Chapter 25
“Phillip!”
“Matty!”
Standing between us was another familiar face and I stood up to hug her. “Margo Sud-Nelson. How are you?”
“I’m well, now that my favorite chef has been found. We had to come see for ourselves. We’d been kicking ourselves for not keeping you with us on the trail. Can you forgive us?”
“Nothing to forgive. The last two days may have been the most important of my life. I wouldn’t have missed them for the world.”
She cocked her head and looked into my eyes. “Promise me that the next time we meet, you’ll explain it to me?”
“I promise.”
She stepped aside and laughed when Phillip picked me up under the arms and swung me in a circle, driving the other onlookers back. I squealed like a child and begged him to let me down. And in the distance, somewhere outside, I thought I heard something…like a wounded animal.
Some old Scot raised his cane over his head and shouted for Phillip to do it again. Someone else started a chant—do it, do it, do it!
Phillip reached for me again. I shook my head and said, “Don’t you dare!”
He ignored me and my feet left the ground again. All my weight was concentrated on my ribs, where his hands lifted me. I was sure I’d be bruised in the morning.
This time, he turned slower and let my feet dangle straight. When he set me down again, he panted and laughed.
“I’m surprised you didn’t break your back.”
“Light as a…feather,” he got out between breaths, and the three of us laughed at his obvious lie.
I heard that injured animal again. Only this time, it came from inside the pub. It was real this time, not imagined, and as clear as my memory. Which meant only one thing. Cian MacInnis had decided to join the real world again. He had come out of hiding…
And he’d done it for me.
Everyone in the pub froze, but they were ready to bolt. I remembered that feeling.
“What the bloody hell was that?” Phillip pushed Margo next to me, then put himself in front of us, and put his hands on his hips and waited.
I giggled like an idiot and stepped out from around him so I could see. “That, sir, was the Ghost of Glenmore.”
Covered in fur again, Cian bellowed one more time as he stomped through the dumbstruck mob who wisely gave him a wide berth. Twenty feet away, he spared one too-brief look at me, then focused all his attention on Phillip.
Uh, oh.
The son of Vikings found it all terribly entertaining and did what the big man had done earlier—put his hands on his hips, like a king waiting for some visitor to present himself at his feet. He looked Cian up and down and gasped, “I will be damned.”
“Aye,” Cian said, not slowing. “Ye will.” He shifted his weight from his boots up through his body and into his fist, which connected with Phillip’s jaw and sent him flying backward to land on his back.
Slipping one hand around my waist and behind my back, Cian pulled me against him, then searched my eyes. “Have ye missed me?”
“You have no idea. But…Cian, why would you hit him?”
“Fer all the hurt he’s caused ye.”
I bit my lip and swallowed hard, trying to get my heart to go back where it was supposed to be.
“That is Phillip. A fellow skier. He was happy to see I had been found, that’s all.
” Cian glanced over my shoulder at the still prone blond being fawned over by a highly amused Margo. “I think she’s his wife.”
Cian huffed out a breath and stared at my mouth. “Must I apologize now, or can it wait?”
“Mmm. I think you’d better do it now. Maybe take off the furs first.”
He lowered me into the red chair and held up a hand in a silent command not to move.
Then he pulled off his fur cap and shrugged off the rug thing sitting on his shoulders.
He kicked off his fur boots, and my Yeti-man was nothing more frightening than a massive Highlander wrapped in his clan colors, with his street clothes beneath.
In stocking feet, he moved carefully to Phillip’s side and offered him a hand up. The blond stared at the hand for a few seconds, then smiled and took it.
Cian pulled him to his feet. Even without his boots, they two stood eye to eye. “I ask yer forgiveness, Phillip. I mistook ye for the bastard that once was her husband. I was told he had come fer her.”
“I’m still her husband,” Nick said, and stupidly stepped to the side of my chair and put his hand on my shoulder in some stupid he-man move, like he was ready to fight over a stick, or turkey leg. He may as well have shouted, “Mine!”
