by Allie Mackay
More recently, she attracted ghosts.
Or rather, a ghost.
So she set her face in scowl she hoped was fierce enough to ward off a whole battalion of such buggers and lifted her leg again, this time poking at her bed’s new dressings.
But the moment her toes touched the bright tartan curtaining, a jolt of icy tremors shot through her. MacDougall plaid on the windows was one thing, but outfitting her magnificent four-poster in clan colors was something else altogether.
No longer feeling quite so bold, she withdrew her foot and slipped beneath the covers. They, too, were of fine MacDougall tartan, but pulling them up to her chin felt good.
Half-expecting to hear Sir Alexander’s deep, Scottish voice raging at her, she ignored the prickles on her nape and tried not to look at any of the grand old portraits on the bedchamber walls. If she dared, she suspected it wouldn’t be one of her bearded, plaid-draped ancestors frowning at her, but him.
Just before he’d step down out of the heavy gilt frame and proceed to rend every bit of MacDougall tartan in the room. She didn’t doubt he could do it, either.
Anyone who walked through walls and vanished off the backs of horses in broad daylight could likely do anything.
Sure of it, she burrowed deeper into the covers. If she lived to be a hundred, she’d never forget how he’d simply disappeared when they’d reached the stables.
Oh, yes, he had quite an impressive repertoire.
And nothing he might yet do should surprise her.
What bothered her were his slurs against her ancestors. Not that she’d ever much thought about them. Certainly not like her father with his foible for genealogy.
Sheesh, he’d sometimes talked so animatedly about ancestors like Colin MacDougall and the Lady Isobel that Mara had almost expected them to march up Cairn Avenue and ring the doorbell, announcing themselves to dinner.
Hugh McDougall was obsessed with roots.
However tenuous a bond he could claim.
Kin was kin, he liked to say. A MacDougall, a MacDougall, however the name was spelled, and no matter how many centuries and oceans stretched between.
Blood will tell, he’d insist, nodding on the words. Scotland called its own, always.
Mara had then usually turned aside, not wanting him to see her roll her eyes.
Now…
Much to her surprise, since arriving at Ravenscraig Castle, she found herself caring, too. Not in her father’s crazed, glaze-eyed fashion, but enough to be perturbed each time Sir Alexander sought to blacken their name.
The MacDougalls were a fine Highland clan. Ancient and proud. If they’d viewed Robert Bruce as their mortal enemy, they’d had their reasons.
Now that she could no longer doubt Alex’s claim to be a ghost, she had to assume he’d twisted the past to suit his own purposes.
History didn’t lie.
But scoundrels did, and he was obviously a dastard of the first water.
Dangerous, cunning, and way too sexy.
Mara bit her lip, warmth rushing to her cheeks. She didn’t want to think of him.
But before she could push him from her mind, a blast of chill air swept into the room, billowing the plaid drapings and gutting Innes’s lavender-scented candles. Within seconds, the temperature plunged from cold to freezing.
“Oh, no!” Mara’s eyes widened as the hearth fire leapt and hissed.
Peat bricks didn’t shoot up tall, multi-colored flames – peats glowed softly. Gently. Even she knew that.
Then they were smoldering gently again and all was still.
Just as it had been.
Mara swallowed, wondering if she’d fallen asleep without knowing it and just wakened from a nightmare.
But several of the little silver bowls of sacred water were now strewn across the floor, their contents seeping into the thick Turkish carpet, proof enough that the tempest had been real.
At least as real as the ghostly Highlander who’d sent it.
It had to be him. Since he’d let the wind do his dirty work, maybe her precautions were working. At least enough to keep him from manifesting.
Exactly what she’d hoped to achieve. Much as a tiny part of her would miss him.
Being ravished by an honest-to-goodness medieval knight might be straight out of her fantasies, but she’d rather he’d come to her as a time traveler than an apparition. Ghosts just weren’t on her agenda. Hot or not, he’d have to be banished.
It was time to for Prudentia’s secret weapon.
