Chapter 20 #2
“Look to his brother,” Moraig advised. “Mark his cousin, Ian. Watch the friends that enter the doors of the laird’s hall.” She nodded wisely. “Ye’ll see.”
Madelyn was sure she’d see something, but it wouldn’t be a bunch of guys wearing T-shirts that said, “Kiss me, I’m Medieval.”
“I’m sure I will,” Madelyn said.
“Lunch?” Moraig offered.
“Certainly, if I can clean up.”
That seemed to cement the deal. Moraig served her a quite delicious stew, then Madelyn did the dishes with water from the stream heated over the fire. She tentatively sniffed a few herbs as she put things away and couldn’t resist a peek or two into darkened corners.
No sprites.
No elves.
No faeries seconding the truth of Moraig’s fanciful story.
“Thank you for lunch,” Madelyn said politely. “It was a pleasure.”
Moraig cackled, took Madelyn’s hands and patted them. “Ye’ll see, gel. See if ye don’t. Ye’ll see in the end.”
Madelyn nodded as if she believed, then hightailed it out of there before she had to listen any more to the bizarre ramblings of a woman who had obviously come in contact with one too many bunches of lavender.
She walked briskly down the path, turning to wave once, then continuing on with something that fast turned into a trot.
And that was something, considering she was wearing hiking boots.
She ran until she couldn’t breathe anymore, then stopped when she realized she probably looked really stupid. What had she expected from Moraig, really? Ask a crazy question, get a crazy answer.
She walked beneath the eaves of the forest, listened to the beat of her own heart and the crunch of twigs under her feet. It sounded like half a dozen feet stomping along with her.
Literally.
She stopped suddenly.
The footsteps that echoed her stopped as well.
Not quite as suddenly.
She tried it another time or two with much the same results.
She looked around her but saw nothing. That didn’t mean there wasn’t someone there. A twig cracked to her left. Her heart leaped into her throat. She was alone in the woods with a psycho—
Bagpipes, blessed bagpipes, started up so closely she screamed. The piper appeared thirty feet in front of her, nodded to her, then turned and marched on.
Okay, she could handle that, especially if the alternative was very corporeal, very frightening footsteps following her. Ghost or not ghost, at least the piper was a known quantity. She ran after him.
And never seemed to catch him, truth be told.
The feeling of being watched was gone by the time she reached Patrick’s place.
She stood hunched over with her hands on her thighs and sucked in painful gulps of air.
She either had to work out more or quit running in crisp autumn air.
She needed air with smog in it. All this clean stuff was really hurting her lungs.
She straightened when she could, then watched as her piper went and climbed up on top of Patrick’s rock wall. He played peacefully. His kilt didn’t swirl around with the breeze that stirred her hair. His music didn’t come and go on that same breeze.
She was becoming alarmingly accustomed to being serenading by a ghost.
She stood in the ruins of Patrick’s garden and listened for a long time, and then suddenly she began to grow restless. Patrick’s house was a disaster, true, but the thought of going inside to clean gave her the willies. She needed to be out in the open.
Where she could see someone coming, if she had to.
She pulled Jane’s cell phone out of her pocket, turned it on, then set it on top of a rock wall.
She looked around and wondered just where to start in the garden.
The whole place needed a date with a heavy-duty tiller, but she couldn’t do anything about that.
The least she could do was derock a little of the place by hand.
She bent down and started to work.
Soon she became too hot for her coat. She went to toss it over the rock wall. She’d only taken three or four steps before she came to a teetering halt.
There were men in kilts standing along the rock walls with their backs to her.
As if they guarded her.
The piper was sitting on the wall as well, watching her, holding his pipes and swinging his leg casually. She gaped at him as well.
“Are they protecting me?” she asked before she thought better of it.
He nodded.
“Are you a ghost?”
He merely smiled, then hopped back on top of the wall and took up a playing stance. Soon she was enjoying a little recital of what apparently passed as gardening music.
She wanted to pinch herself to make sure she was awake, but she knew she was awake, so there was no need for any self-inflicted torture.
So instead, she pondered the state of affairs in her mess of a life.
She was picking up rocks in a garden that really needed a bulldozer taken to it while wearing clothing bought for her right down to her underwear by a Scottish lord whom a witch thought to be of medieval vintage.
And she was talking to a ghost who played the bagpipes while she was surrounded by other ghosts who had apparently taken enough interest in her to protect her.
If there was a deeper meaning to it all, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what it was.
She rolled up her sleeves and went back to work.
She worked until her arms were shaking and she wanted nothing more than to go take a nap.
She had grown used to the music and the sight of Highlanders—and they certainly didn’t look like modern-day Highlanders—standing on top of Patrick’s crumbling walls, their swords drawn and gleaming dully in the gloom of the afternoon.
Weird?
Very.
She looked over Patrick’s garden. The results of her work weren’t all that great, but there was a patch that was definitely rock free.
She wondered what would grow here. Probably the same sorts of things that would grow in Seattle, though it seemed colder here in Scotland.
