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“What does that have to do with anything? I still want you and love you. It fucking shreds my heart to pieces that you’re going to marry someone else.”
She shook her head and took another step back. “If ye really loved me, ye wouldna have dragged me out here and put my reputation in danger in front of the whole camp. Anyone can see us.”
“Let them.”
“Ye’re nae thinking clearly. Mayhap in yer world a man and a woman can be together with nae consequences. In mine, women marry out of duty and to secure our future. And if ye canna understand that…”
He took a step towards her, and she took another back. “Anna, please…”
“Please what, David? What?”
Yeah…please what? Was he ready to ask her to marry him? To go to the King of Scots and ask for her hand? To abandon his dreams, his search for a way out of this reality?
Even with his mind foggy and moving at the speed of a snail, he couldn’t imagine that.
“Nothing. You’re right. I put you in danger. I couldn’t imagine being apart from you… It’s the first night that I don’t have you in my arms and…I can’t imagine how to deal with it.”
“Well, ye’ll have to. Ye’ll have yer whole life to sleep without me. In a warm, comfy bed in a house with the miracle of light with no fire and warm waterfalls running at yer will.”
She turned to go inside, but he couldn’t leave it like this.
He caught her by the elbow and gently turned her to him. “Part of my heart is going to die if you become someone else’s wife.”
Anna’s throat moved, and her eyes watered in the darkness. “Ye think mine wouldna?”
As she whirled around and turned her back to him to walk away, he looked up. He thought he saw a shadow move quickly to hide behind the corner of the pavilion. But it was so dark, and he was so drunk, he wasn’t sure if the shadow was simply the cast by the flames of the nearest campfire.
Anna disappeared into the pavilion, and he stood like a statue, unable to take another step away from her. He sat down at the entrance and waited to make sure he didn’t see any danger. But the alcohol in his system finally did its job, and his mind gave in to sleep.
CHAPTER 27
David’s hand clenched around the handle of his claymore. It was good he stood in the crowd next to Colum and Aulay MacDonald, who knew this wasn’t a gesture of aggression. He didn’t need to peer around the backs and shoulders of the warriors and noblemen in front of him, as he was taller than almost everyone else—except for Colum and Aulay.
He watched Anna’s figure, her back straight in her rich wedding attire. She stood at the front of the congregation at the right side of the church in Stirling village. Sir Philip Mowbray—a tall, handsome, and perfectly respectable man in his early forties, with intelligent blue eyes, a full head of hair, and a short beard—stood in front of the second half of the crowd at the left of the church. Behind him were the warriors, knights, and noblemen of Stirling.
In front of all of them, a priest was reading a blessing for John the Baptist. The scent of incense was thick and nauseating. He was hungover from yesterday.
The church was rather big, much bigger than the one in Dornie. Long, glassless, gothic windows lined the walls. A large wooden cross hung on the wall behind the altar, which sat under a tall, pointed arch. It was semidark, even during the day, with candles doing their best to light up the space.
Before, he’d drunk to forget he was in the Middle Ages.
Last night, he’d drunk because the thought of Anna in another man’s arms was a stake piercing his heart with every breath.
She was his.
His.
And yet, he and Anna both knew she wasn’t and would never be his. Seven of Sìneag’s previous matches had resulted in a happy ending.
But this time, she was wrong. So wrong.
As the priest kept mumbling monotonically in Latin, David craved another uisge. He wondered why he hadn’t left Stirling yesterday. He’d brought Anna here, to safety. He was free to go. And yet, he was torturing himself by remaining to watch the wedding. To watch her marry another man.
Finally the Mass was over, and the groom and the bride were brought to stand before the priest. As David watched the two of them, Philip—handsome and noble, wearing a brocaded tunic with a jeweled girdle on his hip, a shirt with puffed sleeves, and knitted tights, along with a floor-length mantle with petal-shaped scallops over his shoulders. And Anna—small and thin and looking like a proper princess in her rich robe of brocaded silk shot through with gold and silver threads. The panel down the front of her robe had metallic spangles. It made her skin look like porcelain and her hair like ebony. David felt the nausea rise to his throat. She was where she was supposed to be. This was her destiny.
And his was to be back to the twenty-first century.
Philip was ogling Anna with the eyes of a man who appreciated a woman. Possessive and admiring. He knew he’d scored high. Who wouldn’t? But the translucent complexion and the delicate figure were an illusion. She knew how to fight and how to ride a horse better than he did. And she knew how to swim and how to hunt and cook on a campfire.
