A Highlander for Christmas

by Christina Skye

  “The wire slipped.” She shrugged. “It happens.”

  “Damn it, Maggie—”

  “It’s nothing. Sometimes I get burned; sometimes I get cut. It’s hardly earth-shaking.”

  He closed his eyes, fighting a primal need to possess and protect her. “Be more careful, Maggie.”

  “I can’t. Honesty always has a price. I’m honest when I work. And … honest right now.”

  But Jared was experienced enough to know exactly what was happening. She was becoming an obsession, and that could hurt them both badly.

  Or even get them killed.

  Her hand opened on his. He felt her courage, mixed with her uncertainty. She was a singular woman who would fill the lonely corners of a man’s heart forever, if he was wise enough to let her.

  She gave a crooked smile. “I could use a bit of help here, Commander. I’m not in the habit of propositioning stoic men. Especially when they look as if I’ve shocked and disgusted them.”

  “Neither shocked nor disgusted.” Already his body was hardening, all too aware of how close she stood and how little she wore beneath that sheer slide of silk. He closed his eyes. “But I can’t. We can’t, Maggie.”

  “Is that truly what you want, Jared?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I want. It never has. There is duty. There is honor and repaying old debts. Nothing else counts in the end.”

  An end that was far too close. An end that Jared had seen with burning clarity.

  He turned, putting several inches between them. It was the only way he could clear his head and remember the danger around them. “You need to be careful. And you also need to rest. The other things … can wait.”

  Her shoulders stiffened. “Sorry I brought it up. You’re obviously busy and I’m tired. So that’s that.” She leaned over, scooping Max from Jared’s arms. “Come on, honey.” She nuzzled the puppy, who barked and buried his nose deep in the soft folds of her sweater.

  Exactly where Jared wanted to be.

  Then Maggie turned slowly. Color swirled through her cheeks. “You know what? I’m not very experienced. I’ve never had much time for relationships. But there’s one thing I do know, Jared. You’re dead wrong about us. We would make something unforgettable together.”

  Jared wanted to explain, to soften the rejection. But Maggie was already gone, the scent of her perfume lingering like a forgotten summer afternoon.

  Killing him with slow, perfect precision and with the absolute certainty that she was right.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Three hours later the woods around the abbey lay silent. Nothing stirred at the Witch’s Pool or the old gatehouse. Only the moat moved, restless and silver in the moonlight.

  Jared paused in his nighttime security round, listening to the hundred normal sounds of an old house settling. Breathing, Nicholas called it. But the complex noises could be unnerving if you weren’t used to them.

  The wind sighed over the moat and shook the old casement windows Somewhere a wall creaked.

  Jared climbed the stairs, studying the somber portraits along the shadowed wall. He could almost feel their eyes upon him—especially that haughty-faced aristocrat in the Long Gallery.

  Adrian Draycott was the man’s name. According to Nicholas, the eighth viscount Draycott had not been a man to trifle with. The hardy adventurer had fought off vicious dakhoits in the Punjab while he’d made some exceedingly clever investments in the East. With the family fortunes secure, he’d wandered wherever his heart chose: Sardinia, Crete, even to the Americas. But some old sadness had clung to him, and he’d finally returned to the abbey he’d loved so well. There he had died, leaving behind even more rumors and legends, along with the legacy of his beloved roses, which still graced wall and hedge.

  There was more to the story, but Nicholas would never reveal it. Now as Jared stood in the restless silence of night, he felt the lure of those strange legends. In this ancient house he could well believe that ghosts might walk.

  Beyond a pair of heavy tapestries, he saw shadows gather. Behind that door Maggie lay sleeping.

  His hand rose to grip the polished frame as he felt a desperate urge to see that she was safe. It was a perfect reason to push open the door, check the locked windows and scan the room

  Only her safety drew him.

  A lie.

  Jared knew well that opening her door would be an invasion of her sleep and privacy. It was late and he was in no fit mood for company

  But beneath all his cool logic moved a greater force. The door latch twisted in his hands.

