by Lynn Kurland
As was Megan de Piaget, apparently. Iolanthe smiled weakly and followed along, docile as a lamb.
The saints preserve her.
Chapter 21
A week later, Thomas sat in a glass-walled boardroom and stared out over the Manhattan skyline. He'd stopped listening an hour ago to the threats and counter-threats being swatted from one side of the table to the other like tennis balls. It wasn't that he didn't stand to make a great deal of money in the takeover. As chairman of the board, he would take home a very comfortable severance package. And it wasn't as if he was worried about his employees either. He'd already offered them the services of a professional headhunter to find them other comparable work if they so chose—at his expense. It wasn't even that someone had been sly enough to arrange things so selling was more attractive than being driven out of business by another larger firm.
It was that the firm doing the driving belonged to Arthur Davidson.
Tiffany's father.
Thomas pulled his gaze away from the afternoon sunlight glinting off buildings and looked at his erstwhile future father-in-law. The man was a shark and apparently had no compunction about backing Thomas into a corner because of his daughter's whim. Thomas had no doubt Tiffany was behind it. She'd already left a dozen messages at his hotel over the last week. He didn't suppose she was physically stalking him yet, but that couldn't be far behind.
Thomas began to look for an excuse to get out of there. What he needed was to call the inn and see how Iolanthe was doing. Maybe she was just hanging out in the sitting room and Mrs. Pruitt could hold the phone for her so they could talk. He'd known he would miss her, but he hadn't expected it to be this gut-wrenching.
The other surprising thing was how he now felt about the city. He'd always loved Manhattan. He'd loved the smell of the place, the sights, the sounds. But now it was just noise and dirt. He had a surprising longing for driving on the wrong side of the road, toast that was cold for breakfast, and drinks that didn't freeze your throat on the way down.
And he longed for Iolanthe. He wanted to tell her of the bloody siege going on in the boardroom, of the fools who fought on either side, of their stratagem that made his head ache. He wanted to sit in her room with her and listen to something on the stereo, sit in her garden and watch her flowers bloom, sit with her in the sitting room of the inn and enjoy the fire.
He looked at his attorney and wondered if making a break for the john would fly. It wasn't as if Jake couldn't handle the negotiations on his own. Thomas prized his attorney for his smooth-as-silk exterior, which hid a ruthlessness that had left Thomas awestruck the first time Jake had displayed it. Duncan MacLeod would have found the man very much to his liking.
Davidson's henchman excused himself, and Thomas saw his chance. He followed the man out, ready to tail him to the bathroom and then maybe down to the street for a snack.
Apparently, a trip to the can was a ruse. Thomas followed the man right into his office. Well, now he was there, there was no sense in not using the phone. The man walked around his desk and sat down, then looked up in surprise.
"Hey," he said crossly, "I came in here for some peace and quiet."
Thomas looked at the man's nameplate. He'd been thinking of him as "the snake" from the beginning; maybe it was time to start using his proper name. "Well, Mr. Anthony DiSalvio, you'll have it just as soon as I use your phone."
"Why?" DiSalvio asked with a smirk. "Calling in reinforcements?"
Thomas had developed a healthy dislike for the man over three days of meetings, and that comment only strengthened it.
"Calling home," Thomas said shortly.
"Sure you are."
"To Scotland. And don't bother billing me for it."
"We'll get it out of you one way or another." DiSalvio leaned back in his chair and shook his head. "What is it with that place, anyway? I know more people who've migrated there."
"Less stress."
"More sheep, more like," DiSalvio muttered as he shuffled papers on his desk. He looked up suddenly. "Know any MacLeods?"
Thomas paused in mid-dial. "What?"
"One of my old partners lives in England, but he's always going up to hang out in Scotland with a bunch of MacLeods. His sister married one."
"Did she?"
"The guy's name is James, I think." DiSalvio shook his head. "Crazy bunch. They all fool around with swords like some medieval fairy group. You know, those light-steps that dress up in skirts."
"Plaids."
