She smiled, triumph hers. “You.”
“I am more than thrice your age.” He looked at her as earnestly as if he’d commented on the blowing mist. “Truth be told, I’m seven hundred, give or take a few years.”
“Indeed?” Her mouth twitched. “I suppose you’ll also tell me your name is Robert Bruce?”
“Nae, but I knew the man well.”
“You did?” Her smile faded.
He nodded. “My father’s people were Norman Scots, as were the de Brus. Our families were friendly.”
“We are speaking of King Robert the Bruce, right?” She tucked her hair behind an ear. “Medieval Scotland’s greatest hero king?”
Kiltie drew himself up, seeming to grow even taller and more fierce-looking. “To my knowledge, Scotland has ne’er seen a greater ruler in any epoch,” he said, almost bristling. “But, aye, he is the one I meant.”
“I was afraid of that.” She drew a tight breath, the effect of his burr evaporating.
An uncomfortable thought rushed her. The corridors she’d sped through after taking a wrong turn had been dark and musty with an air of disuse to them.
That, and a sense that the endless passageways with their ancient portraits and faded tartan carpet runners might hold secrets. Like barred windows and meals served through a narrow slit in the door.
Bad things best left behind thick, rubber-covered walls and good, heavy locks.
“So you’ve figured it out?” He sounded pleased.
“Oh yes.” She spoke as calmly as she could. “I believe I have.”
Not trusting herself to make eye contact and risk riling him, she stole a glance at the still-open parapet door.
It seemed miles away.
She swallowed and began inching in that direction as surreptitiously as possible. “I thought Uncle Mac and Aunt Birdie only catered to the aged. I didn’t realize—”
“The MacGhees aren’t aware I’m here.” An iron grip to her elbow halted her escape. “ ’Tis a ghost, I am, sweetness, no’ a—”
“Ghosts can’t touch people!” Cilla shot a glance to where his long, strong fingers held her arm. She could feel his strength and warmth pulsing clear up to her shoulder and down to her fingertips. “You—”
“I am what I say, and I can do much more than grab your arm.” He leaned in, his gaze locking with hers. “If I were so inclined, that is.”
“Oh!” Cilla jerked free of his grasp.
He stepped back and folded his arms. “Oh, indeed,” he said, his eyes heating. “Be glad I am no’ interested—”
“Where did your shield go?” She stared at his crossed arms. “It’s gone.”
“Say you?” His mouth curved with a hint of amusement. “I but set it aside so I could fold my arms. See”—he uncrossed them and held up a hand, the shield appearing at once—“here it is again.”
Cilla’s eyes widened. “That’s impossible.”
He said nothing. He simply stood holding the targe in front of him at hip level, that faint smile still playing across his lips.
The smile didn’t reach his eyes, but it did give a vague idea of what could happen if ever he turned the power of a true, full-blooded smile on her.
He was jaw-droppingly handsome as is.
He wore a kilt and had the cutest knees she’d ever seen.
With a killer smile, he’d be beyond dangerous.
Indeed, for all she knew, he could be a killer. His intense, unblinking stare certainly wasn’t friendly. Far from it; the look he was giving her sent chills tinkling down her spine and tied her stomach in knots.
As if he knew it, he flashed a grin that revealed two deep dimples.
Boyish dimples, entirely too charming.
She tried not to notice. “If you’re really a ghost, why can I see you? Can everyone?”
“Everyone who is meant to, aye.”
“That doesn’t tell me much.” She eyed him, still skeptical.
He laughed. “Sweet lass, just because I’m a ghost doesn’t mean I have all the answers. Truth is, some souls just see us. Most can’t.” He angled his head, looking thoughtful. “If you didn’t know, a ghost could run naked through a crowd of people and chances are only one, if any, would notice.
“And”—he glanced aside—“there are times we can will it that everyone does see us. Though even then there will be some who do not. I canna tell you why that is so.”
He looked at her, his gaze penetrating. “It just is.”
“Then why hasn’t Aunt Birdie seen you?” She had him now. “She can see ghosts.”
