The Intended by May McGoldrick

face, her
lips moving. A pain shot through his chest, his head pounded.
Malcolm again felt his bones disintegrating. The agony was
back.
    Nay, he screamed, turning back to the door.
He glimpsed the final flash of light, but the door had closed.
Gone, he realized through the pain.
    By God, the wench had won.

Chapter 7
     
     
    “Is he dead?” Mary Howard’s whisper broke the
momentary silence that had fallen inside the cell. Peeking into the
open door, she froze at the site of the blood and the bloody wreck
of the Scot’s body.
    The physician cast an admonishing glance at
the blanched face of the newcomer, and Jaime’s startled expression
quickly changed to bewilderment at the appearance of her
cousin.
    “Did you come down here for a dance, Mistress
Mary?” the physician asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
Turning to Jaime, his gruffness returned as he barked, “Take her
out of here at once, Mistress Jaime. The poor lad is barely hanging
on as it is. We don’t need the entire household tramping through
for a peek at his miserable carcass.”
    “But...but we’re not finished with him,”
Jaime argued. She had no desire to go just yet. “You need help with
his dressings. I should try to clean the blood from his
wounds.”
    “I’ve done this for over thirty years,” Grave
grumbled under his breath. “I can manage the rest just fine. As for
the cleaning, I’ll do what I can and have one of the stable hands
sleep in here. We don’t want any of the barn vermin getting at him
during the night.”
    The physician smiled wryly as Mary Howard
paled again, looking as if she were about to be ill. He looked back
at Jaime. Uncertainty showing on her face, she stood looking at him
from her place beside the prisoner.
    The lass had certainly been a great help, far
better than his own hapless, shirker of an assistant. But the truth
of it was that the physician needed a bit of time alone to regain
his wits. What he’d just witnessed had frightened him. Something
had passed between this woman and the wounded man, and he was
struggling, even now, to square it in his mind. He could have
sworn...no. There was no doubt. The Scot had died. He’d stopped
breathing.
    He was dead.
    And then—Graves dared not think of it as
magic—Jaime had brought him back to life. Back to life and back to
a conscious state. The physician’s hackles rose again at the
thought of the awakening. The Highlander’s chest had convulsed, his
fists clenched and then opened, only to tighten into fists once
more. And then the lad had opened his eyes, clear and alert
and...disbelieving. The Scot had just stared at her, anger quickly
taking over, wrath eclipsing any other expression on his battered
features. He’d silently drunk the entire potion then, never taking
his eyes from her face. Then, cursing her by name, his swollen
eyelids had drooped, and he’d fallen into a deep slumber.
    Over a year ago, when Jaime Macpherson had
first arrived, the word had gone about that she was niece to Anne
Boleyn. He himself could see the family resemblance between her and
the dead queen. In the back of his mind, now, resemblances of
another type were pushing forward with an unpleasantness that
Graves was trying to ignore. Aye, he’d heard the stories that Queen
Anne was a witch—a sorceress of some kind who had cast a spell on
the king. That is, until he’d had her beheaded. They’d said she
could communicate with spirits. There was even talk that her ghost
had been seen in the Tower of London and other places, as well.
    But Graves had never believed such talk. He’d
seen her before the king fell in love with her, and he’d seen her
as queen. She hadn’t been an easy lass to like, in his opinion.
Proud and vain. But hardly a witch, so far as he could see. Just
talk begun by her enemies, by those who wanted her dead. And of
course, he thought, ‘tis even easier to slander your enemies once
they are dead.
    But now... His eyes looked searchingly into
Jaime’s