“But I have not lived there since I was a child.” She had not intended the words to sound wistful, but Hugh seemed more focused on what she had said than the way she had said it.
He frowned. “When I took ye from Paris, ye told me in plain terms ye were to go back to your family. The whole way to Lyon ye seemed fair determined,” he said, “to go home.”
Mary gave a little shrug and looked deliberately away. “Home, as you once told me, is not always where you left it.”
She did not wish to speak to Hugh about her family. He already knew—had known from the beginning—who her elder brother was, and doubtless he would then know something of her family’s past. And having made inquiries here in Rome about her father and her other brothers, he would also know how little she had figured in their lives. He did not need her to remind him of how easily they’d left her, for he was about to do the same himself.
Hugh had said nothing in reply, and Mary—knowing he had no great love of conversation—took that as a sign he wished to bring an end to this one and deliver her to her hotel in safety, for the sun had crept yet lower and the turquoise color in the sky was bleeding through the softer pink and washing it away, and soon the twilight would descend.
“Shall we start back?” she asked him with a brightness that she did not feel. “I’m sure that Frisque will be beside himself with joy to see you, he has been so bored these past weeks.” As have I, she nearly added, but she held her tongue.
“I have a gift for ye.”
It was, as speeches from the Scotsman went, so strange and unexpected that she was not sure she’d heard him right. “A what?”
He did not bother to repeat the comment, for he had already pushed his sword hilt to the side to gain him access to the pocket of his dark red coat, from which he drew his hand out in a half-closed fist. He held that fist towards her, and his fingers opened to reveal a thing so purely beautiful that Mary could do naught but stare.
It was an equipage—a silver clip of four open-work hearts so set together that they seemed to form a butterfly, and hanging from them by three dainty silver chains she saw a tiny watch key, and the little watch that went with it, and something small and round suspended in a cage of silver wire.
She looked at it and could not speak.
She thought of what the earl had asked him earlier, about whether the man Hugh had met had completed the work he’d been paid for, and vaguely her mind resurrected the earl’s idle mention of shops and a silversmith, but it seemed incredible that Hugh would go to so much trouble and expense on her account. And then she looked at the watch and another thought, still more incredible, struck her. She asked him, “You made this?”
He nodded. “I had a man here do the chains and the clip for me, for I had not the right tools.”
Any words she might have said at that moment all seemed to be caught in a lump at the base of her throat, so she did not say anything, letting Hugh show her the watch—how the glass front would open, as would the bright silver-cased back, and the way it was meant to be wound with the key.
With his head bent, intent on instructing her, he said, “It must be wound once a day, though it will run for six hours beyond that if ye do forget it.”
She managed to say in a small voice, “I will not forget.”
She did not mean the watch, but she stared at it anyway, noting the miniature scrollwork that weighted the delicate hands on its white porcelain face with the numerals marked simply in black.
“The face is a plain one,” said Hugh, “but the workings inside will not fail ye.”
Her gaze lifted slightly and focused on Hugh—on the serious line of his brow and the slash of a shadow his eyelashes made on his strong angled cheekbones, and Mary could not then imagine how she could have ever thought Hugh unattractive. “It is a handsome face,” she told him, and again she was not speaking of the watch.
He took no notice, gathering the bits of silver and the chains that ran like liquid over his hard palm, and passing all into her smaller hand.
The turquoise sky was flaming now to duller gray, and Mary had to lift her hand to see the details of the silver chains and what they held. She gently rolled the little silver cage to better see the flattened ball within. “Is this a bullet?”
“It is.”
She glanced up, mutely questioning, and Hugh explained, “I killed the wolf with that shot. It protected ye once, and it may yet have power to keep ye from harm.”
Her eyes started to fill and she quickly looked down. She’d been cared for and loved by her uncle and aunt, but she’d never had anyone show such concern for her welfare as this hardened man of the Highlands, who’d taken the trouble to fashion a charm with the sole aim of keeping her safe in the time when he would not be able to do it himself. When he would not be there at her side.
Blinking hard at the butterfly hearts, she began to believe she had seen a design like that somewhere before…and then suddenly she knew exactly where she’d seen those hearts, and her gaze slipped in mixed disbelief and dismay to the basket-like hilt of Hugh’s sword, and the open space where now one piece of the wrought silver basket was missing, then back again to the increasingly valuable gift in her hand.
Her fingers closed around it and she had to fight and concentrate to keep the tears from spilling over from her blurring eyes, and it was all for naught because a single tear squeezed through her lashes anyway and slowly tracked a path down her averted cheek. She blinked again to force the others back and breathed a steady breath and willed herself to show him nothing but the strength he’d told her he admired.