Specifically to Keltar men.
Facts that Chloe had known about Dageus prior to Gwen’s little visit: He was irresistibly seductive; he had a fantastic body—she’d seen it when he’d dropped his towel; he wore condoms for the “Extra-Large Man.”
And now—thank you Gwen MacKeltar—she knew that he was a man of both immense appetites and stamina, and had been known to spend, not a few hours, but days in bed with a woman. Oh, Gwen hadn’t actually come out and said those things, but she’d made her point clear enough in bits and pieces that she’d dropped.
Days in bed? She couldn’t even begin to imagine what that would be like.
Oh, yes, you can, a snide little voice poked, you dreamt about it a few nights ago, in shocking detail for a virgin.
Scowling, she pushed her curls out of her face and swung her legs over the side of the massive, antique bed piled with down ticks. Her toes dangled a foot above the floor and she had to hop to get out of it.
Shaking her head, she grabbed her clothes and headed for the shower. She didn’t really need to, having showered late last night, but this morning she suspected she might benefit from a cold one.
When she stepped out into the corridor a half an hour later, she stopped abruptly, bristling. She’d taken a chilly shower, forcing herself to think about the artifacts she might get to see, and what she’d like to explore first. It had taken her nearly the entire half an hour to get him off her mind, and now he was right back on it.
“What are you doing?” she asked grumpily, feeling that dratted, instant surge of attraction that demanded plaintively (and incessantly!), Would you just jump on him and to hell with the consequences? The man of her dreams—literally—was sitting on the floor, leaning against the door across the corridor from hers, his long legs outstretched, his arms folded over his chest. He wore black trousers and a charcoal crew-neck wool sweater stretched over his powerful torso, showcasing his perfect physique. He’d shaved, and the skin on his face looked smooth and soft as velvet. Coppery eyes met hers.
He rose, towering over her, his sheer masculinity making her feel small and feminine.
“I was waiting for you. Good morrow, lass. Did you have pleasant dreams?” he inquired silkily.
Chloe kept her expression bland. He looked immensely pleased with himself this morning, and there was no way she was letting him know she’d had even one nocturnal thought about him. “I can’t remember,” she said, blinking guilelessly. “In fact, I slept so deeply I don’t think I dreamt at all.”
“Indeed,” he murmured. When he moved forward, she nearly jumped out of her skin, but he simply reached behind her and pulled the door to her bedchamber shut.
Then backed her against it.
“Hey,” she snapped.
“I sought but to give you a good morrow kiss, lass. ’Tis a Scots custom.”
She craned her neck, scowling up at him, and gave him a look that said Yeah, right, nice try.
“A wee one. No tongue. I promise,” he said, his lips curving faintly.
“You never give up, do you?”
“I never will, sweet. Doona you know that by now?”
Oooh, that was beginning to take on shades of her dream. And he’d called her “sweet,” a little endearment. She clamped her mouth shut and shook her head.
He lifted his hand to her face and lightly traced his fingers down the curve of her cheek. A soft touch, nothing overtly seductive about it. The gentleness of it startled her, stilled her. He moved his hand from her face to her soft curls, threading them through his fingers.
“Have I told you, Chloe-lass, that you’re beautiful?” he said softly.
She narrowed her eyes. If he thought a generic compliment would buy him a kiss, he was sadly mistaken.
“Och, aye, lovely as can be.” He smudged her cheek with the back of his knuckles. “And without a trace of artifice. I sat in my cab and stared at you the day I first saw you. I watched other men looking at you and wished them blind. You bent back into the car to say something to your driver. You were wearing a black skirt and jacket with a sweater the color of heather, and your hair was falling into your eyes and you kept pushing it back. It was misting a bit, and the hose on your legs glistened with droplets of rain. You didn’t mind the rain, though. For a moment, you tipped your head back, turning your face up to it. It took my breath away.”
The caustic comment coiled on the tip of her tongue died.
He looked at her a long moment, then dropped his hands.
“Come, lass.” He offered her his hand. “Let’s fetch some breakfast, then I’d like to take you somewhere.”
