by Cyndi Tefft
He shrugged helplessly. “What could I say? What can I say even now? Only that...now you know.”
Unable to help myself, I turned and faced him. “Know what?”
His lip quivered a little as his eyes finally sought mine. “What it feels like to be deceived, to unwittingly hurt the one you love, to never be able to make it right, to never say ‘I’m sorry’ enough to erase what’s done, to feel like you’re dying inside, to be hopeless, helpless, and afraid.”
His words reached into my chest and wrapped around my heart, squeezing me. He knew exactly how I felt, exactly what I was going through. The tension between us dissolved until all that remained was what we were before this madness began.
One.
His mind gave me a gentle nudge again and this time I opened for him. His love poured into me, filling me and carrying away the shame I’d held so tightly. His longing for forgiveness was a thick, tangible force that cut me straight to the core. Nodding in answer to his unspoken plea, I flung my arms around his neck and kissed him. Both of us were crying and shaking, then smiling and laughing, then kissing again. A storm of desperation swirled around us, a need to be absolved of our sins and loved in spite of them. Aiden broke the kiss and clutched me tightly against him, trembling.
“Mo chridhe,” he breathed against my hair, the words like a salve on a burn. Eagan had never called me that and I realized with a blinding fierceness how much I’d missed it.
The thought of Eagan reminded me that we were not through the worst of it, though. I sagged in his embrace.
“What is it?” he asked, moving his hands to my cheeks, cradling them and bringing my eyes to meet his. The fragile connection that we’d forged wavered but did not break. Would this snap it completely? Would there be any coming back from this?
“Aiden, I…” God, how could I say it? My mouth felt stuffed with cotton and I couldn’t force the words past my lips, but he stopped me.
“Nae. It doesn’t matter. Whatever happened, whatever damage was done, it’s in the past.” With a groan, he released me and ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “Lindsey, you have no idea what it was like, what he made me. He stripped away every piece of my identity, gutted me like a fish, then sewed me back together and made me pretend I was whole. But I was the furthest thing from whole. He dressed me in an Englishman’s costume, filled my mind with memories that were not my own, imparted skills I had not learned myself, then set me loose to blindly stumble through the dark toward the only source of light: You.”
He let his head fall back and stared unblinkingly at the ceiling. His hands balled into fists atop his thighs. “I didn’t know you, but I felt your presence like a sunbeam on my skin, like a cool breeze in the heat of summer. As simple as a flower turning its face to the sun, my soul reached for you. But you hated me, absolutely reviled me. And why wouldn’t ye? The monster he made me out to be…” He shook his head. “No, I was. I was a monster. How can I even explain this?” He made an angry growl I knew was not directed at me. “I wanted you with a primitive hunger like a man who hasn’t eaten in days lusts after a crust of bread, like a prisoner longs to see the sky, like a widow’s bones ache for her dead husband.”
His eyes closed and his whole body shook with remembering. “But for all that, he healed me as well, in a way I would never have foretold. When I took up the whip and lashed at his back—my back—to make him pay for the lives of the men he’d slain, I felt every stroke in my soul. Even though I did not understand it at the time, I slashed myself to pieces on the inside, bleeding out three hundred years of shame and hatred for how I’d failed my family. The destruction of Eilean Donan castle and the deaths of my kin were my fault and I’ve carried that every day since. But on that ship, in willingly taking the beating that I deserved, Eagan absolved me in a way no one ever could.”
“Willingly?” My voice was no more than a whisper, but it seemed to break the trance he was in. He turned to me with a sad half-smile.
“Aye. I recognized the look in his eyes when he saw ye, though it pierced me to the marrow of my bones. He loved you, lass, and at the end, all of what he did, he did for you. And how could he not?” Reverently, he reached out and traced the line of my cheekbone with his thumb. “You’re so much more than beautiful. Your spirit is joy, and fire, and strength. When I look at ye, I don’t just see your lovely body, your sparkling green eyes, and your wild, unruly hair.” He wrapped one curl around his finger and let it spring free. “When I look at ye, I see…home.”
