Eve had spent the rest of the afternoon helping Robbie and Kenzie set up camp, wishing the night would hurry up and get here yet dreading its arrival. Now she was about to take a walk with a man who was as mysterious and undefinable as was her love for him.
She looked around their cozy campsite, and finally realized the rabbit hole she’d fallen into didn’t have any exit. The hole she’d slid down was one way, and her only hope of surviving this free fall was if Kenzie was at the bottom, waiting to catch her.
Despite all the mysterious events that had been going on since she’d met him, when she was with him, she felt utterly, perfectly safe. Her mother had called him a gentle giant the day they’d met, and Eve had certainly seen proof of that in the way he handled her, Mabel, Daar, his animals, and even a wild deer. But lurking behind that gentleness, Eve knew there was a dark and dangerous side to Kenzie Gregor—and that was exactly what made her feel safe with him.
He set his plate on the ground and stood up, then settled the leather sheath holding his sword so that it rode diagonally across his back. “Is everyone set for the evening?” he asked, his gaze stopping on Mabel. When she nodded, he looked at Robbie MacBain. “I don’t know when we’ll be back.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Robbie said, setting down his plate and lacing his fingers behind his head with a tired sigh. “We’ll be right here when you do.”
“Daar?” Kenzie asked.
Daar grabbed Robbie’s plate, which still had some pie on it. “I forgot my pillow, and I can’t sleep without it.”
“I’ll go get it,” Robbie said, standing up with a groan. “I need to check if more of the animals came back, anyway.”
“I don’t think we should leave Mom and Daar alone,” Eve whispered to Kenzie.
“Oh, we’ll be fine,” Mabel said, obviously having heard her. “William’s nearby.”
“But you said he’s hurt,” Eve pointed out.
Her mother smiled. “If I scream, he’ll come crawling if he has to. He would never let anything happen to me.”
Eve looked up at Kenzie, and found him smiling, too.
The first thing Mabel had done when she’d emerged from the cellar was rush up to Kenzie and quietly demand to see her friend—at least having the sense of mind not to mention the dragon in front of Maddy. Mabel hadn’t even batted an eyelash at the destruction to her home, but had simply refused to lift a finger to help if she wasn’t taken to him immediately.
Kenzie had taken her to William, and when she’d come back, her mother had proudly told Eve what a brave, tough dragon he was. Then she rolled up her sleeves and went to work searching for whatever they’d need to camp out.
Getting Maddy to leave, however, had taken forever. First she wasn’t leaving without bringing Mabel and Daar home with her. When she realized that wasn’t going to happen, she wanted to help them set up camp. It wasn’t until Eve had taken her aside and told her she wanted to be alone to tell Kenzie about the baby that Maddy had reluctantly left—with the promise of returning right after she got out of work tomorrow.
“That was a wonderful meal, Mabel. Thank ye,” Kenzie said, leading Eve toward the path to the ocean.
She hesitated, and he stopped and looked down at her. His face was so battered and bruised, and she knew every cut and scrape under his shirt, because she’d tended to every one. She wasn’t sure she was ready to learn what had made them.
“Have ye changed your mind, then?” he asked softly.
“No. No,” she said a bit more firmly, starting them off again. “I’m just afraid of what you’re going to tell me.”
“Afraid?” he asked in surprise. “This from a woman who took on a man twice her size?”
“I could see and touch that man in the bar.”
They walked in silence for a bit, then Kenzie asked, “And because ye believe something is real only if you can see it, if ye can’t see something, then it must not be real? Is that how it works?”
“Well…no, not always. I can’t see radio waves, but they’re real.”
“Suppose ye substitute the word magic for radio waves. Would that help explain what ye can’t see?”
She stepped over a broken branch, then frowned up at him. “You’re saying magic is like radio waves?”
He took her other hand in his and held them over his heart. “Magic is energy, Eve. It’s what powers everything: from the sun and stars, to the ocean waves, to my heartbeat. And yours,” he said, moving her hands over her heart. “Have ye never wondered what powers you?” He cupped her face between his warm, battered palms, locking his gaze on hers. “The entire universe is inside ye, lass, just as you are in the universe. And all of it—everything that you can and can’t see—is nothing but pure energy.”
“I know that,” she said. “It’s the doctrine of almost every known religion. But what has any of that got to do with magic?”
He reached in his pocket, pulled out his cell phone, and held it up between them. “I only have to push one button on this phone, and within seconds I can be speaking to my brother, even though Matt is a couple hundred miles away.”
“But that’s not magic. It’s radio waves.”
“It might not be magical to you, because modern science has revealed its secret.” He flipped open the phone, making the screen light up. “But not a century ago, if I’d shown this to anyone, they would have called it magic.”
He snapped the phone shut and returned it to his pocket, then started walking again. “Most people forget that what someone calls magic today, science will explain tomorrow.”
“So those strange storms or whatever they are,” Eve said, waving in the direction of the ocean. “You’re saying they’re magical energy?” She stopped to reach up and touch a cut on his throat. “That energy made this scratch? It looks like a claw mark to me.”