“Nick?”
“Yeah?” He barely glanced at me.
“You’re going to want to remove your hand.”
His chin lifted. “I’m not out of your life yet, Matty. And I won’t be bullied—”
Cian smirked. “Aye, but ye will.”
Nick wasn’t done arguing, but none of the rest qualified as words. It was more like one continuous noise of someone who is losing their balance, being hefted into the air, and tossed onto a low chandelier made of stag horns.
Cian dropped his fists to his hips—just like the others had—and looked up at my ex-everything. “Ye’ll be oot o’ her life, and without a quibble, as soon as we’re back in the States. Do ye understand? Or shall I pull ye doon and make it more plain?”
When Nick didn’t answer, Cian reached for the nearest horn and Nick whimpered. “I think the only place you’re going is to jail, sir. You assaulted me, and that other man, and we have all these witnesses.”
“Nay, ye don’t.” Officer Reid held a beer with one hand and his wife with the other. “Anyone see a witness aboot?”
The mob chuckled and shook their heads, looked at one another, shrugged their shoulders, and laughed again.
Cian reached for the chandelier again.
Nick recoiled, which sent it rocking. “Okay, okay! I get it! Now, somebody get me down from here!”
I didn’t observe what happened next, so I could only go by what I heard—that the folks of Aviemore left Nick on the chandelier for another hour or two, until they wore themselves out dancing beneath him.
Cian took my hand and we ran for it. I hadn’t looked for a back staircase to sneak him up to my room, so we headed for the main one. Unfortunately, the reporter and her cameraman stayed glued to us, and when we hit the stairs, she called out.
“Do ye wish to revise yer story, Matty? Tell us what really happened out there, while these people were risking their lives searching for ye.”
Caught off guard, I couldn’t think of how to answer.
Cian nudged me behind him. “A storm pushed her far off course. She found m’ home and took shelter there.
The storm made it impossible to leave, but as soon as it relented, she insisted I guide her to Aviemore.
She kenned the risk folks were takin’ on her behalf, and she put an end to it as soon as she could. ”
He turned his back and waved for me to go ahead of him.
“But tell us, Ghost of Glenmore, when exactly did you fall in love with her?”
He turned back. I held my breath.
He didn’t miss a beat. “Same as any man. When she cooked fer me.”
Saying hello was a thousand times sweeter than our farewell might have been.
We only made it ten feet inside the room before he spun me to face him, caught me, and kissed me breathless. He smelled like cold air and pine trees, and like a fur hat that I hoped he would never wear again.
When we stopped to grin at each other for a minute, I remembered what he’d said to Nick.
“Did you mean it? You said until we’re back in the States. Does that mean you’re coming with me?”
“I willnae allow ye to leave without me. So if ye mean to go, I’m comin’.”
“Even though you’ve only known me for two days?”
“Hearts dinnae ken about time, lass. I’ve loved ye a hundred years in those two days, and a hundred years more since we were parted unexpectedly.”
I pulled his head down to prove I felt the same. And from somewhere outside our delicious, magical haze, came a knock. I couldn’t believe anyone would dare come looking for us after all the entertainment we’d provided in the pub, but they did.
He didn’t want to let me go.
I laughed and pulled out of his arms. “I’ll answer it, then I’ll put a note on the door.” I looked out the peephole and saw two older women and one extremely handsome man with hair almost as long as Cian’s. Not that I noticed…
I opened the door and stood in the gap, blocking their view into the room. “Can I help you?”
“Yes, dear. We need to speak to Cian.” The woman blinked rapidly, all innocence.
“Uh…” I remembered I’d called him by name after he hit Phillip. “Can I give him a message?”
“No, dear. It’s not the sort of subject we should discuss in a hallway.”
The other woman, obviously her sister, made a pained face. “You see, it’s a matter of…time.”
My eyes flew to the man, and I didn’t have to ask to know that this was the traveler—the time traveler—who’d been hunting Cian and forcing him into hiding.