Page 41 of Here in Your Arms
She only kept talking, words spilling from her lips like water from a broken dam.
“I read it,” she continued. “Before—before I came here. Margaret’s journal. I read her words. I saw her name. I sawyourname—but I didn’t know your name, not here. Not until Leana just said it.” She pressed a shaking hand to her forehead, her eyes darting past him, unfocused. “I don’t understand. I don’t—I don’t know what itmeans—”
The wind bit through the night air, cutting against them both, and still she hadn’t reached for the plaid. Hadn’t held it closed. It was bothering him more than it should. Tiernan scowled, grabbing the edges of the breacan and pulling them together himself. He caught her hand, lifting it to the fabric, pressing her fingers against it as if she needed to be reminded of her own body.
“Hold it,” he muttered.
She blinked, her face still drawn with frantic confusion. “Thank you,” she said absently, then kept right on with her chaotic fragments, none of which thus far explained... anything.
“I don’t know—why was I brought here? It can’t only be coincidence—I didn’t know the journal belonged to... Margaret is a very common name. I never... put it together.”
Tiernan exhaled sharply through his nose, his patience threadbare, even as her words began to sink in, as he began to actually hear her.
Margaret’s journal?
His frown deepened. “Hold,” he said, gesturing for her to stop.
She didn’t. Her words kept tumbling out, frenzied and uneven, her breath catching between them.
Tiernan caught her hands where they clutched his breacan, his warm fingers curling firmly around her ice-cold ones. “Rose, cease. Breathe.”
She stilled at the command, her gaze snapping upward, lifting from his chest to his face. She stopped blathering, but her chest still rose and fell in quick, shallow bursts, the force of whatever had shaken her still rattling through her.
“Aye, that’s it,” he said, his tone quieting. “Just breathe.” He waited a beat, then another, before speaking again, employing more patience—more gentleness—than he’d ever been called to use. “I need ye to start at the beginning, Rose.” His voice was calm, but firm. “Explain everything—whatever has ye in distress—slowly, one thought at a time. Put them in order.”
She jerked her head in a quick, nervous nod.
Tiernan studied her critically. She wasn’t crying, but she looked as if she might. Her hands were cold in his, trembling faintly even as he still held her fists in his. She was bloodless, drained of all color, and her eyes were dark and wide. She looked small suddenly, and much younger, fragile in a way he’d never noticed before.
It unsettled him.
She had been, thus far in his encounters with her, brave-mouthed, sometimes sharp-tongued, and full of defiance. But this—this was something else.
His grip on her hands tightened slightly, steadying her.
“Go on then,” he said, his voice lower now, quieter. “Tell me.”
Rose dragged in a long breath through her nose. “I was working in an archive,” she began, her voice still uneven. “At a university. My job was to sort through old estate records, documents from the 14th and 15th centuries—accounts of lands, transactions, ledgers. Most of it was dry, just numbers and names.”
Tiernan said nothing, but his grip on her hands remained steady, firm.
“But somehow, mixed in with all those records, I found a journal.” She let out a small, unsteady breath. “It shouldn’t have been there. It wasn’t an official document, not something meant to be cataloged with accounts and ledgers. But it was there. And I read it.” She shifted slightly, her brow furrowing as she looked up at him. “It was written by a young woman sent to a convent. She wrote about how lonely she was. How much she missed her family. How she used to run free as a child, but now spent her days shut behind stone walls, kneeling on cold floors, forced to pray all hours of the day.”
Tiernan studied her, his sharp gaze unwavering as he realized where she was going with this.
“She had no word from the outside. No news of the war. No letters from her father, her mother. She felt like she had been buried before she even had the chance to live.”
“Aye,” Tiernan said when she paused, encouraging her to continue.
“The journal belonged to a woman named Margaret—her name was written on the first page.” Rose exhaled shakily, but the longer she spoke, the steadier her voice became. “Then the journal changed. For a long time, there were no entries at all. And when she finally picked it up again, her words were different. She’d resigned herself to life at the convent—actually, it seemed like she really liked it. But then she was summonedhome. She wasn’t... she didn’t seem to be too happy about it.” The wind stirred around them, but Rose didn’t react. “She started writing about her betrothal—to you.” She swallowed, and then added unnecessarily, “Tiernan.”
Tiernan stilled, his entire body stiffening at the sound of his name from her lips.
Rose shook her head, as if still trying to grasp it herself. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He didn’t, not at all. She’d somehow found Margaret’s journal, she’d read his name... but what?
“I never put it together,” Rose said, seeming upset with herself over this fact. “Not until tonight. Not until Leana said your name.” She shook her head, bewildered, shaken to her core, breathless again even as her voice was stronger. “I was reading the journal in 1978—reading the words and thoughts a woman—Margaret—had written almost seven hundred years ago. And I was nearing the end, reading about her journey to—to here, to Druimlach—to wed you. She was...she seemed...”