She cursed Bentley. These were things she would have known if she’d been able to stick to her itinerary and visited all those gardens.
Instead, she’d had an all-expense paid vacation with a man who muttered in disgust over historical details. She’d eaten at a witch’s hearth and lived to tell. She’d found herself being watched over by ghostly Highlanders and serenaded by a bagpiper of that same ilk.
It wasn’t a bad trade.
She turned to go back into Patrick’s house to wash her hands, then pulled up short at the sight of the young Himself sitting on the rock wall near the gate, swinging a leg casually, watching her silently.
Her heart gave way.
He was, put simply, beautiful. Beautiful and lethal and wearing an expression that said he was glad to see her. Her Scottish lord in black jeans and boots who had wanted her to change her plane ticket for a later date.
She tried not to read too much into that.
She failed.
So she walked over to him. “You’re back early.”
“It was a quick job.”
“Your charge must have gotten tired.”
“He passed out,” Patrick said with a grin. “I thought it wise to send him home early.”
“Kind of you.”
“Aye, I thought so.” He looked at the walls. “Friends of yours?”
She followed his glance. “Actually, I was going to ask you if they were friends of yours.”
“Never saw them before in my life,” he said. “But strapping lads, those.” He looked at her. “Did something happen?”
“I went walking in the woods and thought someone was following me. I ran back here.”
He reached out and took her hand. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”
She fanned herself with her other hand. It was hot. She was hot from all that rock lifting. It had nothing to do with him. It had nothing to do with his handsome face, his perfect mouth, his amazingly green eyes. It had nothing to do with him stroking the back of her hand with his thumb.
It had nothing to do with the fact that he was looking at her as if he thought kissing her might be a good activity for the afternoon.
“You not here?” she managed, finding herself completely incapable of looking away from his mouth. “No big deal. I had the crew here.”
“Now do you believe in ghosts?”
“Nah,” she said with a smile. “I’m still a skeptic.”
He laughed. Madelyn looked at him and smiled in response. He was, without a doubt, the most stunning man she had ever met.
And he looked at her as if he just might like her.
A lot.
“I’d say there isn’t much room for disbelief anymore,” he said dryly.
“Maybe not.” She looked up, then jumped. “Here they come, trying to scare the hell out of me.”
Patrick, as luck would have it, made a rather handy thing to hide behind, especially when she pulled him off the wall and put herself between him and that wall. She wasn’t a coward. She was conservative. No sense in getting too involved in the whole paranormal thing.
She watched as the Highlanders one by one came and stood before her and Patrick, bowed to them both, then turned and walked away. They each disappeared behind the other side of the house.
It was so surreal, she just couldn’t bring herself to believe what she was seeing. Then again, the fact that her guardsmen were walking through the rock wall instead of over was something to think about.
And then there was their dress. Their kilts looked like large blankets draped over their shoulders and belted around their waists. Add to that the enormous broadswords they either wore strapped to their backs or to their sides, and you certainly had a recipe for something quite unbelievable.
Unless you were standing there looking at it, of course.
And speaking of looking at things, there was Patrick to look at as well. She looked at him, bringing to mind Moraig’s words.
1285? A medieval clansman? A time traveler?
She snorted. Right.
He handed her Jane’s coat. “I was thinking perhaps you might like to go to Jamie’s tonight. He always has something on the fire.”
She nodded immediately. Yet another way to test Moraig’s words.
Yet more time to spend with this man she couldn’t seem to get out of either her mind or her heart.
“I’d love to,” she said.
“Good.” He took her hand. “Let’s be off then, shall we? I left the car at Ian’s.”
“I don’t mind the walk.”
He stopped suddenly, turned her to him, then slipped his hand under her hair and looked down at her with a smile.
There were, she had to concede, quite a few things she didn’t mind.
When he let her up for air—and this was some time after her knees had given way and she was upright only because she was digging holes into his shoulders with her fingers—she decided that kissing him was tops on her list of things she didn’t mind at all.
“Shall we go?”
“I think I can still walk.”
He laughed, took her hand, and gave it a squeeze. “I’ll do what I can to keep you upright.”
“Great.”
Or was great the feel of his hand around hers? Or was great something she should use in a sentence such as “What a great big bunch of malarkey I spent the morning listening to”?
Hard to say.
What she did know was that she was happier than she should have been just walking next to the man. DiLoretto, Delaney, and Pugh seemed like a very long way away. Seattle seemed just as far away.
Comfortably far away.
“I hope you’ll like my family,” he said. He smiled down at her. “They are an interesting group.”
An interesting medieval group? she wanted to ask, then pushed the question aside. It was ridiculous. The thought of it was ridiculous. It was his family and he wanted her to meet them.
She tried not to read anything into it. It was dinner, that was all.
The Culloden magic whispered over her soul again, a brief hint of it that was nothing more than a faint bit of fragrance on the air.
All right, so maybe it was more than just dinner. Maybe there was a great deal more to it than just that. Time would tell.
And with her plane ticket on hold and nothing pressing to return home to, time was on her side.