Highland Knight of Dreams: Scottish Historical Romance (Highland Dynasty Book 5) by Amy Jarecki

Author:Amy Jarecki [Jarecki, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Oliver Heber Books
Published: 2020-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

After the sun rose on the next morn, Gran still hadn’t returned. Worse, Lord Quinn was sweating like a laborer in the hot sun.

“Water,” he croaked, his voice nowhere as bold as it had been the previous day.

Cup in hand, Alice hastened to his side. “How are you feeling?”

He held his head up while she gave him a drink. “Like I’ve been shot.”

“The ball needs to come out. It’ll make you very ill if it does not.”

He rested his head on the pillow and let out a long breath. “Have you experience with such a surgery?”

“I saw it done once.” Gran had removed a musket ball from a man’s knee, but he’d caught the fever all the same and died a month later. Alice bit her lip. No use telling Quinn his chances for survival were grim.

The blanket slipped lower as he traced his fingers around the wound. “Then you’ll have to dig it out.”

“Me?”

“Aye.”

“My grandmother would do better. She’s very skilled with the healing arts.”

Quinn’s gaze swept across the cottage. “I haven’t seen her.”

Alice offered him another sip. “I thought she would have come home by now.”

“Are you worried?”

“Aye. She’s been acting strangely as of late. I’m afraid she’s going senile.”

He licked the water from his cracked lips, his eyes losing focus for a moment. “In that case, I’d rather have you perform the deed. Then once I’m on my feet, we’ll set out to find her.”

“We?”

“Mm.” He rubbed his arm right below the wound. “I’d reckon you’d want to go, would you not?”

“A-aye,” Alice replied, none too convinced. She’d brought a Campbell into her home and now he was talking about taking her to search for Gran? Things were growing stranger by the moment.

“I’ll fetch you something to help with the pain,” she said, heading for the shed where Gran kept her medicine bundle and hung the herbs to dry. Unfortunately, the dear woman had never seen fit to record any of her remedies with quill and parchment.

Alice found the mortar and pestle and put it on the table while examining the stoppered pots. Let’s see…valerian, willow bark, a pinch of opium… She chewed her lip as she looked at the vial of nightshade. Only a few days past she had thought to poison the man with it and now she was trying to save his life.

With a trembling hand, she pulled off the stopper and sprinkled in a tiny bit of the finely ground powder—any more and her remedy might be his undoing. Using the mortar, she mixed the tincture and then added a dram of whisky. Then she poured the lot into a cup and stirred it with her dagger for good measure. Alice had no idea why, but Gran always used her dagger to mix the tincture before she performed surgery, and now was no time to veer away from any matter of course.

Back inside the cottage, His Lordship gave the concoction a dubious look. “What’s in it?”

“Whisky…mayhap a few pinches of this and that.”

Scrunching his nose, he took the cup and held it aloft.

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