Chapter Six
B efore she could blink, she found herself in a place that seemed as far away from that stifling room at the hospital as she could be. They stood together at the top of a knell above a vast field that reached toward the sea in the distance.
Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore.
The rolling land below them, scored in a thousand hues of green, pink, lavender, and purple, was covered in flowers of some sort. The fragrance of all of that was wrapped up in a ball of woodsy, sweet, and salty air.
Emma inhaled deeply of the intoxicating scent.
“Where are we?” she asked, scanning the unfamiliar landscape in surprise. “Is this…heaven?”
He laughed, the sound shockingly unfamiliar to her, but it brought a smile to her lips.
“No,” he said, gazing out at the spectacle before them. “’Tis Scotland.”
Emma’s eyes widened. “Scotland? But how…?”
“Ye must disremember all the limits ye know for now,” he said. “There’s nothing bindin’ ye to the way things were.”
He was right about that. There was nothing familiar in the way things worked in this in-between world.
Connor’s steady presence was her only anchor to the life she’d known.
Yet she could still feel the brush of heather against her legs.
Take in the heady fragrance of the sea and the mossy sweetness of the summer bloom.
Feel his skin against her own when he held her hand.
Somehow, she’d imagined—when she’d even allowed herself to imagine such things—that all those things would disappear in spirit, that it would all be more ephemeral.
That she would never look at a man the way she did Connor and long for him to touch her again.
She stared out at the endless blue sea beyond the cliffs and the road that cut across the moor.
A solitary car—the only sign that they had not left the real world behind them—was making its way toward an impressive looking, centuries-old estate atop the enormous cliffs that spilled into the sea, two miles away.
Connor stood beside her, knee deep in those purple flowers, staring, too. He looked like he belonged here, in this very picture of what she’d always imagined Scotland to be.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, her voice tinged with awe.
“Aye, it is.”
“This place, it was your home.” It wasn’t a question. She already knew the answer somehow.
He pointed to that great estate in the distance. “It stands yet. I grew up here roaming these very moors.” He slid a look at her. “Can ye recall it?”
She shook her head. “No. I’ve never been to Scotland before.”
He tugged her toward the hill behind them and an ancient ruin, blackened by time and weather, half-covered in mossy green vines that still stood watch over the valley.
“Wow,” she breathed, finding words inadequate at the sight of it.
“’Tis Narwick Castle. Or it was once. Here since the Vikings ruled this land.”
They hiked for a few minutes before reaching the fallen stones, half-standing walls and stairways leading to the sky.
Together they climbed stones that ended on a wind-scoured battlement wall of gray stone.
It felt magical to be standing where warriors must have stood hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
On this very spot. Whole lives played out here for a season, then faded away like the heather blooms must every year with the snow.
A prickle of déjà vu niggled at her as she turned to look at Connor, sitting atop a stone wall, staring at her. His handsome face etched with Scottish sunlight, his dark hair whipping across his forehead with the sexiest carelessness. Had she stood in this very spot before? Like this? With him?
Impossible.
But was it?
“No,” he said, answering her unasked question. “I kissed ye here. For the first time. When ye were Violet.”
She blinked at him, unable to put together words.
“It was here I loved ye. Gave myself to ye. And you to me. Here on these very stones.” He scratched off a vine from the stone revealing initials carved there.
VG+CM
“Violet Gray and Connor Montrose,” he said.
Emma’s lips parted as the sensation of déjà vu grew stronger.
She could almost see the look in Connor’s eyes, rising above her, his hair falling across his cheek as he drove into her.
The twist and plunge of desire awakened in her belly.
The remembered feelings inside her chest were tiny explosions of joy.
But that was another woman’s joy. Not hers. “That wasn’t me.”
“It was,” he said. “You know it was. You and I, Emma, our souls have circled one another for a thousand years. Maybe more. Why, I canna know, but I mean to resolve things now, this time to move on.”
Some inexplicable sense of loss came with those words. Could he be any clearer than that? He wanted to be done with her, even now. Wanted to be shed of whatever connection they’d formed in this in-between. For reasons still too unclear for her to understand, that broke her a little.
“D’ye see that moor, down there, near the cliffs?”
She looked to where he was pointing, to the giant rocks teetering on the edge of cliffs that were skyscraper tall. She nodded.