  He felt a sudden desperation to see her in the moonlight with her hair fanned out over the pillow.

  To watch her sleep; to see her dream. Just once.

  The door opened. His feet made no sound on the thick carpet.

  Moonlight slanted through the windows and dusted the bed where she slept, one hand tugging at the sheets. A fine chain glinted at her wrist, links of beaten silver—her own work, no doubt.

  In that endless moment while the house slept around him, Jared felt the orbit of his life pitch sharply. Something fell away from him as he watched her chest rise and fall slowly, the image of all he had ever wanted and never hoped to find.

  Honesty he had never lacked. Wit, perhaps. Sanity even. But never honesty, despite her accusation that afternoon. He knew what lay before them in that moment when arguments were put behind him. He knew all the danger that moment would hold.

  But suddenly it meant nothing as he saw Maggie’s dreaming face before him, calm and beautiful beyond his imagining.

  The curtains lifted in a faint breeze.

  Odd, Jared thought. The windows were sealed and every door was locked. There was no reason for the gauzy panels to float out beside the French doors to her balcony

  Frowning, he padded to the far wall. All the bolts were thrown, and every window was closed tight. The movement was probably from some tiny crack in the ceiling or a chip in one of the leaded glass panels. There had to be dozens of places where air could creep inside an ancient house like this.

  Moonlight touched his hand from the window. Jared almost felt its cold weight on his skin. For an instant the room spun and the details changed. Silk walls turned to stone. Plaster ceilings merged to solid oak beams.

  Impossible.

  Yet Jared knew only too well that nothing was impossible, that normal logic and everyday reality could twist in cruel distortions. His own visions had proved that since his return from Thailand.

  He turned away, one hand to his brow. What he needed was a hot shower and a good night’s sleep. And he needed to forget the woman on the bed, the woman whose beauty and strength called to him until his breath caught and his whole body ached.

  He looked down, angry to see that his hand was shaking. What power did Maggie Kincade hold over him? Why in this night of all nights did her dreaming eyes call to him with promises of more joy than he could imagine?

  He fought to remember she was a client in danger. He told himself what he felt was merely the result of months of solitude and pain, followed by too much loneliness.

  But the words didn’t work. Wanting filled him, climbing in his chest and blocking even the simple act of taking breath.

  I want you, he said silently to the figure on the bed. I want us together, more than I can imagine, more than is safe for either of us.

  His hands closed slowly. He drove his fists deep into his pockets and forced himself to look away, to turn back toward the door—and the sadness of his own room, where too many shadows lay in wait.

  Somewhere a clock chimed.

  Jared did not move as the low chiming strokes filled the abbey halls.

  Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

  A few moments more, he thought. To stand so close and imagine being closer still.

  Linen rustled in the darkness. “Jared?” Blankets shifted and hit the floor.

  He froze at the husky rasp of confusion in her sleepy voice. How would he explain that he only wa
nted her presence and the scent of her soft skin?

  “I was checking the doors.” To his irritation, he had to clear his throat. “Sorry if I woke you.”

  She sat up slowly, her eyes wide. Moonlight drifted over the sheer white cambric that hugged her shoulders. “I had the strangest dream. Something about a necklace-only it wasn’t a necklace. It became a crown of fire that burned all who touched it. There were voices and horses and someone else, but I don’t remember the face.” She took a shaky breath. “Was it a dream, or is this beautiful house driving me crazy?”

  Jared stood motionless at the window, afraid to turn and see the dark hair tumbled around her shoulders. Imagining was hard enough, but seeing her would undo all his careful control.

  “The abbey is a place for odd dreams.” Somehow he made his voice firm, level. “Nicholas says it’s a trick of the shadows, something that gives even the most practical visitor, a dose of wild imagination. It can shake a person badly.”

  “It hasn’t shaken you.”

  He shrugged. “I was prepared.”

  “Why don’t you look at me?” Maggie’s voice was a whisper.