Chloe struggled for composure. The man had a way of throwing her off-kilter like no one else she’d ever known. Just when she thought she knew him, he threw something unexpected at her. Where had that just come from? He remembered exactly what she’d been wearing the day they’d met, and it had been misting that morning. And she had briefly turned her face up into the mist; she’d always liked rain. She cleared her throat. “So when do I get to see the texts?” she hastily forced the conversation to less uncertain terrain.
“Soon. Very soon.”
Other men were watching you and I wished them blind. She shook her head, trying to scatter his words from her mind. Unable to determine what “face value” to place upon them. “Does your brother have other artifacts too?” she pressed brightly.
“Aye. You’ll see many things before the day is through.”
“Really? Like what?”
He smiled faintly at her eagerness and caught her hands in his. “Do you know how I know when you’re excited about something?”
Chloe shook her head.
“Your fingers start to curl, as if you’re imagining touching whatever it is you’re thinking about.”
She blushed. She hadn’t known she was so transparent.
“Och, lass, ’tis charming. Do you recall that I said I could show you a Scotland no other man ever could?”
She nodded.
“Well, this afternoon, lass,” he said with a strangely wry note in his voice, “I’ll be making good on that promise.”
Some distance from the castle in which Chloe and Dageus were currently breakfasting, a man leaned back against the side of a nondescript rental car, talking quietly on the phone.
“I haven’t had the opportunity to get close,” Trevor was telling Simon. “But it’s only a matter of time.”
“You were supposed to take care of her before they left London,” Simon’s voice was faint on the cell phone, yet still rang with implacable authority.
“I couldn’t get near her. The man is constantly on guard.”
“What makes you think you can get close on Keltar ground?”
“He’ll drop his guard eventually, if only for a few minutes. Just give me a few more days.”
“It’s too risky.”
“It’s too risky not to. He has an emotional bond with her. We need his ties gone. You said so yourself, Simon.”
“Forty-eight hours. Ring me every six. Then I want you out of there. I’m not willing to run the risk that one of our Order is taken alive. He must know nothing about the Prophecy.”
With a soft murmur of assent, Trevor hung up.
• 15 •
The day had been sunny and surprisingly temperate for March in the Highlands: mid-forties, a light breeze, the sky dotted by a few fat, fluffy white clouds.
It had been one of the most exhilarating days of Chloe’s life.
After breakfast, she, Dageus, Drustan, and Gwen had driven to the north, taking the winding roads to the top of a small mountain, above the colorful, bustling city of Alborath, where’d she’d met Dageus’s cousins, Christopher and Maggie MacKeltar, and their many children.
She’d spent the day with Gwen and Maggie, touring the second MacKeltar castle (this one quite a bit older than Gwen’s). She’d seen artifacts that Tom would have blithely committed felonies to acquire: ancient texts sealed in protective cases, weapons and armor from too ma
ny different centuries to count, rune stones scattered casually about the gardens. She’d toured the portrait gallery lining the great hall, a painted history of centuries of the MacKeltar clan—what a wonder to know such roots! She’d brushed her fingertips to tapestries that should be in museums, furniture that belonged under much tighter security than she’d been able to see on the grounds. Though she’d inquired repeatedly and rather anxiously about their anti-theft system (which seemed criminally nonexistent), she’d gotten nothing but reassuring smiles, forcing her to conclude that none of the Keltars bothered to lock things up.
The castle itself was an artifact, meticulously preserved and protected from time’s gentle erosion. She’d wandered through the day in a dreamy kind of stupefaction.
Now she stood on the front steps of the castle with Gwen in the rosy, early evening light. The sun was resting on the horizon and tendrils of mist were wisping up from the ground. She could see for miles from her perch on the wide stone stairs, past a sparkling many-tiered fountain, out over the valley where the lights of Alborath were nudging back the encroaching twilight. She could imagine how glorious the Highlands would be in spring, or better yet, the full bloom of late summer. She wondered if she might find some way to still be there by then. Maybe after her month with Dageus, she mused, she would stay in Scotland, indefinitely.
