasional servants she came across as they directed her wordlessly through the castle, still trying to reconcile those two divergent realities. Which of them was real?

The nightmare?

The fairytale?

The savage?

The gentleman?

It was all incredibly bizarre. She was trying to make herself understood to the people in this castle. Some of them, it seemed, spoke no English. According to the young woman who had persistently attended to her while she was bathing despite Al’s repeated assurance that she could do it herself, many of the Highlanders spoke nothing but Gaelic.

Others might have been simply refusing to speak with her. The foreigner. The interloper. The killer.

As outlandish to them as all of this was to her.

Rumors must have circulated through the castle over the four days of her incarceration, though, given the dark looks she received. She’d been astounded when she’d heard the time frame. Four. Not ten, not twelve. Just four.

A lifetime. But not.

It made her want to hate the man responsible but after such an eloquent apology in that soft, purring brogue, she’d had a hard time holding on to her resentment.

She’d reserve that for Maeve now. From a distance. Instinct told her to steer clear of the irate woman.

Keir seemed to have relinquished some of his anger toward her as well, though his frustration was still evident. He would want answers now. She only hoped she was brave enough to give him the truth, damn the consequences.

Clearly he loved his cousin. He deserved to know.

Hopefully when he was done with his interrogation she’d be able to deliver one of her own. The wheres and whens of her accidental passage through time were a mystery she’d like solved.

Scientist problems. Al repressed a giggle at the thought. How often had anyone ever been faced with such a setback?

She was still smiling when another servant, a rickety old man in a faded kilt and brilliant blue jacket, pointed expressionlessly at a pair of double doors. She entered to find Keir rising from a chair set at the head of a ridiculously long table.

He was dressed even more flamboyantly than before. This time in a green silk jacket with golden frogging along the edges and wide, turned-up cuffs with lace spilling out over his darkly tanned hands. His mop of black hair was tamed into a ponytail at his nape, sending the sculpted perfection of his facial features into sharp relief.

He should have struck her as preposterously effeminate with all the braid and dripping lace, but again, he did not.

The magnificence of his person sent her heartbeat racing. Any lingering anger she’d been nursing fell victim to a sudden rush of shyness.

“What do ye find so amusing?” he asked, tugging at his cuffs and fluffing the lace of his jabot… playfully? He was becoming more human and less monster by the second. “The barbarian is gone, I assure ye. Tonight we shall dine… and converse like two civilized people. I hae dressed for my part. I see that ye were well garbed fer yers.”

Al brushed shaky hands down the fabric reining in her midsection and refrained from indulging in the deep inhale she longed for to calm her nerves. An attempt to do so when she’d first seen herself in a mirror had nearly rocketed her breasts right out of the too-tight bodice. She’d didn’t want that to happen again.

Still with his eyes wandering downward as they had days ago, alight with appreciation, the inhale was involuntary. His eyes widened… and warmed. A little tingle ran down her spine that was as inappropriate now as it had been four days ago.

Keir cleared his throat and bowed, much as he had earlier in the library. This time he held out his hand expectantly, and having no other option beyond awkwardly retreating, Al placed her hand hesitantly in his.

He kissed it. Actually kissed it. And Al nearly fainted as his lips brushed over her knuckles. Her knees trembling when he raised his eyes and winked at her.

“My compliments, lass. I’m fairly speechless in awe at the bonny picture ye present.”

Damn, he was good. So far he was beating a lifetime of detailed fantasies, hands down.

“Tell me, does such an angelic vision hae a name?”

A name? Oh.

“Al,” she stuttered out.

“Al?” he repeated using her same, flat American accent on the short word. He straightened, his brow furrowing as if the name were completely nonsensical. Or repugnant. “Al?”

With a grimace, Al tugged her hand away and entwined her fingers self-consciously at her waist. She nodded jerkily. “Yeah. Or a lot of my friends call me Big Al.” His brows shot upward and she rushed to explain. “It’s ironic, you see? Since I’m so not… in size… but…”

“Al.” He repeated her name, testing it on his tongue with far more flavor than the diminutive deserved. It sounded