Her heart thundering, she scrambled off the bed and retrieved a bundle of dried sage from behind the row of mirrors on the mantlepiece.
“Away with you,” she vowed, speaking the words the cook had taught her. Then she touched a match to the herbs. They caught flame at once, sending a plume of acrid fumes straight into her face, burning her eyes.
“Begone!” she warned, her tone sending Ben under the bed. Mara frowned after him, swiped a hand across her streaming eyes. “See what troubles you cause, Sir Alex! Scaring a poor aging dog. Go back to Dimbleby’s and haunt some other stick of furniture! Leave Ben and me alone.”
She began choking, but kept moving around the room, waving the burning sage as she went. Soon, noxious smoke thickened the air. A reeking cloud so dense she wouldn’t be able to see the bastard if he sifted himself into place right in front of her.
“Damn,” she gasped, her throat on fire.
Ben whimpered beneath the bed.
“Okay, I’ll stop,” she reassured him, shaking the sage to extinguish its burning tip. But her efforts only caused even thicker smoke and sent a rain of ashes to the floor.
“Double damn!” She jumped when some of them landed on her foot.
Desperate, she grabbed a vase of pink delphiniums, tossing the flowers onto the bed and plunging the burning sage into the water. Prudentia’s ghost-proofing weapon extraordinaire went out with a last puff of smoke and a fizzle.
Then all was quiet.
Except for the roar of her blood in her ears and peals of rich, male laughter coming from outside the windows.
His laughter.
She’d know it anywhere.
Even among a thousand laughing mirth-filled men. And the implication made her heart stop.
No, her heart was racing. Pounding with giddy relief that she hadn’t banished him.
Worse, mirth started building in her own chest and only her aching throat kept her from laughing with him. Alex, she’d been calling him, the realization hitting her like a fist in the gut. And that, too, was reason to laugh.
But for very pathetic reasons.
Reasons underscored by the sudden silence from the wall-walk.
He was gone.
And much as she’d like to, she couldn’t go chasing after him.
“Oh, Ben, what am I going to do?” she whispered, watching the dog shuffle back to his place on the hearth rug.
Knowing there was nothing she could do, she sank onto the now-damp bed and looked around at the shambles of her ghost-busting efforts. The yards of tartan everywhere made the room look like a fabric warehouse run by Scotophiles. Enough candles, crosses, and rowan were scattered about to fill an ancient Celtic church.
Not to mention the mirrors and other touches.
Groaning, she pulled a few crushed delphiniums from beneath her and pitched them to the floor. Not one to wallow in self-pity, she tried to look on the bright side.
At least no one could see her. Heaven help her if they could.
They’d think she’d gone stark raving mad.
But then maybe she had.
Why else would she have let herself fall in love with a ghost?
***
It was the tartan that flared his temper.
And he was still reeling from the shock. Alex glowered at the cold gray mist curling around him. He might have willed himself back to the world-between-the-worlds, the mystical realm he’d drifted in and out of all these centuries, but he couldn’t forget t
he affront he’d seen in the Thistle Room. How he’d stood on the parapet wall-walk, unable to do aught but gape.
One look into the plaid-draped room, and he’d forgotten every shred of remorse he’d felt for bedeviling the lass these last few days. Something he’d done for her own good, hoping she’d break and leave Ravenscraig.
Resume her work with her Exclusive Excursions and journey to some far-flung corner of the world where she’d forget him.
Especially that they’d kissed.
Or how close he’d come to taking her right there on the cliff grass above the seal colony. The memory squeezed his heart, shaming and outraging him. He’d become a lust-driven fool, worse by far than Hardwick, for he’d allowed the MacDougall lass to sneak past his defenses.
Mara, with her flame-bright hair falling around her shoulders, her shining eyes.
How swiftly her passion ignited.
Alex blew out a furious breath, and shoved a hand through his hair. Even now he was hard for her. Hot, throbbing, and almost splitting with need.
“Hell’s fire and botheration,” he seethed, knowing himself lost.
Most damning of all, his desire to bury himself inside her was only half of what pained him.