His fingers continued past my jaw, over my collarbone, and down my arm. Tingles followed the path of his touch like an electrical current. My heart swelled in my chest at the raw honesty in his eyes. His mind caressed my own and there was no need for words. Everything he felt, all the pain and the love, seared itself onto my soul until I couldn’t stay still any longer. Reaching out, I brought his lips to mine and pulled him close. He covered me with the warmth of his frame, pressing me into the mattress. His kisses ranged over my skin as he peeled away my nightgown, baring my skin to the moonlight. He shed his own clothes and came back to me. The heat from his skin against mine branded me as his and I’ve never wanted to be anything else. My hands gripped the muscles in his back and I let him know just exactly what I did want. The wicked smile he gave me showed off the dimple in his cheek and suddenly, I laughed.
He pretended to look offended. “Hey, you’re not supposed to laugh at a time such as this. A man could take it the wrong way.”
I tried to school my features into some semblance of apology, but I couldn’t keep the stupid grin off my face. “I’ve missed you,” I said, earning a bright smile and a kiss in return.
“And I you, my love. Happy Christmas.”
“Happy Christmas,” I replied. Then he moved his hips and my grin was lost as my eyes rolled back in pleasure.
Chapter 22
As I lay there afterward, circled in his embrace and feeling the languorous pull of sleep, I decided the time had come to stop keeping secrets. The thought of spilling my fears to Aiden still made my stomach clench, but I was unwilling to allow anything to come between us.
I splayed my fingers across the flat plane of his stomach and he covered them with his hand. A soft hum of pleasure came from his throat.
“Aiden?”
“Yes, love,” he replied, stroking the back of my hand with his fingertips. I concentrated on the feel of his skin against mine and said a prayer. Apparently, I waited too long to continue because he shifted onto his side so he could look at me.
My heart fluttered in my chest and I bit my lip. He reached out and touched my mouth, so I pressed a kiss into his palm. He cradled my cheek and bent forward to kiss me, but I put a hand on his chest to stop him. His eyebrows furrowed in concern and I breathed out a sigh, knowing the time had come.
“I’m pregnant.”
A beat of shocked silence greeted my announcement, then his eyes flew open wide and his face broke into a beaming smile. Childlike joy radiated off of him. My heart pinched and I hurried to tell him the rest.
“It might be Eagan’s.”
His face fell into a confused jumble. “What?”
“We were on the ship for weeks, and they told me at the hospital that I’m not far along at all, that it must have happened within the last couple weeks. And since time is not the same in Between as it is here, it could be—”
He bolted upright in the bed. “No.”
“Aiden…”
“No. Absolutely not.”
I understood his reaction, but after stressing about it for so long, his blatant refusal to even consider the possibility was rubbing me the wrong way.
“I’m not saying it is his baby. I’m just saying it might be.”
He shook his head, his face hard as stone. I rubbed my temples and tried to reason with him.
“How can you be so sure?” I asked, with more of a challenging tone than I’d meant.
“Do you want the child to be his?” he spat back.
“Oh, for God’s sake! What kind of question is that? I’m just freaked out here and I need to face facts and I can’t do that if you’re not even going to listen.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at me, but at least I had his attention. Of course, now that I had it, I wasn’t sure what more to say. I decided to attack this with reason, since that was easier than dealing with the emotion behind it.
“Do you or do you not think it’s possible to get pregnant in Between and carry the baby back here?” I asked. His frown wavered a bit, but he did not reply. “Your ring came back with me. Your dirk, your clothes… even Willie’s pocket watch!” I jumped up off the bed and dug into my bag to find the watch and held it up like it was Exhibit A.
Aiden’s eyes lost their iron strength as they landed on the relic from his long dead brother. His gaze traveled down my arm and rested on my stomach. The wind in my sails plummeted and I dropped my arm to my side, not sure where to go from here.
“Fine. I’ll grant ye that the possibility exists,” he said quietly. “But I know in my heart that it’s not so.”