"Whatever."
Thomas put the phone down. "James, did you say?"
"That's the guy."
"How interesting."
"Naw, it's nuts. I keep trying to get Alex—he's the guy who used to work for me, and what a barracuda! He makes your guy look like a fifth-grade girl. Anyway, I keep trying to get Alex to come back and work for me, but he says he can't handle the city anymore." DiSalvio sighed heavily. "A waste of a good mind, but I can't do anything about it. I even took him out for dinner last night, him and that Amazon he's married to. You wouldn't believe the money I offered him—or the money I spent on dinner!"
Thomas was just sure he'd heard the man wrong. "You had dinner with him last night? He's here in New York?"
"Yeah," DiSalvio said, taking a toothpick to his teeth. Apparently he was still looking for stray bits of last night's meal. "He comes over once a year just to torture me."
"I'm sure that's his main reason," Thomas said dryly.
"You don't know Alex. And you wouldn't want to know his wife." He looked almost unsettled. "She's a looker, but I wouldn't want to meet her in a dark alley. She pulled a knife on me at dinner. She's another one of those reenactment wackos, though I'd sure like to see her in a pair of tights."
Thomas had the overwhelming desire to sit down. "They couldn't still be here."
"Oh, sure. They're over at the Plaza." He smiled proudly. "Alex can afford that and plenty more. He made a crapload of money while he was here—off saps like you, of course."
"Of course," Thomas said, wishing he had his own knife to brandish. "You couldn't get me the number, could you?"
DiSalvio picked up the phone. "Marj, get me Smith's number for the dead fish in here. Yeah, I'm doing him a favor, what's it to you?" He slammed down the phone. "Damned uppity Brooklyn women. Thinks she needs to run my life."
Marj, a very ancient and far-from-uppity-looking woman, entered the room shortly thereafter and shoved the number at DiSalvio.
"Don't be late for dinner," she snapped.
DiSalvio looked at Thomas sheepishly. "My ma. She's the only secretary I can seem to hold on to."
"Astonishing."
"Yeah, I think so, too." He shoved the paper at Thomas. "Here you go. Guess you sheep-lovers need to stick together."
Thomas's desire to grind Tony DiSalvio into the dust was tempered somewhat by the phone number he had in his hand. He had the same feeling of destiny he'd had when he'd first learned of his castle coming up on the auction block.
Alex Smith knew James MacLeod. James MacLeod's hobby apparently was fighting with swords.
Was that James MacLeod the same one Iolanthe couldn't seem to come up with a death date for?
Well, there was only one way to find out.
Thomas walked back to the conference room and leaned down to talk to his attorney.
"Get us out of this with as little damage as possible," he whispered.
Jake's jaw went slack. "But I thought you wanted them crushed."
Thomas considered, then nodded. "You're right. Stick it to them. But still get us out as quickly as possible." DiSalvio had bought himself that much leniency.
"You're the boss," Jake said doubtfully.
"Yeah."
"You're also crazy."
"You're right. Gotta go. Got things to do."
"More important than this?"
"Much."
The understatement of the year. Thomas straightened and tried not to leave the room at a dead run.
/> Two hours later, he was sitting in a very expensive sitting room of a suite at the Plaza, looking at two people he was almost certain possessed the key to his future.
Alexander Smith was your typically good-looking GQ poster boy, but the picture was spoiled by his dry wit and easygoing manner. Thomas would have thought Tony DiSalvio had been talking about the wrong lawyer if it hadn't been for the shrewdness in Alex's eyes. His wife, Margaret, was every bit as good-looking as Tony had advertised, but Thomas was hard-pressed to believe she would pull a knife on anyone. She was poised, lovely, and gracious.
And then she opened her mouth to speak.
Her accent was English, but she sounded like she'd learned English from Chaucer. Not that Thomas was an expert or anything, but he'd been bored one semester in school, and he'd taken a poetry class to try to channel some of his energy into something creative. It had turned out to be not poetry writing, but poetry reading, and three-quarters of the semester had been spent bouncing between Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales. He'd excelled, given the gift for languages he certainly hadn't acquired except through his gene pool, and could still read the text in its original language and keep most of the words straight in his head.
