Theirs was a special bond.
Even in ghostdom, he’d prided himself on keeping the Heartbreaker at his side.
Now he wished he’d ne’er laid eyes on the legendary sword. But he had and he could feel its powerful presence now, calling to him from across the darkened room. Not that he was going to risk another eye crack. He knew his bedchamber well enough to know there was a strange humminglike thickness to the air. A weird quality he’d noticed earlier, upon retiring, and one that seemed to intensify now.
Even the fat night candle on his bedside table gave off an odd hissing sound. And without looking, he knew the richly patterned tapestries on his walls were rippling with movement. He could hear the swishes and rustlings of their costly, heavy silk. A most curious phenomenon given that the wind wasn’t all that strong and he’d taken care to bolt the room’s window shutters.
Equally unsettling, he’d let the fire burn down, and the cold smell of peat-and-wood ash that filled the room was overlaid by a fresh, delicate scent unlike any he’d ever encountered except the few times ghostly business had forced him to sift himself into the realm of the present.
It was an exceptionally clean scent that he now recognized. The American’s scent, lingering to torment him. Light as a sun-washed spring meadow and with just enough lily of the valley to make a man sigh in appreciation.
Bran favored a scowl to sighing.
He also did his best to ignore the bewitching fragrance. Unfortunately, the harder he tried, the more the scent wafted beneath his nose. He considered burying his face deeper in his pillow. As a ghost, it wasn’t as if he needed to worry about harming himself.
But he did wish to do something to keep from breathing in the haunting perfume. Especially since he had a good idea what was causing the scent to remain.
The Heartbreaker surely felt his resistance and was enlisting every otherworldly trick in its steely, gempommeled arsenal to remind him of his destiny.
A fate he had no intention of claiming, so he rolled onto his side and pulled a hand down over his face before he could groan. Groaning, like shivers, was not a trait a Highland man acknowledged gladly.
It was a weakness to be avoided at all costs.
As were American women of the modern day, be they naked or otherwise.
No matter how delicious they smelled.
Or how they tasted . . .
“Hellfire and damnation!” Bran sat bolt upright and glared into the shadowy room, certain his sword would catch blue fire again any moment. Or worse, that the nameless American siren would reappear, this time without her mysterious veil of glittery blue light.
Next time—he just knew—she’d be naked without any such wizardry cloaking her. And then he’d be hard-pressed to resist her.
That, too, he knew.
And the truth of it scared him to the marrow.
The sudden pounding on his door angered him. Muttering, he leapt from the bed and crossed the room in three long strides to yank the door wide and see who would dare intrude on his privacy. He’d pleaded head pains and given express orders that no one was to disturb him.
Of course, the grinning fool standing in the doorway didn’t consider himself bound by such wishes.
Saor MacSwain thought much of himself.
In ghostdom as he had in life.
“You’d best have a good reason for bothering me.” Bran gave his friend a soured look. “I was sleeping.”
“Say you?” Saor cocked a brow and peered past him at the mussed bedsheets. “If you come back to the hall, I daresay you’ll rest better thereafter.”
Bran jutted his jaw. “This is my thereafter, if you’ve forgotten.”
“Faugh!” Saor laughed. “I came to fetch you, thinking you’ve forgotten that Serafina is performing her dance-of-the-veils for us this e’en.”
Bran blinked. He
had
forgotten Serafina’s promise of a dance.
A dusky Saracen beauty who only rarely visited his hall, she was well received when she did. Her veil dance—and her willingness to delight Bran’s manly friends in any manner they desired—made her one of the most popular and sought-after ghostesses in the other realm.
Bran admired her, too.
The last time she’d performed in his hall, she’d ended her dance on his lap. He could still feel how she’d slid her long, shapely legs around him. The sinuous rotations of her naked buttocks across his thighs and then the sleek silken heat of her wetness as she’d lowered herself onto him. He recalled, too, how her large, dark- nippled breasts had bounced and swayed. How, ultimately, she’d leaned close to rub them against his chest as she rode him.
