“What are you talking about? We’re both adults. Why can’t we do whatever the hell we want to if we both agree to it?”
“I’ll no’ listen to yer swearing and carryings on. If I say we are done wi’ it, we are done wi’ it. Now move out of my way.”
She merely glared at him and folded her arms. “You’re scared aren’t you? You were actually feeling something there and it scared you, didn’t it?”
Duncan decided to ignore her. She’d live longer if he did. He bent to lift the trunk. With a groan he hoisted the unwieldy thing and began a labored walk to the stairs. He prayed he did not disgrace himself by tripping on them.
She walked behind him. “Why are you doing this?”
He had no breath to answer.
After several more strong opinions regarding his stubbornness, she ran past him and called out instructions, guiding him up the warped stairs and around the rotted boards. She then held the door for him as he maneuvered himself and the trunk inside. He lowered the thing beside the base of the ladder in a dust-raising thud.
“Couldn’t you have just, you know, blinked it in here?”
He straightened and looked at her. “Aye,” he said, gathering his breath.
“Then why—”
“Because I have only thirty-one mortal days a year and I wanted to use my God-given strength where I could.” He gave her a pointed look, but as usual, she did not heed his warning.
“Then you are mortal?”
“As much as a soul in purgatory can be.”
“Purgatory? Why? Penance for Mairi’s death? Surely you don’t bear the guilt of her choice.”
“It is not I who makes the choice of purgatory, but Them who do. I merely exist in it, to feel guilt or no’.”
“Them? Who are They?”
“They control the passage of souls.” He sighed, not sure if this was a wise discussion. But her curiosity was fired up. He could see it in her eyes and he knew not if he was strong enough to deny her the knowledge she sought. Nor was he certain he could deny himself the comfort her presence and her conversation were affording him.
“Is that it then? You’re stuck in purgatory for all eternity because They say so?”
“Until I learn the lessons They deem necessary, aye, that is the way of it.”
“What lessons?”
Duncan rubbed a hand over his face. “I do not wish to discuss this wi’ you.”
“I didn’t wish to have you invade my cabin or my life either, but you’re here and I don’t seem to have any choice in the matter. You say your past is mixed up with one of my ancestors. Doesn’t that give me some right to understand why you’re here?”
“Read the journals. Perhaps Lachlan explains it.”
“Maybe he does. But if so, that will likely be the perspective of my side of the family. Mairi’s not wandering the hillsides of North Carolina as a ghost. You are. I’d like to hear it from you.”
“And I’d like to be left alone.”
She stepped closer to him. “Then you should have left me alone. But you didn’t. So it’s too late—you involved me. So deal with it.”
“Don’ step too close to me, Maggie,” he warned softly. “Or we’ll be involved, as you say, in every way a man and woman can be. I gave ye a warnin’ as much for yer own good as fer mine. I ask you to leave me be before we both take steps better not taken.”
“Speak for yourself,” she said.
“Now who’s bein’ stubborn and unwise?” he asked, tamping down the sudden urge to smile. Bluidy hell, but she riled him up in ways he did not understand.
She looked up at him then, her eyes no longer filled with anger and righteousness. There was doubt and fear behind all that soft blue. He wanted to think her a pretender as her ancestors had been, using their arsenal of feminine wiles to urge a man to do as they bid.
He was having a hard time ascribing that character to Maggie. He released a short sigh. Perhaps he’d learnt more over the centuries than he’d been aware of if this chit could simply walk in here and move him in these strange ways. Whatever the cause, he could not have looked away from her at this moment even had someone swung a claymore at his head. Daft he was. Daft and soft.
“My life as I know it is gone,” she said quietly. “I had to leave my job, my home, and all my possessions. Everything I worked for is gone. I can’t call or write to anyone. I’m a virtual prisoner here. Very much like you. You have lessons to learn here. So do I. I have to learn how to survive. I have to learn how to get myself out of this mess I’m in. I have to find a way to keep the man I once thought I loved from killing me.”