He wondered how Margaret Smith would have done at the same task.
Interesting.
"You said it was urgent," Alex said with a disarming smile. "So, spill it."
"My mother is a MacLeod," Thomas said, hoping to win a few brownie points.
"The saints preserve us, we're surrounded by them," Margaret muttered.
Alex smiled at her, then turned back to Thomas. "Then you're family. What do you need?"
"You won't believe this—"
"Ah, but we likely will," Margaret said.
Alex laughed. "She's right. We'll believe just about anything."
Thomas took a deep breath. "All right, this is the deal. A couple of years ago, I bought a castle."
"In Scotland?" Alex asked.
"On the border. But that's not the thing about it. I finally went over about a month ago to check it out." He paused and hoped they wouldn't think he'd lost his mind. Just how was it one went about telling complete strangers that one owned a castle full of ghosts? Well, maybe the direct approach was the best. He smiled weakly. "It's haunted."
Margaret sighed. "I'm unsurprised."
"The thing is," Thomas said, "it's not so much the fact that it's haunted. It's who it's haunted by."
"All right," Alex said, "I'm biting. Who's it haunted by?"
"By a woman who is the great-granddaughter of Jesse MacLeod, who had a father named James, who doesn't have a death date." He paused for effect. "Ring any bells?"
There was absolute silence in the room for several moments. Alex opened his mouth to speak, then apparently swallowed the wrong way because he began to choke. Margaret slapped him forcefully on the back until he held up his hand for her to stop.
"Great story," Alex wheezed. "Couldn't be more interested. Really."
"I understand your brother-in-law is named James MacLeod."
Alex seemed to be beyond the point of coherent speech. That alone was enough to convince Thomas he'd struck gold. He moved in for the killing blow.
"Is he a ghost?"
Alex seemed to have great difficulty swallowing. Margaret had practically beaten him to a pulp before he managed to tell her to stop between coughs. Margaret looked at Thomas.
"Jamie's no ghost," she said, sounding very sure about it.
"No," Alex managed. "He's definitely very alive."
Well, that was a dead end. So much for the theory of James being a ghost. Not that his being a ghost would have helped much anyway, but Thomas had held out a hope that somehow beyond reason and logic, James would have had some kind of help to offer him.
"If your brother-in-law's not a ghost," Thomas said slowly, "then what's the secret of his castle? Everyone at my place who knows anything says there's a secret associated with the keep."
Oddly enough, both Alex and Margaret had gone completely still.
Well, that was something.
"The secret isn't that he's a ghost?"
Alex and Margaret looked like two people who didn't dare look at each other for fear of what they would give away.
"I am family," Thomas reminded them.
They did exchange a glance at that. Then Alex looked at him.
"Why do you want to know?" he asked carefully.
"Do you know the secret?"
"I know lots of secrets," Alex said easily. "Why don't you tell me your problem, and I'll see if I have a secret to fix it."
"Fair enough," Thomas agreed. "This is the problem. I met the woman who haunts my keep, and we fell in love. I was thinking that maybe the secret of her ancestral keep—which, by the way, she won't tell me—might be something that would help us, well, survive." He came to an abrupt halt and realized how utterly stupid he sounded. What kind of secret was going to fix what needed to be fixed? He was mortal; she was not.
There was no fixing that.
"Forget it," he said, shaking his head. "I don't know why I even asked."
He sat there and looked out their window with its fabulous view and felt more discouraged than he had in his entire life. That feeling wouldn't last, of course. He would get back to England and get Iolanthe somewhere she couldn't escape, then they would talk. It would all work out.
But for now he was incredibly bummed, and he had every intention of wallowing in it.
"You know what would be handy," Thomas said.
"What?" Margaret asked gently.
"If I could stop it. Stop her death."
