But she’d disappeared in Uster too.
Then they’d just have to go farther away. China, perhaps. Or Africa. At least get the hell out of Scotland.
Damn it all! Dalkeith was his place. Their place.
Dalkeith-Upon-the-Sea had been his entire life. He’d endured so much to have this time. To come home. To watch their sons play at the cliff’s edge. To watch their daughters race through the gardens, little feet pattering across mosses and cobbled walkways. On a warm day, to bathe their children in a clear blue loch. On a balmy summer night, to seduce his wife in the fountain beneath shimmering stars.
He deserved to spend the remainder of his years walking with Adrienne over these hills and vales, watching the sea and the seasons’ eternal march across the land, building a home rich with love and memories and adventures. Every bit of it—damn it—he was a selfish man! He wanted the whole dream. Should have stayed away, Hawk, and you know it. What made you think you could fight something you can’t even name? He closed his eyes tightly and swayed in the dark. Give up Dalkeith for her? His head fell forward, bowed beneath the weight of crushing decisions. A sigh to extinguish bonfires shuddered through his body. Aye. He would wed her at the Samhain. Then he would take her as far away from here as they had to go. He’d already started to say his goodbyes in a strained silence. Goodbyes took some time, and there was much he needed to bid farewell at Dalkeith-Upon-the-Sea.
To risk staying where whatever forces commanded his wife? Patently impossible. “We can’t stay,” he told the silent, waiting room—the one room he needed to bid farewell most strongly. His nursery. “Running is the only intelligent thing to do in this case. ’Tis the only sure way to keep her safe.”
He rubbed his eyes and leaned an arm against the door-jamb, struggling to tame the emotions coursing through him. He was captivated, bound beyond belief to the lass sleeping innocently in his bed. This night shared with her had been all he’d ever dreamed he might one day know. The incredible intimacy of making love to a woman whose very thoughts he could read. It wasn’t just making love—tonight when their bodies had melded together in passion, he felt such complete kindred that it knocked him off balance. If nothing else, it shifted and tumbled his priorities into perfect position. She comes first.
Hawk’s jaw tensed, and he cursed softly. His eyes wandered lovingly over the cradles, the carved toys, the soft woolens, and the high windows opening to a velvet dawn. He could give her a babe—hell, she might carry his already. And someone or something could rip her and the babe right out of his arms and his life. It would destroy him.
Dalkeith would prosper without him; Adrian would make a fine laird. Lydia would summon him home from France. Ilysse would keep his mother company and Adrian would wed and bring babies to this nursery.
He would suffer no regrets. He could have babies with Adrienne in a crofter’s hut and be just as happy.
The Hawk stood a few moments more, until the flicker of a smile curved his lip.
He closed the door on his old dream with a gentle smile and a kind of reverence only a man in love fully understands. A room had never been his dream at all.
She was his dream.
“Hawk!” Lydia’s lower lip trembled an unspoken protest. She averted her gaze to study an intricate twining of roses.
“It must be done, Mother. ’Tis the only way I can be certain she’s safe.”
Lydia busied her hands with the careful pinching away of dried leaves, pruning her roses as she’d pruned them for thirty years. “But to leave! Tonight!”
“We can’t risk staying, Mother. There’s no other choice I can make.”
“But Adrian isn’t even here,” she protested. “You can’t relinquish the title if no one’s here to claim it!”
“Mother.” Hawk didn’t bother to point out to her how absurd that protest was. From the sheepish look on her face it was obvious she knew she was grasping at any excuse she could find.
“You’re talking about taking my grandbabies away!” Lydia squinted hard against tears.
Hawk regarded her with a mixture of deep love and amused patience. “They’re grandbabies you don’t even have yet. And ones we won’t get a chance to make if I lose her to whatever it is that controls her.”
“You could take her far from these shores and still lose her, Hawk. Until we discover what controls her, she won’t ever really be safe,” Lydia argued stubbornly. “She and I had planned to investigate the details of each time she traveled, to discover similarities. Have you done that?”