“No’ when they wish to remain unseen.”
“So you’ve been hiding from her?”
“Nae, I simply chose not to disrupt her days.” He made it sound so simple. “One of the advantages of being a ghost is the privilege of staying out of sight when desired.”
That did it.
He was talking as if he really believed such nonsense.
Cilla tossed back her hair. “Look here, mister. If you’re trying to scare me, it won’t work.” Her gaze flicked to his there-one-minute, gone-the-next shield. “I’ve seen crazies on the streets of Philly with better tricks than disappearing shields.”
“Then what say you to disappearing men?”
“What—” Her jaw slipped as he vanished right in front of her.
His words hung in the air.
Rich, deep, and buttery smooth, they stayed behind to taunt her. Each one slid through her like sun-warmed honey, pooling low and tantalizing even as they chilled her to the bone. Worst of all, they left her with little choice but to accept that Mr. Wasn’t-Really-There genuinely wasn’t.
It would seem he was exactly what he claimed to be.
A ghost.
Chapter 3
She thought he was feeble-minded.
Hardwick glowered after her, trying hard not to notice the bounce of her full, round breasts as she fled the wall-walk. He ignored, as well, the long strides of her shapely legs. Above all, he pretended not to see the swing of her luscious, well-made bottom.
The kind of bottom he could do all kinds of things to—and would—under different circumstances.
As it was, a muscle twitched in his jaw and vexation, not lust, swept him. Even so, he watched her go, his fists clenching when she darted into the stair tower.
“Damnation.” He threw back his head and glared at the roiling clouds, the fast-moving sheets of mist racing across the battlements.
He could scarce breathe for ire.
In nearly a millennium of intimate encounters with the fairer sex, nary a one had ever insulted him so deeply. Most women—of the Otherworld, admittedly, but even those of her realm who’d seen him—swooned and went all weak-kneed at a mere glance from him.
If he flashed a smile, they were his.
Totally beguiled, they freely offered their charms, claiming he was braw and irresistible.
Cilla Swanner clearly felt otherwise.
Crazy, she’d called him.
Not that the word mattered. The meaning was the same and he didn’t like it at all.
Unfortunately, the thought of her tearing down the stair tower’s tight, winding steps sat even worse with him. He needn’t exactly traverse them to know how slick they were. Worn smooth by centuries of trudging, tromping feet, the slippery hollows of the stone steps could easily send her tumbling to her death if she tripped.
And she’d looked to be in a very trip-easy mood when she’d dashed through the parapet door. An assessment underscored by the echo of her hasty, panicked descent.
Hardwick shoved a hand through his hair and scowled as he listened.
He should amuse himself elsewhere.
Dunroamin boasted at least fifty rooms. Give or take a few, to be sure. A soul could lose hours in the disused wing alone, counting the rats, bats, and roosting doves dwelling there. Great swaths of cobwebs begged examination, several chambers held dust-covered piles of candlesticks and pewter plates, clumps of moth-eaten ve
lvet drapes, and even bolts of ancient tartan. Best of all, some of the walls hosted such a battalion of mold and mildew, the musty damp was a sure guarantee she wouldn’t spend time there.
So there were possibilities.
Places where he could avoid her.
Too bad he’d grown accustomed to spending his days in the warmth and comfort of the castle’s cozier bits.
Either way, he did need to stop mooning over the chit. Nor was it wise to make his head ache worrying about her. That road led to folly.
It was nothing to him if she fell.
If anything, he’d be spared hearing unholy cackles on the wind. Without her around to tempt him, the hell hags wouldn’t have reason to chortle. He’d be free of the nuisance of trying to scare her away.
Something he wasn’t at all sure he could do.
Frightening women, after all, wasn’t his strong suit.
So why did the clatter of her hurrying feet grate on his last nerve?
Sure he didn’t know—or want to—his scowl deepened when he blinked and realized he’d somehow materialized on the stair tower’s top landing.
He hadn’t meant to move from the parapet wall.
And he certainly hadn’t planned to manifest again.