“I died there. Right there beside that bald rock.”
Surprise and dread mixed inside her. “I suppose you’re going to tell me how.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to know because he had some sort of accusatory look in his eye pointing it out. “And that your Violet, in some way, had something to do with it. Am I right?”
“We were to be married. The banns had already been read at the kirk. Only my death or yours would’a stopped it.
I had just inherited my father’s estate after my older brother, Edgar, was killed in a riding accident.
I’d been named duke at my father’s death a month earlier.
Though it was my honor to carry on my father’s name, carryin’ his title wasna my choice, mind ye.
I’d never set my sights on that. But my younger brother, Arthur, coveted that title.
Wanted it for himself. He and I had never seen eye to eye on much, but he was my only livin’ brother. I loved him.”
Emma picked a stem of heather growing from a crack in the wall and ran the flowers between her fingers, imagining those two young men, pitted against one another in the name of wealth and title.
“I had a sister, too. Her name was Rowena. She was the youngest. Plain and small, with no experience with men. She was just seventeen when a wealthy British knob named Landon Sykes ruined her with scandal. He bragged of it in my hearing and Arthur’s, sayin’ she’d willingly gone to his bed.
Rowena’s reputation was destroyed. Her future would be ended right there without an answer. ”
Emma clenched her fists together in her lap. There was a buzzing in her hands, and she couldn’t seem to stop it. “How terrible.”
“Short of outright murder—which I preferred wholeheartedly—I challenged him to a duel to force him to retract his lies about Rowena. Arthur stepped up as my second, as angry as me about what had happened. Or so I thought.”
“Wait, what’s a ‘second’?”
Patiently, he explained, “Someone—a friend, a brother—of your choosing to have yer back. To be sure nothing goes wrong. That the other party is no’ planning to bring a load of lads to ambush you in case it does. They load and check the weapons.
“And after he did, Arthur looked me dead in the eye as he gave me my pistol. ‘Kill him,’ he told me, and for the first time, we agreed on something.”
“Did Violet know what was about to happen? If it were me, I would have tried to stop you. I would have tried anything.”
“Ye would’ve stopped nothin’. Let his lies stand? No.” Connor lifted a handful of stone dust in his hand and tossed it to the wind, where it drifted past her. “But I haven’t gotten to the good part yet.”
“Go on, then.”
“Ye see, Arthur misloaded my pistol. I pointed it at Sykes’s heart, the hammer slammed shut.
Nothing. I looked at Arthur, but he just shrugged with a look that told me it had been intentional just before Sykes’s bullet found my chest. My blood was on his hands, every bit as much as the man who’d ruined our sister’s good name.
Ye see, he’d planned it all with Sykes, ruined our sister’s name, watched me die. All so he could be named duke.”
“Oh, Connor!” She reached for his hand. “How awful. What did Sykes get out of it?”
“He got you. Or Violet, as you like. Sykes leaned over me as I lay bleedin’ out on the heather and made sure I knew Violet had already been his and would be his wife after I was gone.”
“ What? ”
“And that is exactly what happened.”
“No! I would never—!”
His expression flattened with self-righteousness as she put herself in Violet’s shoes. “But she did. Which explains why she never came that day or even tried to comfort poor Rowena, who was her friend.
“And Rowena…she’d been just a pawn in my brother’s scheme to get my father’s title. And in exchange for this little plot of theirs, Sykes would steal away the woman he’d coveted, the woman I’d loved.”
“Oh, Connor. How terrible.” That story burrowed itself deep inside her, ripping at parts of her she’d never known were there. “But Violet—why would she—? How do you know she really—?”
“Because she did, in fact, marry the man who killed me,” he snarled. “Bore him children. And lived wi’ him till the day she died.”
Emma leaned her head back against the stone.
She had nothing to say to that except if it was true, he had every reason to hate Violet.
The woman’s betrayal still ate away at him after all this time.
It explained so much. Somehow, he blamed her—Emma—for Violet’s apparent infidelity.
But that story made no sense to her, deep down—soul deep.
“And your brother? What happened to him?”
“He lived a short, unhappy life, childless wi’ a woman who didna love him. His death,” he added, “was slow and painful.”
“You watched her? After?”
“No. I couldna watch. I learned of it later.”