“How can you know? And what if it is part demon? Oh, my God, I just—”
Quick as a jungle cat, Aiden leapt over the bed and wrapped his arms around my waist. “Look at me, Lindsey.” I pulled my eyes toward his. The certainty and joy that I saw in them drew me like a magnet. Countless doubts and fears still pulled at me, but I tucked them away and locked them in a steel box deep inside. Aiden was so sure that the child was his. I didn’t know how he knew, but I wanted nothing more than to believe him.
Our baby.
The thought made me lightheaded all of a sudden.
Aiden reached down and rested his palm against my stomach in wonder. I stared down at his hand and the two of us stood there for a long moment, lost in the newness and strangeness of the idea I had a little person growing inside of me.
“Will he have your green eyes, I wonder?” Aiden mused out loud.
“A boy, is it?” I teased and he grinned in response.
“Well, I’ve only had brothers, never a sister. What would I do with a wee lass?” His eyes misted over as he stared at my tummy like he could see the tiny child within.
“Maybe she’ll have red hair like Willie and your dad,” I offered. A wet, shaky laugh bubbled up out of him.
“God in heaven, but I miss that lad. Seeing him on that ship and learning it was naught but a lie…” He lifted a fist to his mouth and bit down on his knuckle, his eyes closed tightly as he fought to hold it together. After a moment, he continued. “If only I knew what had become of him. Did he die in the explosion as I’d assumed all those years? Or was he safe? Did he live a long, happy life with a wife and children to call his own?” His gaze swept over my stomach again before coming back up to try and find the answer in my face. An idea occurred to me and my eyes widened with excitement.
“Maybe we can find out.”
“What? How?”
“The book I got you for Christmas, the history of the MacRae family. Maybe he’s in it. Maybe it will tell us what happened to him, or at least the year he died.”
Aiden strode across the bedroom to draw the book out from his things and brought it back to the bed. I climbed up next to him and we thumbed through the pages, looking for any mention of his family. There was a long section about the history of the castle and how it was destroyed by the English in 1719. It mentioned the Spanish traitor who told the English about the gunpowder they used to blow up the castle, but it didn’t say anything about the Scotsman who let that secret slip. Aiden’s shoulders tensed as we read, so I quickly continued flipping through, anxious to find a family tree of some sort.
And then, there it was.
“Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh,” I said, pointing a shaky finger at the page.
Children of Hugh MacRae and Leah MacKenzie MacRae:
Duncan James MacKenzie MacRae 1695 – 1719
Aiden Alexander MacKenzie MacRae 1699 – 1719
William Hugh MacKenzie MacRae: 1707 – 1746
Aiden started shaking like a leaf in a thunderstorm, then he began to laugh, this wild, unhinged laughter that only comes from great relief. Once, when I was about ten, my dad and I went on this nature hike. We came across this quick moving stream that was just beyond some tall grass. I broke away to investigate and the ground gave out underneath me, dumping me into the river while the rest of the group unknowingly continued on. But my dad had heard my cry and he bolted down the length of the river, finally getting hold of me by crawling out onto the branch of a fallen tree that was jutting out across the water. When he pulled me to safety, the both of us laid there on the bank, soaked and filthy, and we laughed that very same laugh.
After a while, Aiden pulled himself together and wiped his face. He tried to apologize, but I didn’t let him.
“He lived,” he said, his voice scratchy with emotion. “I assumed he died in the castle’s explosion, but a small part of me always wondered if he got scared and ran before the soldiers arrived. But two of them went in and only one returned. How could that be if Willie ran?”
I shrugged. “Maybe one of the Scots guarding the other side took him out. Maybe it was Duncan who saved Willie’s life. There’s no way to know.” Aiden nodded, considering, then shook his head in wonder at this new information. I curled my fingers through his as we both stared at the book for a long time. Then something bubbled up from my memory bank.
“Remember when we looked up Scottish history back at the cabin? 1746 was the year of Culloden. My guess is that he gave his life in battle for his country, just like his big brothers.”
