A Bewitching Bride by Elizabeth Thornton Read Free Book Online

Greek, Latin, or ancient Hebrew. The words were not important. What mattered was the sense of well-being that flowed through her at the sound of his voice. He had a mesmerizing voice.
    The voice changed. Or maybe it was her perception that changed. He stopped soothing her and started calling her to account.
    “Oh, no,” he said. “I’m not letting you slip away again, else you may never wake up. Open your mouth. Wider! Drink this!”
    With those harsh words, her woolly reveries suddenly unraveled, and she opened her eyes. There was no sign now of the voice that had charmed her as she slept. This man’s jaw was tight. His eyes bored into hers. Had she felt more like herself, she would have fought him, but she didn’t even possess the strength to sit up.
    She could have wept. As a child, she’d had an imaginary friend who was more real to her than her own sister. He was always there to comfort her when things went wrong. Friend , she called him. He didn’t desert her; she deserted him the day she learned that her mother was locked away for hearing voices in her head. Was she mad, too?
    There was no friend. He was a figment of her imagination, a means of protecting her fragile psyche from harm.
    Reality was this hard-eyed man who held the rim of a cup to her lips.
    She opened her mouth and promptly choked on the tea, not because it was too hot, but because it was too sweet. How many cups of tea had she drunk, anyway? There was no relenting in him. He forced her to drink the cup to the dregs.
    “Good girl,” he said, as though she were his pet dog.
    He helped her raise herself a little, with her head and shoulders propped against a pillow. When she was settled, he turned away and added more logs to the blaze. It looked to her as though it would be a long night.
    She gave a shivery sigh. There was no escape into sleep now. Everything had come back to her. He was Gavin Hepburn, and she owed him an explanation. If it had not been for him and his dog, she would be as frozen as one of the icicles that hung from the eaves. But before she took the plunge, she wanted to make quite sure that she could trust him. After all, there was a faint possibility that he was the one who had pursued her over the moor.
    To what purpose? He hadn’t killed her. He had saved her. Or was there some devious point to this cat-and-mouse game?
    Emptying herself of all distracting thoughts, she opened herself to what her senses were telling her, but all that she received were mixed messages. He wasn’t dangerous, but he wasn’t harmless, either.
    What was she supposed to make of that?
    He pulled a stool up to the narrow bed and sat with legs spread and his arms resting on his knees. He was getting ready to fire off his questions. It just so happened that she had a few of her own that she wanted answers to before she took him into her confidence.
    “This cottage,” she began and had to start over because her voice sounded as weak and wobbly as an old woman’s. “Who does it belong to, and what are you doing here?”
    He spread his hands. “A man with a dog is not welcome at the hotel, so Juliet offered Macduff and me this cottage. It’s not far from the hotel, but in this weather, we might as well be on the moon. If it’s any consolation, it has stopped snowing, so we may get out of here and back to civilization by morning.”
    Macduff, who was toasting himself in front of the fire, had looked up when he heard his name mentioned.
    “He saved me, didn’t he?” she said quietly, turning her head to look at Macduff.
    “What do you remember?”
    “A ferocious beast, with fangs bared, standing over me.”
    “That would be Macduff. He’s a herder, you see, and bred to protect the flock whatever the cost to himself. Leastways, that’s my opinion. He came to me as a stray, so I have no way of knowing.”
    “Has he done this kind of thing before?”
    “Yes, but only if he takes a fancy to you.”
    Her smile was fleeting, but as memory