A thread of steel entered her expression and she straightened a bit. “You’re right. I guess I was too eager to find a diversion from my very real problems. The last thing I need to do is get caught up with you.” She tried a smile and a laugh, but both wobbled on a sudden gulp of air. “I mean, I don’t even believe in ghosts.”
He realized that bit of steel he’d spied in her was more thin shield than the thick walls protecting a fortress. He also realized that his own shield was thinning where she was concerned. He wanted to rail at the deities for finally conjuring so perfect a teacher. He could not tear his eyes away from hers. More proof of his quick descent after three hundred years of solid resistance.
What demon was this They had sent him? Bluidy hell. The deities be damned, but reach out he did. He held her chin with the tips of two fingers, his attention drawn by the sight of his scarred hands so near to something as perfect and soft as her skin.
“I’ll make you a compromise,” he said. “The first a MacKinnon has ever willingly made with a Claren.”
Her expression turned wary. He smiled. “Tell me yer story and I’ll see what I can do to help ye leave this place.” And me, he thought, not liking the instant pang of regret that followed. “Then we can both have what we want, you your life back and me my peace, such as it is. And if yer still interested when we’re done, I’ll tell you the story of Duncan MacKinnon before you go.”
She didn’t say anything for the longest time, but the fear receded a bit from her eyes and she finally lifted her chin away from his touch. He curled his fingers back by his side, rubbing the tips against his palms as if he could rub away the feel of her. It only seemed to burnish the softness deeper into his skin.
“I don’t know what you could do to help. But no matter what happens, I will hold you to your end of the bargain,” she warned. “I might agree that we shouldn’t get any more involved than we have, but I doubt I’ll ever meet up with another ghost again in my life, so you get elected to satisfy my sudden curiosity about the afterlife.”
“So is that all I am? A curiosity?” Why he goaded he had no notion. “Yer a smart and bonnie lass, Maggie. You make me wonder how it is you were foolish enough tae have a man huntin’ you down, wantin’ tae kill you.”
Her eyes flashed and that shadow of vulnerability mercifully disappeared. “I thought we were sharing our lives together. He thought I belonged to him. He didn’t understand that loyalty and devotion aren’t earned by threats and commands.”
Duncan’s heart stilled. Did she know how close she had come to pricking his own shamed heart?
“All I wanted was out. He wouldn’t accept that.”
“To the point of death?” he asked, even as his own heart taunted him with the same question. Didn’t you chase your betrothed to her own death and yours because you couldn’t accept her refusal of you? That was different! he wanted to roar. Mairi’s refusal of him hadn’t just spurned him as a man, it had condemned an entire clan to their deaths!
“He’s a vice president in charge of international investments for one of the largest banks in Manhattan. I’m a stockbroker, or was anyway. We were very compatible and though he wasn’t my dream man, he was certainly closer than anyone else I’d dated. He was a bit on the domineering side, but I figured I could handle that. I’m thirty, it was time, we both wanted it, so I agreed to marry him.
“As soon as the r
ing was on my finger, his behavior changed. He became annoyingly possessive. We argued constantly and eventually I realized, as much as it hurt me, that the man I’d chosen to marry wasn’t going to change, and that, as his wife, he would only get worse. So I broke it off with him.”
“How di’ ye leave him? Di’ ye sneak off in the middle o’ the night or di’ ye confront him wi’ how ye felt?”
She shot him a sharp look. “I didn’t sneak off, not the first time anyway, though in retrospect that might have been the wiser move. He knew I wasn’t happy, so I told him my feelings had changed and that I couldn’t marry him.”
“And his reaction?”
“He was furious and refused to accept it.”
Duncan swallowed his retort and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, suddenly wanting to pull at the already loose laces around his throat.
“Here I thought I’d finally met a true gentleman and he was really a barbarian in a designer suit. Maybe there was some aura of danger that initially attracted me. But after the episode in the stairwell of my condo, I know there is absolutely nothing remotely romantic about danger, restrained or otherwise.”