“It was a claw that made it,” he said, covering her hand, “and that claw was as real as the scratch it left.” He dropped their hands between them. “But the demon attached to the claw was nothing more than energy that had been manipulated by a ninth-century witch.”
“A witch.” She started trembling. “Are you implying that people—call them witches or whatever you want—can turn energy into something solid and real, and that this real thing can actually kill a person?” She shook her head. “That’s like saying William is really a man who only thinks he’s a dragon, and suddenly he’s ten feet tall and can fly.”
He took hold of her shoulders. “And therein lies the answer to all your questions. Everything you can see and touch and feel is nothing more than your mind trying to make sense of what you can’t see. But modern technology is getting us there, in what Camry calls quantum physics. Scientists are now able to see the energy that makes up a rock, a tree, a bird, and you.”
“So I’m just supposed to accept that witches and demons and dragons are real, even if I can’t seem them, because maybe a thousand years from now science will prove that they exist?”
“Aye,” he said, leading her into a dense thicket of stunted spruce. “In exactly the same way that you’ve finally come to accept your mother’s illness, even though you can’t fully understand what’s going on in her mind, you must accept that the magic is real. It truly is that simple.”
“Or that complicated?”
He lifted a finger to his lips as he led her deeper into the spruce. “Shh. I believe MacBain gave him herbs to make him groggy. He may be awake or sleeping, or somewhere in between.”
Eve used his grip on her hand to slow him down as she tried to adjust to the dimming light. She wasn’t actually afraid; she just wasn’t sure she was fully prepared to finally meet the him he was talking about.
They stepped into a small clearing and Kenzie pulled her in front of him, wrapping his arms around her so that her back was against his chest. “This is your mother’s good friend, William Killkenny,” he said softly, in deference to the softly snoring creature curled up on the grass.
“But you said…why
is he…”
Honest to God, she was looking at a ten-foot-long, scale-skinned, gossamer-winged dragon. She pressed back into Kenzie, unable to tear her eyes away from William.
“If he’s really a man,” she whispered, “then why does he look like a dragon to me? I don’t believe in them, so why should I see him as one?”
“Because what William believes about himself is far more powerful than what you or anyone else thinks of him,” Kenzie softly explained. “And he believes he’s a dragon, so he is. When he lived in ninth-century Ireland, an old hag cursed him for burning her home and throwing her off his land. She turned him into the most horrible, feared creature of that time, and William will remain a dragon until he either opens his heart to others in a way he’s never been able to, or he finally realizes that the hag’s curse is nothing more than a trick she played on his mind.”
Eve frowned up at Kenzie. “Then if it’s just a trick of his mind, why haven’t you simply explained that to him?”
He chuckled humorlessly. “I have, at least a hundred times. But you have to remember what century he’s from. People of that time believed witches could either grant them wishes or turn them into nightmares, so trying to change William’s thinking is the same as telling him everything he’s ever believed in is false.”
“I…I want to touch him.”
Kenzie hesitated only a moment, then led her over to the sleeping dragon. He really was a magnificent beast; iridescent scales covered powerful muscles, his head was a fascinating blend of mythological lore and reptilian nonevolution, and his wings—one of which covered his body like a blanket—were nearly as long as he was, including his tail.
He looked dangerous and powerful and definitely scary: exactly like a ninth-century nightmare. Or a twenty-first-century fairy tale.
Kenzie took her hand and ran it along William’s long, muscled neck.
“He feels warm,” she whispered in surprise.
“Because he’s a warm-blooded man.”
“He’s magnificent.”
“Not to the people of his time, he wasn’t.”
Eve looked up, arching one brow. “How did he get to this time?”
Kenzie led her out through the spruce and back onto the path, heading toward the ocean. “He came here the same way I did. He used the magic to manipulate time.”
She pulled him to a stop, then had to tug on his shirt to get him to look at her. “What do you mean, the same way you did?”
“According to your modern calendar, I was born in Scotland in the year 1048.”
Her heart literally stopped, causing the blood in her head to build to a pounding roar that made her dizzy. Eve took a step back.
She couldn’t have heard right.
Or he had to be kidding.
But he certainly looked serious, his gaze locked on hers as he stood as still as a statue, every muscle in his body as tight as a bowstring.
“How can that be? You’re not a ghost. I can touch you, so you must be real. I even had sex with you.” She gasped, holding her belly. “I’m pregnant with our son!”
He also stepped back, his face going pale in the twilight. “What did ye say?” he whispered. “You’re with child? But how? When?” He took another step back. “That night you found me on the cliff—” He covered his face with his hands. “Christ, it really happened.”
“Look at me,” she snapped, pulling his wrists down. “I started it. Do you understand? I was scared and confused and thought I was dreaming, so I just…I thought that if nothing about that night was real, then what harm would there be in acting on my fantasy. We were both clearly willing.”
He merely stared over her head. “I know what you’re thinking, and this is nothing like what happened to your sister,” she growled. “I started it, Kenzie!” she said, slapping her chest.
When he still said nothing, she reached up and cupped his face. “Tell me you’re not going to suddenly disappear back to the eleventh century.”