Aiden squeezed my hand as a thank you. “Hopefully he knew the love of a woman before that day, maybe even bounced his child on his knee. It’s enough to know he lived, if only for a score of years.”
“Hmmm…” I said, then jumped down off the bed and rooted through my stuff to find my laptop. “Hold that thought.” I settled into place beside him and booted it up. I did a search for ancestry sites, signed up for a free trial of one of them, and plugged in the information we knew about Aiden’s family. And a breath later, the names of Willie’s spouse and children—two boys—were right there on the screen for us, along with their children’s names, and their grandchildren’s names. Nearly three hundred years of MacRaes descendent from Aiden and Willie’s father were listed on the screen before us. Aiden just stared at the laptop in shock, unable to process what he was seeing.
The site didn’t list information for any living people—probably as a security measure—but it didn’t really matter. The internet being what it is, I had names, addresses, and phone numbers for Aiden’s closest living relatives within about fifteen minutes of online sleuthing.
They lived in Orkney: rugged, windswept islands just north of the Scottish mainland.
“We could visit them!” I said, beaming up at Aiden in triumph. He slid off the bed and started pacing the room, trying to take it all in. While he processed, muttering to himself in Gaelic the whole time, I mapped out a course to Orkney and did some research on the area.
“It’s just over 200 miles northeast of here. We can drive to the tip of the mainland and then take a ferry across to where they live. Should only take about five hours.” I set the laptop aside and crossed the room to Aiden, holding his hands to calm his frantic energy. “Orkney has all kinds of cool, prehistoric sites: an underground stone settlement from 3000BC, a huge tomb you can go inside that has Viking runes carved on the walls, a whole slew of standing stone circles… My mom would love it. I’ll tell her we want to go there for a honeymoon. She and Dad can go hit all the attractions while we sneak away to see your family. What do you think?”
Aiden looked at me like I had started speaking in tongues. “And tell them what, exactly? ‘Hello, I’m your ancestor brought back from the dead. Care if I come in to share a wee dram with ye?’ Can’t see why they’d have a problem with that.”
“Alright, alright. No need t
o get snarly about it. We’ll come up with something. Don’t you want to meet them?”
“Of course I want to meet them! You’ve no idea how it feels to have no family, to have everything you’d ever known turn to dust over the centuries, to—”
“You have family. I’m your family. And Ian and Sarah—”
He put up a hand. “That’s true, and I don’t mean to belittle the fact, as I am more grateful for that than I can rightly explain. But my brother’s blood kin…” He pulled in a deep breath and let it out. “Aye, I want to meet them.”
“Well, then quit freaking out and let’s come up with a plan, okay?”
A slow smile appeared on his face like dawn over the horizon and I couldn’t help but grin in return.
“This is sheer madness, you realize?” The excitement dancing in his eyes did not match his words.
I affected a nonchalant shrug. “Hey, Madness is my middle name. Lindsey M. MacRae. And don’t you forget it.”
“Never,” he replied, and then he kissed me.
Chapter 23
In the end, it didn’t take much wheedling to get Mom to agree that we needed to visit Orkney. She was probably just so happy to see an end to all my sulking that she would have agreed to just about anything. Normally, Dad would have balked at the additional cost since he was footing the bill for this extravagant wedding and everything already, but he was like a giddy teenage boy around my mom. It was cute. Well, maybe a little creepy, too, since they are my parents and all, but seeing them together again healed something broken deep inside me and I was not going to question it.
Aiden was fun to watch on the drive, as it didn’t take long for us to get to the edge of his familiar territory and venture into someplace new. He spent the whole time enraptured, watching the world pass by out his window. But that was nothing compared to taking him on the ferry, which was hilarious. He didn’t believe we could just drive onto the boat, sail to the islands, and then drive off again. Of course, all of these things he said to me in my mind so Mom and Dad had no idea how these commonplace moments were new to him. I had the thought that someday, he would be all caught up to our world and that nothing would faze him anymore. Somehow, that made me incredibly sad, so I shook it off and tried to focus on seeing the world through his eyes. Everything fresh, new, wondrous.