  Turn? Face all the things he couldn’t have? No, this was safer. Cool, calm distance and never forgetting this was business. He was a man without a future. The cold vision of his death had made that clear enough. Time and again he had watched his body fall in a pool of blood beside a lichen-covered boulder and a tree with a broken limb. Long ago Jared had learned to trust the force of such visions, a gift of his Celtic blood.

  He had neither expected the gift nor wanted its terrible weight. Though the power ran long in the MacNeill bloodline, it surfaced ever in the firstborn son, said to be the heritage of a woman who watched all her kin die beneath a Viking’s ax. As the berserk invader laughed, she had called down a curse on all her enemies and a vow that no MacNeill should again ever be taken unaware by betrayal. By her prayer the gift was given, always falling to the firstborn male, who was to guard the safety of the line and the drafty stone walls that brooded above a great loch.

  But tradition had been broken.

  After the death of Jared’s brother, the gift had moved, falling to a soldier unsuspecting and unprepared where he crouched in a stifling box in an Asian jungle.

  For the first time, another MacNeill, second-born, had gained the gift of touch. It had come to Jared as he lay dying, slick with his own blood.

  Had he been home when his brother needed him, would the future have changed? Could Jared have stilled his brother’s pain and stopped his hand in suicide? Would Grahaeme still stride those high hills, his laughter shaking falcons from their nestings above the gray seas?

  Jared closed his eyes, forcing away a cold wave of guilt. What if could drive a man mad more surely than sin, and Jared was already too close to madness.

  And to sin.

  Linen whispered. Cambric stirred. He sensed her perfume moving in the still air. It pulled him sharply back to the present.

  “Look at me, Jared. I won’t melt. I certainly won’t break.”

  But I might, he thought. Or I might do something neither of us could forgive while so much is still unsettled. “Go back to sleep,” he said harshly. “I won’t disturb you again.”

  He heard her sudden, sharp breath only inches behind him. He stiffened as her hand settled on his arm.

  She was worried, uncertain. He read every nuance of her mind, opened to him with painful clarity. She wanted to understand. She wanted to comfort him. She wanted—

  He closed his eyes at the image of exactly what Maggie wanted to do in that big white bed while their hands met and their skin moved in reckless hunger across the linen sheets.

  He felt her clearly.

  Heat and surrender. Need and yielding.

  Jared cursed.

  But it was no good closing his eyes and pretending he hadn’t felt the hot edge of her desire. She might sense it only vaguely herself, but to him the image was painfully clear.

  She wanted his hands on her skin. She wanted his body, a warm weight above her. She wanted his laughter and his breathless groan while he brought himself hilt-deep inside her.

  “You don’t know what you’re asking, Maggie.”

  Her hand didn’t move against his arm. “I’m asking to see your face, Jared. I’m asking for … answers.”

  “Answers take a toll. Usually they make things worse.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  What did he believe?

  Jared closed his eyes, tried not to notice how her fingers felt against his skin. He tried not to wonder how it would feel if her hand slid to his chest— and then lower. “Whatever you feel is wrong,” he said roughly. “Whatever you want is … dangerous.”

  “Beauty always has a price,” she said, her voice husky at his ear. “My father taught me that before I was old enough to hold my own soldering iron.”

  He almost smiled at that. Other women cared about clothes or houses or career plans, but Maggie spoke reverently about soldering irons.

  “Why are you so afraid to face me, Jared? Because you know I’m right?”

  He turned angrily, ready to prove that she was wrong. But he lost what he wanted to say when he saw the moonlight captured in her hair, falling like silver powder on her cheeks. “Beautiful,” he whispered.

  “No.” Her fingers twined through his. “But what we make between us could be. I meant that.”

  He didn’t answer.

  Her hand moved along his arm. “Are you so afraid of the truth? Or are you simply afraid to be happy?”

  Jared felt the heat of her skin and the slide of her fingers. He was bound to her, linked in a way that felt as old as memory or time itself. In that moment of shimmering contact, he stared deep into her soul.