Her gaze skimmed the front lawn, coming to rest on the gorgeous, dark man who’d turned her world so completely upside down in just under a week. He was standing, some distance from the castle, inside a circle of massive, ancient stones, talking with Drustan. Gwen had told her the brothers hadn’t seen each other in years, though she’d offered no explanation for their estrangement. Inquisitive as Chloe usually was, for a change, she’d resisted prying. It just hadn’t seemed right.
“It’s so beautiful here,” she said, sighing wistfully. To live here, to belong in such a place. The rowdy enthusiasm of Maggie and Christopher’s six children, from teens down to tots, was unlike anything Chloe had ever experienced. The castle was stuffed to overflowing with family and roots, the air rang with the sounds of children playing and occasional bickering. As an only child, raised by an elderly grandparent, Chloe had never seen anything like it before.
“That it is,” Gwen agreed. “They call those stones the Ban Drochaid,” she told Chloe, gesturing at the circle. “It means ‘the white bridge.’”
“‘The white bridge,’” Chloe echoed. “That’s an odd name for a group of stones.”
Gwen shrugged, a mysterious smile playing about her lips. “There are lots of legends in Scotland about such stones.” She paused. “Some people say they’re portals to another time.”
“I read a romance novel like that once.”
“You read romance novels?” Gwen exclaimed, delighted.
The next few moments were filled with a hasty comparison of favorite titles, female bonding, and recommendations.
“I knew I liked you.” Gwen beamed. “When you were talking earlier about the history of all those artifacts, I was afraid you might be the stuffy literary type. Nothing against literary novels,” she added hastily, “but if I want to get all existential and depressed, I’ll pick a fight with my husband or watch CNN.” She was silent a moment, her hand resting lightly on her rounded belly. “Scotland isn’t like any other country in the world, Chloe. You can almost feel the magic in the air, can’t you?”
Chloe cocked her head and studied the towering megaliths. The stones were thousands of years old and their purpose had long been heatedly debated by scholars, archeoastronomers, anthropologists, even mathematicians. They were a mystery modern man had never been able to unravel.
And yes, she did feel a brush of magic about them, a sense of ancient secrets, and was struck suddenly by how right Dageus looked standing in the middle of them. Like a primitive sorcerer, wild and forbidding, a keeper of secrets, arcane and profane. She rolled her eyes at her absurd fancy.
“What is he doing, Gwen?” she asked, squinting.
Gwen shrugged but didn’t reply.
It looked as if he was writing something on the inner face of each stone. There were thirteen, towering around a center slab that was fashioned of two stone supports, and one large flat stone placed atop it in the shape of a squat dolmen.
As Chloe watched, Dageus moved to the next stone, his hand moving with brisk surety across its inner face. He was writing on it, she realized. How odd. She narrowed her eyes. God, the man was beautiful. He’d changed after breakfast. Soft, faded jeans hugged his powerful thighs and muscled butt. A thick wool sweater and hiking boots completed his rugged outdoorsman look. His hair fell in a single braid to his waist.
I’m going to keep you forever, her dream Dageus had said.
You’ve got it bad, Zanders, she reluctantly acknowledged with a little sigh.
“You have feelings for him,” Gwen murmured, jarring her.
Chloe paled. “Is it that obvious?”
“To someone who knows what to look for. I’ve never seen him look at a woman the way he looks at you, Chloe.”
“If he looks at me any differently than others, it’s only because most women fall into bed with him the minute they meet him,” Chloe said, puffing a curly strand of hair from her face. “I’m just the one who got away.” So far, was the dry thought accompanying that.
“Yes, and that’s all they ever do.”
That got her attention. “Isn’t that all he wants?”
“No. But most women never get past that beautiful face and body, his strength and his reserve. They never, never trust him with their hearts.”
