She hung the lantern safely from a hook on the wall, and then removed her cloak and dropped it in the straw. Finally she sat down and, leaning against the pony’s fat tummy, pulled the cork from her bottle of wine.
The wine was rich and fruity, like the earth in the springtime, if dirt was good to eat. She took another swig. It was peppery too, like . . . like pepper. She peered at the label. It was quite dim in the stable even with the lantern, but she could make out that the wine had come from Italy.
As she upended the bottle again, it came to her: she needn’t stay in Scotland with a father who didn’t care very much for her, and a sister who cared not at all. She had money. No—she had a fortune. She could leave Scotland.
She slowly put down the bottle, the happiness caused by this epiphany exploding in her heart. She would go to Italy and travel to the vineyards. She would buy a little house in the countryside . . . or in Venice . . . or Rome. She needn’t even stay in Italy; she would travel wherever she wished. She need never see an English earl again in her life.
Idea after idea came to her: she would like to see the Parthenon, and a camel, though she had the vague sense they weren’t to be found together. A camel had come through the village in a fair when she was a child. She had never forgotten his long, curled eyelashes, and the way he chewed, thoughtfully, as if he were solving the world’s problems and just not bothering to share the solutions.
Lying there, drinking as she considered the adventures she would have, she began to feel chilled. A bit of a search turned up some horse blankets, and she made a nest with these. Then she curled up and pulled her cloak over herself, fur side down, and resumed her reverie. Only when the bottle was nearly half gone did she come to another epiphany.
She could take a lover. An Italian lover. A man with loopy black curls and golden skin, as far from a pallid, blond earl as could be imagined. “I don’t have any reputation anyway,” she told the pony. “Everybody thinks I did all . . . all that with Dugald. I didn’t. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do as I wish. Maybe I’ll have a child after all.”
The pony twitched her ears encouragingly.
“I will have a child,” Fiona decided, taking another drink. “I’ll tell people I’m a widow. I have more than enough money for the two of us. Who needs Scotland anyway? My father won’t even notice I’m gone.”
Her tiresome conscience had just reminded her that her father likely would notice if his elder daughter never returned, when she became aware of a banging noise coming from the wall next to her stall.
“What’s that?” she asked the pony, who didn’t seem to have an answer. Fiona balled up her fist and thumped back on the wall.
No one answered. “I won’t ever think about him,” Fiona told the pony. “Never, ever, ever.” She looked at her bottle. It was dangerously close to half empty. Tomorrow she’d probably have a “head,” as her father called it.
Never mind; it would pass. Tomorrow she would be planning her trip. There were likely travel guides in Taran’s library. She’d be halfway to Italy before anyone noticed she was gone.
“An’ I’ll never even think of him,” she said, hiccupping as she put the bottle down.
There was a crash as the stable door flew open and bounced off the wall.
“Lords a mercy,” Fiona murmured, huddling deeper into her furry nest. She had just begun to feel sleepy.
Then the door slammed shut, and footsteps stamped down the corridor to the accompaniment of someone cursing a blue streak. An Englishman, she thought, not caring much. Probably the duke’s coachman, coming to check on his horses.
“Fiona!” Her name emerged from the Englishman’s lips in a dark growl that had her eyes springing open.
It wasn’t the coachman.
“What in the bloody hell are you doing here?”
“We say bloudy ’ell in Scotland,” Fiona told him, pulling her fur a little higher around her shoulders. “When in Scotland, do as the Scots.” And, because she really didn’t want to see those blue eyes ever again, she closed her own.
Chapter 16
Byron could not believe what he was seeing. After Fiona’s hell-born sister had blurted out where she had gone, he had risked his life making his way to the stable, stumbling around the side of the castle in the storm, sick with fear that he was about to walk over Fiona’s fallen body . . . only to find her tucked down in a stall nestled against a fat old pony, the two of them peacefully asleep.
He pulled off his gloves with a muttered curse. Thank God the stable was so small, and preserved heat so well. His fingers burned with the cold, and his toes felt as if they might fall off. He took another irritable look at the sleeping girl at his feet.
Her hair had fallen out of its bun. Tousled strands of it curled around her face and unfurled over the pony’s rough winter coat.
He squatted down and put a hand on her cheek. The skin burned hot under his fingers, and her eyes flew open on a little shriek. “Take your hand off me!”
“You’re warm. And,” he said, catching sight of a bottle of wine, “you’re drunk.”
“I am not drunk,” she told him, tilting her little nose in the air. “Though I may as well point out, since you do not know me, it could be that I am an invet— an inveterate inebriate.” She said the last two words carefully.
He bent down and pulled off his boots, which were covered with snow. That strange joy that Fiona Chisholm seemed to inspire in him was spreading through him again like liquid gold. Like the kind of dizzy, silly joy he distantly remembered experiencing as a child.
“What are you doing here?” Her eyes were suspicious.
“I came to rescue you.”
“What?”
“I thought I would find you dead in the snow,” he said conversationally, knocking snow from his hat before hanging it on a hook. “I think it was a near go myself, in truth. I kept losing the castle as I was trying to get around to the stable. I was completely blinded by the snow. Needless to say, we don’t have storms like this in London.”
She sat up, a molting fur cape slipping from her shoulder. “Didn’t you follow the rope from the kitchen door?”
“The kitchen?” He shook his head. “I knew nothing about that, so I went out the front door. Your sister said you went to the stable; I looked out the window and thought it was a damned foolish and dangerous thing to do. So I followed the castle around to the stable, but I kept losing touch of the walls. Blasted amount of snow out there.”
“You could have died!” Her voice cut straight through the muffled sound of the wind howling outside.