  There he saw perfect forms of platinum and polished amber, all waiting to be completed. He felt the joy she would bring to each creation with her passion.

  Too close, he thought, already drawing her closer. She shivered, restless, uncertain, and the fine cambric inched from her shoulder, revealing creamy skin and the curve of one full breast. She whispered his name, the sound blending with the moonlight.

  Jared didn’t want to see into her heart. He couldn’t bear to know all that she was offering him. Grimly, he fought for distance and sanity. “Maggie? Listen to me.”

  “I don’t want to listen. I don’t want to talk.”

  “You have to.” He pulled her to the bed and made her sit. With great focus he smoothed the soft fabric, covering the shadowed curves that beckoned still. “Before you touch me again, I need to explain.”

  “Your past doesn’t matter, Jared. Not to me.” Her shoulders were squared, defiance burning in her eyes. “Nothing you can say will shock me or drive me away.”

  “Maggie, don’t make this any harder.”

  “I’ll make it as hard as I can. I don’t believe a word that officer said. You’d never set a bomb to take someone’s life. No one who knew you would suggest such a thing.” She crossed her arms, patient and implacable.

  “I didn’t set the bomb. But after that, things changed. I worked harder and longer. I followed every case and took on the jobs no one else wanted.” His hands hardened. “Narcotics among them.”

  “Work was a distraction. It’s perfectly understandable.”

  “Not a distraction, an obsession. In six months I had more arrests than men twice my age. It was like a sickness, the need to cleanse the filth I saw everywhere around me.”

  “I understand.”

  “You don’t. You can’t. It’s a different universe, Maggie. There are places in Asia where girls of fifteen are dead of old age, disease or drugs they never wanted.”

  Maggie didn’t look away. All he saw in her face was her concern and sympathy. Suddenly Jared needed to shock her, to show her exactly how far apart their lives were. “I was posted to Thailand, to work with an American Drug Enforcement team. Nothing shook me. I was relentless, incorruptible, and completely off
my head. I fit in perfectly with the unit I was assigned to.”

  “You had good reason to be bitter after all you’d seen. And the things you did were to protect, not to harm,” she argued fiercely. “How can that be wrong?”

  “If only it were so simple. When you push the way I did, people always die. But that didn’t matter.” He turned away. “Only getting even mattered. Maybe it’s good that I was stopped when I was.”

  Jared leaned against the wood bedpost, fighting his way through the blood and shrapnel of dark memories.

  “What happened, Jared?”

  He drew a harsh breath and watched moonlight on the moat, feeling like a stranger lost in a place of pain and darkness. The words seemed to rise in a cold wave. “You can buy anything in Asia. Drugs, guns, people—it’s only a matter of finding the price. I stumbled on a market one night when I got lost after an investigation. But they didn’t sell pirated software or rubies smuggled in from Burma. They dealt in babies. For one hundred baht you could buy a healthy infant. Four dollars got your pick. The price fell if you bought in quantity, of course. But there was no need to choose. Appearance or health didn’t matter.” He drew a harsh breath, reluctant to face those icy memories.

  “I’m here, Jared. Tell me the rest.”

  He heard the din of insects beating at oil lanterns. He smelled the pungent blend of cooking oil, fish, and human fear. The night market was all around him, as real as if it were only a day before. “It didn’t matter how they looked. They never even had names, because they were simply a means of concealment for the high-grade powder that would earn millions on a city street in Europe or America. It was brilliant, the perfect way to slip through customs. After all, who’s going to take a second glance at a sleepy baby beneath a blanket. Except of course by that time, they wouldn’t be sleeping, but dead.”

  His hands locked at the memory of what he had seen at that night market. Thirty tiny forms, alive but not for long. Strictly a means to conceal the white powder.

  “They used babies to carry drugs?” Maggie’s voice was a wisp of sound.

  “For almost two years. The night I found them was the first bit of bad luck they’d had. I saw to it that they had a lot more bad luck after that.”