Chloe pulled her long hair back, twisting it into a loose knot, and held her silence, hoping Gwen might continue to volunteer information. She was in no hurry to admit to her pathetic romanticizing, which had only worsened throughout the day. All day long she’d been treated to glimpses of the incredible relationship between Gwen and her husband. She’d watched, with shameless longing, the way Drustan treated his wife. They were so unabashedly in love with each other.
Because he looked so much like Dageus, comparisons had been inevitable. Drustan had popped up oodles of times, toting a light jacket for Gwen, or a cup of tea, or an inquiry if her back ached, if she needed a rub, if she needed to rest, if she’d like him to leap into the sky and pull down the blasted sun.
Making Chloe think ridiculous thoughts about his brother.
Oh, yes, she had feelings. Treacherous, deceitful little feelings.
“Chloe, Dageus doesn’t look for love from a woman, because he’s never been given any reason to.”
Chloe’s eyes widened and she shook her head disbelievingly. “That’s impossible, Gwen. A man like him—”
“Terrifies most women. So they take what he offers, but they find some other man to love. A safer man. A man they feel more in control with. Is he doing the same thing to you? I thought you were smarter than that.”
Chloe jerked, wondering how the conversation had gotten so personal so fast.
But Gwen wasn’t done yet. “Sometimes—and trust me, I know this from personal experience—a girl has to take a leap of faith. If you don’t try, you’ll never know what might have been. Is that how you want to live?”
Chloe fumbled for a reply, but came up empty-handed, because deep inside her that nagging voice that had so persistently begun asking recently “is this all there is?” was nodding sagely, agreeing with Gwen’s words.
Naught risked, naught gained, Grandda had always said.
When had she forgotten that? Chloe wondered, staring at the ancient stones. When she was nineteen, and Grandda died, leaving her alone in the world?
As she stood there, atop the MacKeltar’s mountain in the falling twilight, Chloe was suddenly back in Kansas again, in the silent cemetery, after all their friends had gone, weeping at the foot of his grave. Uncertain, poised on the brink of adulthood, with no one to help her make decisions and choose her way. She’d suffered the comforting delusion that he would live foreve
r, not die at a mere seventy-three from a stroke. She’d gone away to college, never imagining that he wouldn’t always be there, at home, puttering around his garden, waiting for her.
The phone call came during finals week her sophomore year. She’d just talked to him on the phone a few days before. One day he was there, the next day he was gone. She hadn’t even gotten to say good-bye. Same as her parents. Couldn’t anyone die a slow death from some disease, she’d felt like wailing (painlessly, of course, she’d not wish a painful death on anyone), and give her a damned sense of closure? Did they have to just go away? One moment, smiling and alive, the next, still and silent and forever lost. There were so many things she hadn’t gotten to say to him before he left. He’d seemed so fragile in his coffin; her robust, temperamental Scot, who’d always seemed invincible to her.
Was that when she’d begun playing things safe? Because she’d felt like a turtle without a shell, fragile and exposed, unwilling to love and lose again? Oh, she’d not decided such a thing consciously, but she’d gone back to college and buried herself in a double major, then a master’s. Without even thinking, she’d kept herself too busy to get involved.
She blinked. The grief was still raw, as if she’d never faced it, only pushed it into a dark corner, blocking it. It occurred to her that maybe a person couldn’t shut out one emotion, such as grief, without losing touch with all of them. By shutting out pain, refusing to face it, had she missed innumerable chances to love?
Chloe glanced at Gwen searchingly. “It sounds like you’re encouraging me.”
“I am. He’s going to ask something of you. The mere fact that he’s going to ask it speaks more than any words could, of how he feels about you.”
“What is he going to ask me?”
“You’ll know soon enough.” Gwen paused and sighed heavily, as if she were having a heated internal debate with herself. Then she said, “Chloe, Drustan and Dageus come from a world that’s hard for girls like us to understand. A world that—though it may initially seem impossible—is firmly grounded in reality. Just because science can’t explain something, doesn’t make it any less real. I’m a scientist and I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen things that defy my understanding of physics. They’re good men. The best. Keep an open mind and heart, because I can tell you one thing for sure: when these Keltars love, they love completely and forever.”
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