Duncan came to full attention. “What incident? Wha’ di’ the bluidy bastard do to ye?”
She appeared startled by his vehemence. No more startled than he was himself, to be sure.
“He’d been hounding me day and night, threatening me. I didn’t really think he’d do anything, but one night he was waiting for me behind the door to the stairs of my building. He pulled me in the stairwell and shoved me around a bit. When I got angry and told him to lay off before I started screaming, he grabbed me by the throat and shoved me up against the railing. I’m fifteen stories up, so it was a long drop. He bent me backward and laughed in my face. He was choking me and I honestly had no idea if he was going to push me over.” She rubbed one hand along her arm and wrapped the other protectively around her throat. “I had never been so terrified. I think that scared me the most. That this man I’d once made love to could—and would—terrify me.”
Duncan stared at the fear in her eyes and a rage filled him. He wanted nothing more than to storm from the cabin and track down the cowardly whoreson himself so he could personally choke the life from his heart and lungs. He was already turning toward the door when two thoughts stilled him. First, he could not leave the mountain. Such was his lot in purgatory.
But it was the second reason that had him turning toward the dying fire. Here he was wanting to kill a man for behaving the barbarian to this bonnie lass, this bonnie Claren lass! A more brutal irony he’d yet to face in his three hundred years of this hellish existence.
He might not have ever laid his hands on Mairi’s throat or struck at her in anger, but he had been more barbarian than gentleman to her throughout their ill-fated betrothal. He had never once given serious thought to any of her protests, thinking only of his clan. Her wants and needs mattered naught.
“He let me go just before I blacked out,” Maggie said. “He warned me that he’d have me back or kill me trying.”
Duncan felt his skin grow hot and his chest grow tight. The ancient scene flashed fully before him. He watched the snowflakes coming down as he grabbed Mairi, wrapping her frail form in blankets, so intent on leaving the cabin that day the ghost of Argyll himself could not have stopped him. He listened yet again as Mairi flayed him with her sharp tongue, chiding this ultimate stupidity, and him telling her he’d made it through far worse. A little snow was not going to stop them from making the shore and the ship that awaited them. The snow fell harder. Mairi’s health, already worn from a sickness she’d caught during the long trek over the sea, failed more rapidly than he could believe. The snow turned into a blizzard. He huddled them under a bush as any progress became impossible. Bundled her closer, wrapping them both in tartan and blanket, even though they both knew warding off the freezing temperatures would quickly become a losing battle.
Her accusing eyes stared into his before she finally closed them in what became her eternal sleep.
“I immediately went for a restraining order,” Maggie was saying. “I hoped he’d decide I wasn’t worth the effort at that point and leave me alone.”
“He wouldna have,” Duncan said hoarsely. He continued to stare into the fire, watching the wood turn to ash.
“It’s not like we were the love match of the century.”
Duncan faced her. He reached out before he could stop himself and stroked his hand down the length of her tangled hair, his touch as gentle as he could make it. His fingers trembled. “There is no effort too great when honor is at stake, lass. However misguided that honor might be.”
“So I’m to die because his ego is wounded?”
The weight of his shame threatened to crush him. “You wouldna be the first, lass.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
Duncan sighed and released her. He turned back to the fire. “No, it doesna make it right. I, of all people, am beginning to understand the truth of that.”
SIX
When the book hit her face for the fifth time, Maggie finally agreed to call it a night. She’d barely made a dent in Lachlan’s volumes, but she was already enraptured by the rich, detailed way he related his family history.
Her family history.
Maggie was sorely tempted to sit up and peer over the loft railing to see what Duncan was doing. Still brooding? After their earlier discussion, he’d descended into one of his blacker moods, helping her lift a small stack of the journals up to the loft before retreating in silence to stand and poke about in the fire.