There was silence in the room for quite some time. Thomas watched the sun's reflection disappear from skyscraper windows. Dusk fell. Stars no doubt came out, but he couldn't see them from where he sat.
Alex cleared his throat. "It just so happens," he said slowly, "that we might be able to help you with that."
Thomas blinked. "You might? How?"
"It just so happens," Alex said, "that the secret of the keep is... time travel."
Thomas looked at him, blinked several times in silence, then laughed. He threw back his head and laughed long and hard. He looked at Margaret and Alex, expecting them to share the sickest joke he'd ever heard.
But they weren't laughing.
"You aren't kidding," Thomas said, his smile fading abruptly.
Margaret rubbed her hands together briskly. "Let us be about this business. No time to waste." She pinned Thomas to the spot with a piercing glance. "Do you know when she died?"
He tried to nod but found suddenly that his neck wasn't working very well.
She looked at Alex triumphantly. "He could go back before."
Alex shook his head. "If Jamie's theory of time-traveling is to be believed, her time in her century would have to be over. She'd have to be near death. As wonderful as I'm sure she would still be at the end of her life, I doubt Thomas would want to pull her forward when she was sixty-something."
"She was murdered," Thomas managed. "She was only twenty-four at the time."
"Perfect!" Margaret exclaimed. "He can go back before she was murdered and rescue her."
Alex paused, then shook his head. "Even if he could—and I'm not saying that it would work, because you know how fickle those gates are—even if he could, who's to say he'd arrive at the right time? He could get there three years before her death, or twenty minutes afterwards."
Margaret frowned thoughtfully. "I suppose you have it aright, husband." She looked at Thomas. "Forgive me, my friend. I hadn't thought the problem through."
Thomas swallowed with difficulty. "Are you serious? About this time travel business?"
Alex sighed. "I'm going to trust you and hope that my trust isn't misplaced."
"It won't be."
Alex took a deep breath. "Well, this is the thing. It's a long story, but my sister wound up in fourteenth-century Scotland and in time married the current laird of the day, James MacLeod."
Thomas blinked but said nothing. All right, so he had a castle full of ghosts. If that was possible, maybe there were other things possible that he hadn't banked on before.
"They came forward, back to the twentieth century, thanks to a time gate in the forest next to the keep."
"Really," Thomas said evenly.
Alex smiled briefly. "Hard to swallow, I know. And believe me, I wouldn't believe it either, but you see, I've used the gate in the forest. And I've used the other gates scattered all over his land."
"The one to medieval England, for instance," Margaret added.
Thomas looked at her with wide eyes. "Then you're—"
"Margaret of Falconberg," she said.
Thomas could only gape at her.
"I was born in the Year of Our Lord's Grace 1165," she added with a smile.
Thomas didn't want to believe it, but he had a single, compelling reason to.
Iolanthe.
What if he could travel back in time before her death? And stop it?
Thomas sat back in his chair and simply considered for several moments.
And as he considered, he remembered vividly the way he'd felt as he'd climbed the stairs to that cursed guard tower—as if he'd been there before. But he'd known he hadn't.
Yet, what if he had?
"Think on this, husband," Margaret was saying. "Even if all goes well, and Thomas reaches the proper time, how will his lady recognize him? She knows him from now, not then."
Thomas stared at her in horror. "I never thought of that."
"A pity you couldn't go back in time and have some kind of predetermined sign," Margaret mused. "So that she'd remember you."
Alex laughed suddenly, leaned over, and kissed Margaret full on the mouth.
"You're brilliant!" he exclaimed.
She looked momentarily startled, then smiled sweetly. "Am I?"
"I read an article on memory once," Alex said enthusiastically. He focused that enthusiasm on Thomas. "The theory was, our brains are only using a fraction of what we're capable of using."
"I wonder, husband, if you're using less of yours than usual," Margaret said.
"I'm not. This piece said that there's no reason we can't remember the future." He shrugged happily. "Who knows, maybe that whole déjà vu thing is the future we've already done and we're just remembering it."