If she glanced back and saw him, she surely would take a nasty plunge.
A circular patch of hard, stone-flagged floor loomed at the bottom of the stair. He could make it out far below if he leaned forward and looked down. Just as he could see her bright head, her shining hair streaming behind her as she sped round the spiraling steps, racing ever downward.
Her shoe flying off her foot . . .
“Eeeee!” Cilla slipped, her right leg shooting out from under her in the same instant her loafer sailed into the air and went bouncing down the stairs.
In a blink, she knew she was doomed.
Her life, such as it was, flashed before her.
Then the stair tower tilted and spun and she pitched forward into nothingness.
Down, down she fell until, with a great whoosh, she slammed into something hard as stone yet as yielding as if she’d landed smack in someone’s arms.
Powerful arms holding her crushed against a big, muscular body that felt suspiciously kilted.
Her eyes flew wide.
The back of her neck prickled.
“You!” She shifted in arms she couldn’t see, shivers rippling all through her.
“Aye, me.” The words hushed past her ear. Soft, burred, and unmistakably annoyed. “Fool that I am.”
She almost choked. She was the fool. Thinking she could run from a man who could make himself invisible. Instead she’d only tripped and plunged down the stairs, making herself look clumsy as well as unnerved by ghosts!
Phantoms.
She wriggled against his steely banded hold, but her efforts only made him tighten his arms even more. Her mouth opened and closed several times, her protest snagging in her throat at the very real feel of his rock-hard chest.
Something she should not be noticing!
Furious that she did, she frowned.
“You’re a . . . ghost.” She hoped saying the words would make him seem more ghostly, less knight in shining armor, all gleaming steel and bold, searing glances.
“Aye, that I am.” He laughed, not sounding Casperish at all.
“Then . . . how can you—”
She broke off, feeling ridiculous. She was, after all, talking to thin air.
She swallowed. “Ghosts can’t catch people.”
“Is that so?” His scent, dark, spicy, and masculine, swirled around her, and even invisible, it was clear he’d lifted a mocking brow.
She could feel his hot gaze on her. A smoldering, intense kind of stare that made her wonder if one of his spectral powers was the ability to see through clothes. The deep rumble in his chest made it seem a distinct possibility.
Her nipples tightened on the thought and—heaven help her—great whirls of heat whipped through her, making her tingle everywhere. Something, perhaps the gold Celtic armband he wore, pressed into her side, and his scent, all clean wool and linen with a hint of sandalwood and man, persisted in doing funny things to her stomach.
Deliciously funny things she had no business feeling in the arms of a man who wasn’t really there.
A man who, by his own admission, hadn’t really been there for nearly seven hundred years!
She shivered again, her mouth going drier. It didn’t matter that he took her breath away. Or even that he’d just saved her from certain death or, at the least, a few broken bones.
He just plain didn’t exist.
Not really, anyway.
And buttery-burred, dark-eyed Highland sex god or not, that was enough to give any girl the willies.
“Put me down!” She tried to jerk free again. “Now.”
A snort answered her.
Then a swish of cool, silky hair slid across her cheek and she found herself clutched even tighter to his broad, impossibly sculpted chest as she floated—no, as he carried her—down the remaining steps and set her on her feet.
“Next time I will no’ use such care,” he warned, stepping away so quickly the air where he’d been snapped back around her, cold and empty.
He was gone.
Whether she’d seen him disappear or not was beside the point. She felt his absence as strongly as if someone had vacuumed the air from her lungs.
He’d simply poofed himself away.
And she was losing it.
Sure of it, she stooped to snatch up her shoe and jam it back onto her foot. Then she blew a strand of hair off her face and glared up at the tight turnpike stair rising so innocently into the shadows.
The stones of the curved walls looked ancient and were dark and sooty in places where telltale iron brackets had once held smoking rush torches. A cold, damp wind whistled in through a few narrow slit windows, lending to the stair tower’s eerie ambience.
Most telling of all, the worn stone steps had dips in their middle.
She stared at those grooves now, her pulse settling.
They were why she’d slipped.