He pulled her into a crushing embrace, lifting her off her feet and burying his face in her neck. “I won’t leave you. I promise, I won’t disappear.” He lifted his head to look at her. “Ye said we’re having a son. Ye know it’s a boy?”
“Libby MacBain told me he’ll be born on February 7.”
“A boy,” he repeated, burying his face in her neck again.
He was shaking, and she didn’t know if he was truly pleased or just badly shocked.
“I—I’m sorry,” she whispered into his hair. “I didn’t mean this to happen,” she rushed on. “I know it’s not an excuse, but I really wasn’t thinking straight that night, and I was…I tried to…I couldn’t think about anything except feeling you inside me. I’ll understand if you take back your proposal, because the last thing I want is for you to feel trapped or tricked into marriage.”
He took hold of her hand and started walking to the ocean again. “We’ll be married tomorrow.”
Eve pulled her hand out of his, crossed her arms against the sudden chill in her heart, and faced the ocean. “No, we won’t.”
He walked up and stood behind her. “You will not carry my babe without benefit of a ring on your finger and a husband to take care of you.”
“I know you’re from a different century, but today, babies and marriage don’t always go together.” She spun around to look up at him. “I will not marry a man who feels he has to marry me.”
“I love you.”
That warmed up her blood as nothing else could have. “You do not. You already explained that men don’t love women, you just need us.” She turned her back to him again. “This discussion is over.”
Eve didn’t have to turn around to know he was gone. She stared out at the gently swelling ocean illuminated by the low-hanging moon, tears running down her cheeks.
She had no one to blame but herself.
Other than keeping the mother of all secrets that he truly was ancient, he’d been nothing but honest and direct with her.
Except just now, when he’d lied about loving her.
Chapter Twenty
Eve jumped and would have fallen if Kenzie hadn’t swept her up into his arms.
“Dammit, quit sneaking up on me like that! Put me down.”
“Shh,” was all he said, striding up the bluff through the spruce.
“Don’t you shush me! I am not some eleventh-century lassie who thinks that a man’s word is gospel, and that being barefoot and pregnant and churning butter is the next best thing to heaven.”
He set her down on a sleeping bag laid out next to a crackling fire, which told her where he’d gone when he’d vanished. Before she could get up, he straddled her legs and took both her hands in one of his.
He brushed a stray tear off her cheek. “I love you.”
She dropped her gaze with a shuddering breath.
He lifted her chin with his finger. “I love you.”
“I don’t care how many times you say it—I’m not marrying you tomorrow, in September, or ever.”
Instead of saying it again, he started unbuttoning her blouse.
“Oh, no you don’t,” she hissed, trying to stop him. “I don’t care if you are God’s gift to women in bed—you’re not going to change my mind with sex.”
She managed to free herself, but quickly realized it was only because he needed both hands to undress her. She was quite dizzy by the time she finally found herself flat on her back, as naked as the day she was born, her hands pinned over her head and his leg thrown over hers. And somehow, during their lively little wrestling match, his own clothes had disappeared.
He splayed his hand over her belly, the heat of his palm making her shiver. He kissed her temple, the corner of her eye, her cheek, and then her chin as he cupped one of her breasts—which had grown nicely plump with her pregnancy; she hoped he noticed.
She tried not to respond, even though it killed her. Manipulating her with sex was…it was…dammit, it was dirty pool she decided, stifling a moan when he bru
shed his thumb over her nipple.
Watching his head dip toward her breast, his broad shoulders flexing in the moonlight, made her nearly melt with anticipation. When his mouth covered her nipple and he softly suckled, she arched up with an involuntary cry. And the moon reflecting off his finely sculpted muscles was so erotically mesmerizing, all she could think about was licking them.
His fingers began tracing a skin-shivering trail down her belly, over her pelvis, and then…She opened up to him, mindless with the need for him to touch her. Just as his fingers found her sensitive bud, he left her breast and covered her mouth, catching her cry of pleasure. His fingers slid over the slickness he was creating, pushing inside her and withdrawing, driving her into a frenzy.
She tightened around him, digging her heels into the sleeping bag, lifting her hips to meet his delicious thrusts. His mouth left hers and returned to her breasts, suckling first one nipple and then the other. And when his thumb started working its delirious magic on her, her focus narrowed and the world receded to a mere backdrop of haze-filtered moonlight.
She came hard and fast and with disgraceful abandon. She shouted her pleasure to the stars, bucking wildly against his hand to capture every last sensation roaring through her.
Afterward, she sucked in ragged breaths, trying to get control of herself. He kissed her face again, gentling her, then ran his fingers through her hair, brushing the sweat off her forehead as his lips caressed her cheeks. His other hand rested on her pelvis, his fingers spanning her from hip bone to hip bone.
She refused to open her eyes, knowing he’d have a smug look on his handsome highlander face, his golden eyes piercing her with a triumphant gleam.
A lingering spasm shivered through her.
Why wasn’t he saying anything?
She cracked open her eyelids, just enough to watch his gaze journey down her body. Another delightful aftershock suddenly wracked her, and his hand on her pelvis tightened. His head dipped again, landing on her rib cage and heading…south.
“Ohhhh,” she moaned when his mouth reached its ultimate destination.
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