He’d said nothing more about her problems with Judd and she’d decided not to press him on the matter. If she’d thought him cold and unapproachable before, the stony countenance he currently sported made his earlier moods seem festive by comparison.
She’d planned to talk to him when she came down to rummage for dinner, but she’d been so caught up in the journals, she hadn’t even noticed the sun going down. Now her eyes were tired and her stomach rumbling. She raised her eyebrows when she noted that the nightstand lamp had lit itself at some point during her immersion in the past.
She carefully marked her place in the book and slid her legs over the bed, indulging in a long stretch. So far her reading had barely taken her as far back as the turn of the current century. She’d been disappointed to discover that the first journal began with her grandfather, whom she now assumed was one of Lachlan’s many brothers, so there was no mention of her father. From what she gathered, Lachlan had been doing more than tracing his family history and recording familial anecdotes. It seemed as if he were on a hunt of some kind, a quest almost. To prove what, however, she had no idea. But the lives of the Claren clan were so vividly and colorfully drawn, she had all but forgotten her curiosity about Duncan’s life … and that of his betrothed.
She recalled with sudden clarity how remote and haunted his expression had become as she’d gone on about her past with Judd. She crept to the edge of the loft and spied down on the cabin.
Empty.
“Damn,” she muttered. She hadn’t realized how badly she’d wanted him to be there. Then her gaze lit on the plate sitting on the trestle table. A napkin covered it and an apple sat beside it. Dinner? À la Duncan?
She smiled dryly as she scrambled down the ladder. The apple was probably poisoned. She hadn’t even heard him moving about down here, her attention so caught up in her reading. There were still beads of water on the freshly washed apple and the ham and cheese sandwich beneath the napkin was soft and fresh, the lettuce still crisp. She devoured the meal quickly, wondering where Duncan had gone off to this time.
The front door suddenly burst open. Duncan entered the cabin with a fresh armload of split wood.
Maggie leaped off the bench. “You scared me half to death.”
“Your nose has been buried so deep, I didna think a bellowing elk would rouse you.”
“There are no elk in North Carolin
a.” Silence. Still grumpy, she mused. “Thank you for the meal. That was thoughtful of you.” Her appreciation only seemed to darken his mood further. He dumped the lumber in a small stack on the stone hearth and proceeded to add fuel to the low fire.
“Is that the whole of your existence when you’re on earth?” she asked, deliberately prodding him. Even a blast of anger was better than this dark silence. “If you’re not poking at it and feeding it, you’re out chopping wood for it. You’re the only man I know who can turn fire-tending into a full time job.”
His back was still when he spoke. “Wha’ I do is no’ any business o’ yours.”
She changed tactics. “Where do you go when you pop out of here? I mean, when you’re not chopping wood.”
He surprised her by answering. “I canna ‘blink’ out of here, as you say. For this one month each year, I am relegated to this mountain and this mountain only.”
“But you do blink,” she persisted. “I mean, you popped out of here when I first came into the house, taking the furniture with you. Which made me think I’d gone crazy, by the way. And you did it again when you tried to run me through with the poker. How do you do that?”
He let loose with a long suffering sigh. Maggie hid a smile, just in case he could see things without actually looking at them. And that was another question she wanted the answer to. Preferably before she got ready for bed.
“I can move my spirit out of my body if I choose, but only to land with it somewhere else on this godforsaken hill. I canna go back to the spirit world. No’ that this is any better or worse.” He poked a bit viciously at the log, creating a shower of sparks and ash. “Although you don’t always feel so damned cold in purgatory. Ye don’t feel anything.”
“You’re cold? This place is like an oven.” Maggie regarded him for a moment, not liking the softening she felt in her heart. “Is that why you maintain the fire so fiercely, Duncan? You’re always cold when you’re on earth?”
“I’ve lived in colder climes than this, lass, wi’ no fire to warm my hide, nor clothes to cover my back.”
The Legend Mackinnon Page 5