She hadn’t floated down the stairs in the arms of a roguish, sinfully handsome, seven-hundred-year-old Highland warrior in a kilt.
Her foot had simply slid on one of the slick, ancient steps, causing her to stumble the rest of the way down in a jet-lagged, zero-sleep-induced stupor.
There hadn’t been any sexy ghost.
Not in the stair tower or up on the battlements. Imagination wasn’t her middle name for nothing. Everyone knew the mind created all sorts of havoc when people were foolish enough to run around on empty with sand grit scratching their eyes. Anyone so far past the second-wind stage was bound to experience weirdness. Who could blame her if she’d seen fluttering cobwebs and turned them into plaids? Or heard the cold whistle of wind and imagined the purr of a smooth, whisky-deepened burr.
No, a smooth, lilting burr not deep at all and that was calling her name.
Honoria the housekeeper.
Red-cheeked and with her great matronly bosom thrust forward like the bow of a tweed-draped ship, she came sailing around a corner just as Cilla straightened her clothes and stepped out of the stair tower.
“Ach, mo ghaoil, it’s yourself!” The older woman hurried forward, her sturdy rubber-soled shoes silent on the plaid carpet-runner. “We were nigh after having all the staff search for you—”
“Mo gale?” Cilla blinked. The grit in her eyes stung like sandpaper.
The housekeeper waved a hand. “It means ‘my dear,’ is all,” she said, taking Cilla’s arm and leading her in the exact opposite direction she’d meant to go. “We were quite fashed about you.”
“I got lost.” Cilla felt herself flush.
She shoved back her hair and tried to keep her voice light. “I couldn’t find the restrooms Aunt Birdie said were near the main staircase.”
She kept the rest to herself.
No way would she tell the
no-nonsense-looking woman about him.
Nor did she care to admit that a simple search for the so-called loo had taken her into a dimly lit passage where the shadows had slid around her, blotting the way forward and backward. Or that the corridor had reeked so strongly of candle grease, old stone, and dark oak paneling that she’d feared she’d stepped into some kind of time warp.
“Right enough, that’s where they are. The restrooms, as you Yanks say. They’re behind the big stairs, just.” Honoria made a sympathetic clucking sound. “You’re not the first to lose your way looking for them.”
She leaned close, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial level. “That’s the trouble with these old piles, all put together in fits and starts down the centuries. If any one of the late, great builders meant to make it easy for a soul to find his way about, a hundred years later there comes his great-great-grandson adding on his own bits and pieces and spoiling the plan!”
“I like it.”
“Americans always do.” The housekeeper’s chest puffed. “And why not? Dunroamin isn’t your average country house surrounded by the prerequisite sweep of lawn and gardens. With the exception of a tearoom, seasonal tours, and a souvenir shop, we offer a little of everything.”
Looking proud, she rattled off the castle’s charms. “We have the oldest bits, the tower and parapets and even a dank undercroft for medieval buffs. Then there’s the Jacobean wing with its tall, south-facing bays for the stone-mullioned window enthusiast. And”—she winked—“we’ve more than enough Victorian gothic to please the soppiest romantics.”
Cilla glanced out a tall, arch-topped window they were passing, caught a glimpse of rolling moors and mist. “And you have Sutherland.”
“Nae, Sutherland has us.” Honoria gave her a look so serious she wouldn’t have dreamed of disagreeing. “We could travel across two oceans and as many continents and still the land would touch us, calling us home.”
“Dùthchas.” Cilla’s heart wrapped around the word. “It’s the only Gaelic I know. Dooch-hus. Aunt Birdie taught it to me on one of her visits to Pennsylvania when I was little. She said it represents a Highlander’s deep sense of oneness with his land and culture.”
“No words can capture the feeling, mo ghaoil, but Dùthchas comes close, aye.” The housekeeper’s expression softened. “Only when you’ve felt that love of the land pulsing here”—she clapped a hand to her breast—“can you truly understand a Highlander’s heart. Your aunt does. She wears the far north well.”
Tall, Dark, and Kilted Page 5