The greater agony was their wild ride across the cliffs. How sweet and right she’d felt in his arms, nestled so snugly between his thighs. Her gasps of delight and laughter had warmed him, and for that short time, he’d felt real again.
It’d been a glorious experience.
So heady that he’d forgotten all else, including his ghostdom. And that odious state was something he couldn’t ignore, ever. But he had, so easily.
Unthinkable, if he succumbed again.
He couldn’t claim a true place in her world, and she sure didn’t want to join him in his. He pulled a hand down over his beard and glanced round, grateful that the mist swirling everywhere hid much of the eerie nighttime realm. Angry thunderclouds roiled above and beneath him, and he wisely chose not to think of the strange denizens that lurked deeper in the whirling mist, where the mist thickened to a wall of dark, impenetrable fog.
There were worse corners of this place, he knew.
Mara didn’t belong in any of them.
Regrettably, he did.
That truth was why he’d tried so hard to make her nights miserable.
So she’d leave before her attachment to him strengthened. And before she could realize how desperately he wanted and needed her. Guess how just hearing her call him Alex had nearly brought him to his knees.
Before he caused her the kind of anguish he was now suffering.
Instead she’d stayed, armoring herself with her work and making it her business to lure the gods only knew how many MacDougalls to Ravenscraig, coaxing promises from them that they’d participate in One Cairn Village.
Or at least be present for the great unveiling of her MacDougall memorial cairn.
A foul and benighted undertaking that filled him with bile. Odin’s teeth, he couldn’t even walk across the building site without his guts turning inside out. To her, the planned monument was a dream that lit her eyes almost as much as they’d shone that wondrous afternoon on the cliffs.
Only then, he’d put that sparkle there.
Until their time together had soured, as only it could.
Scowling, he clamped his hands around his sword belt, tried to cool his seething temper.
Why couldn’t she have been reasonable? Lost her nerve and fled in terror as every other MacDougall bed stealer down the centuries had done?
Far from it, she pursued her plans with all the zeal and determination he never would have credited a lass of her sorry race.
When she wasn’t busying herself turning Ravenscraig into a haven for displaced, Highland-hungry MacDougalls, she’d dragged so many lengths of the wretched clan’s tartan into her bedchamber, he doubted he’d be able to wipe the sight from his memory for another hundred years.
Mayhap longer.
“Devil’s minx,” he swore, swatting at the chill mist and wondering if he’d ever be warm again. “Fiend and every one of his ring-tailed, beady-eyed minions take the MacDougalls! All of them.”
Especially Mara, with her lush curves and her creamy skin, the witchy, exotic scent he was sure she bathed in. The bits of black lace she’d donned to rouse him.
And she had.
Furious, Alex clenched his fingers on his belt, grimacing at the ache in his loins, the tightness in his chest.
She could count herself fortunate he’d retreated to this between-the-realms place rather than remain on her wall-walk. He wouldn’t have been able to control himself much longer had he stayed.
How dare she outfit his bed in MacDougall tartan?
Sakes, the insult was so great, she might as well have slapped him in the face.
It wasn’t just that she’d turned his bed into a MacDougall shrine. The brazen wench had festooned her entire bedchamber in the abominable colors.
“She’s daft, too,” he muttered, stalking through a pocket of denser mist. “Daft and dimwitted.”
Why else would she have filled the room with those other ridiculous trappings?
“Clusters of garlic and rowan on the windows!” He kicked at a swirl of mist, took some satisfaction in the way it eddied and rippled, almost as if fleeing his wrath.
He snorted and strode on. “Mirrors and silver bowls on the mantelpiece. Crosses on the walls.”
Did she think he was a vampire?
A warlock?
If so, she needed her head washed. He was naught but a lost soul. A good and honorable man in his day, trapped in time and place through no fault of his own. Sometimes he wandered about in this mysterious gray place and other times he roamed the earth-world of the current present day.
That last whenever his bed happened to fall into the bloodstained hands of a MacDougall.
He could also visit other long-ago centuries if he chose to do so. Only his own time was lost to him.
But a ghoul, he was not.
He was simply a misbegotten result of MacDougall treachery and their charmed brooch.
The devil-damned Bloodstone of Dalriada.
A brooch he hadn’t stolen. He’d barely closed his fingers around the bluidy bauble before Colin and his henchmen had loosed their arrows into him.
“Scourges,” he snarled, and the swirling mists darkened, turning from milky gray to angriest black, the very air crackling with his anger.
“Spawns of Satan,” he swore, girding himself against the onslaught.
But it was too late.
Already jagged bolts of lightning streaked past him and thunder boomed, each ear-splitting clap shaking the cushiony fog at his feet and surrounding him with the stench of sulfur.
A warning.
An unmistakable reminder of the foolhardiness of his wrath.
Fury still coursed through him, but he grit his teeth and forced himself to clear his mind.
“Damnation.” He pressed his fingers against his temples until the darkness lightened and the thunder was no more. Only then did he lower his hands, cursing himself for his folly.
How could he have forgotten that particular annoyance of this gray resting-place for the damned?
This land of shadows filled with mist but also quiet. Blessed peace, leastways for those who didn’t overstep themselves as he just had and likely as he still was, for he couldn’t stop frowning.
And he hadn’t come here to scowl.
He’d only hoped to find solitude. Soothing calm to wrap round his ragged edges, helping him forget. Trouble was, he couldn’t, and the hotter his anger blazed, the more he risked another such thunderous visitation.
Only next time the lightning bolts wouldn’t shoot past him.
They’d skewer him, leaving him with scorched, itchy scars that sometimes needed a half-century to heal.
That, he knew from sad experience.
Just as he knew he was not returning to Mara’s bedchamber.
> He would go where he should have gone days ago. Then, when Hardwick suggested it. But better late than not at all.
His amorous friend would surely still be there, enjoying days of revel and feasting. Even if he weren’t, Bran of Barra would welcome him.
And without thunder and lightning bolts. The offensive reek of sulfur.
Far from it, every need and wish a man could have was met on the Isle of Barra, and so often as desired.
There were reasons Hardwick spent so much time there.
Now Alex would visit Bran MacNeil as well.
It’d been too long since he’d shared bread and women with the big, great-bearded Islesman, so famed for his hospitality. Few chieftains were as well-loved, Bran’s open-handedness appreciated by all. His decision made, Alex smiled. Even the hot throbbing in his loins no longer troubled him. Soon he would slake that fire, make himself whole again.
As whole as a ghost could be, he amended, his excitement mounting.
Eager to be on his way, he folded his arms and concentrated on garbing himself suitably for a visit to Bran’s notorious keep. As if by a wizard’s hand, his finest Highland raiments replaced the simple hose and tunic he favored. Satisfied, he carefully adjusted the voluminous great plaid and gleaming mail he wore beneath, then went great-strided to where the billowy gray mists appeared less dense.
A slow smile curving his lips, he whipped out his sword with a flourish and brandished it in a wind-milling motion, slicing at the shifting curtains of fog until he’d cleared a gap large enough to peer through.
Sheathing his blade, he waited as the mists around the opening drew back even more and the formidable square keep and curtained walls of Bran MacNeil’s isle-girt holding came into view.
Bran’s banner flew from the highest tower, its bold colors whipping proudly in the wind. Not that Alex had expected the rough-hewn Hebridean chieftain to be elsewhere. Scores of galleys lay at anchor in the little bay that surrounded the castle-rock, their tall masts, slanting spars, and upthrusting prows piercing the sea mist and indicating that Hardwick was far from Bran’s only guest.
A closer look proved it, revealing swarms of fierce-miened, plaid-wrapped Islesmen moving about the bailey, each one draped with flashy Celtic jewelry, a well-made, sultry-eyed woman-of-ease clinging to each arm. The bushy-bearded Hebrideans were also hung about with more steel than Alex had seen in centuries. But he knew, at Bran of Barra’s, such displays were only for show.