Without doubt, she was the most skilled seductress he’d ever encountered. Just the mention of her name was enough to send a rush of heat pulsing into his groin.
Usually.
Tonight, the thought of her didn’t even bring a single twitch.
His trusty male parts—and, indeed, all of him—remained as cold as the chill night air seeping in through the shutter slats.
A discreet downward glance proved it. Bed-naked as he was, there could be no mistaking.
Bran scowled. “Give Serafina my felicitations and my regrets.” He reached to rub the back of his neck, hoping Saor would believe him. “The pain in my head this e’en is too great for even her
wonders
to be of service.”
“You truly wish to stay abed? Alone?” Saor’s grin faded. He flicked a quick glance down the dimly lit corridor, back toward the turnpike stair. “Serafina will no’ be pleased.”
“Perhaps these”—Bran flicked his fingers to produce two gold coins—“will sweeten her disappointment.”
“Aye, and the sun will fall from the sky on the morrow.” Saor looked skeptical, but he took the coins.
He also eyed Bran a bit longer, then shrugged and turned on his heel to sprint down the passageway. He vanished a few paces from the arched entry to the stair tower, apparently preferring to sift himself back into the hall rather than take the narrow, winding stairs.
Any other time, Bran would have thrown back his head and laughed. He certainly understood Saor’s eagerness to return to Serafina’s side.
But his own lack of desire to be there troubled him more.
Indeed, it took all his control not to slam his fist into the doorjamb. Something he was even more tempted to do when he turned back to his room and caught the faint glimmer of blue winking at him from deep inside the Heartbreaker’s charmed pommel stone.
“Hellfire and damnation,” he growled, not for the first time that night.
If the sword heard him—or cared—it gave no sign.
Sadly, his gut told him plenty.
Disappointing, or even angering, Serafina was the least of his worries. In truth, his troubles hadn’t even begun. And when they did, they’d be worse than anything he’d faced in seven hundred long years.
Much worse.
Gods help him.
Chapter 3
“Ghosts?”
Margo Menlove’s voice rose on the word. Her eyes rounded and she grabbed Mindy’s arms, squeezing tight. “A whole troop of them here at the Folly—bearded, kilt-swinging ghosts—and you didn’t tell me!”
“I’m telling you now.” Mindy broke free of her sister’s grasp and went to stand beside the kitchen’s antique refectory table. Its solidity soothed her. As did the ultramodern kitchen appliances lining the thick stone walls. Gleaming state-of-the-art ranges and refrigerators didn’t smack of spooks and things that go bump in the night.
Better yet, the quiet hum of the dishwasher made it difficult to imagine the
zing
of a sword being whipped out of its scabbard.
The lingering scent of breakfast bacon helped, too.
Mindy doubted ghosts had much of an appetite.
Even so, she was grateful that no ancestral portraits hung in the huge barrel-vaulted space.
Only the massive double-arched fireplace hinted at the room’s medieval origins, but she took care not to glance in that direction. The Folly’s staff—invisible and discreet as in the Age of Victorians—took great pains in keeping the kitchen fire blazing, and its crackling, well-doing flames were just a tad too atmospheric.
Under the circumstances, that was.
Mindy shivered.
She also refused to think about the flicker of eerie blue light she’d seen earlier—a large man’s silhouette reflected near the warm glow of the fire. Nor would she dwell on the faint skirl of pipes she’d heard coming from one of the kitchen’s darker, more echoey corners.
Above all, she wasn’t going to mention last night’s dream. Margo didn’t need to know everything. And she chose to credit the incident to nerves.
She rubbed her arms, determined to suppress the chills sweeping her.
No mean feat, considering.
Mindy swallowed, her gaze sliding briefly to the wall next to the kitchen hearth. A collection of the last century’s cooking equipment hung there. Highly polished copper pots and kettles, preserving pans, and jelly molds winked brightly, attracting the eye. But nothing stirred. No dancing shadows and certainly no man’s silhouette. But the fire glow did cast a weird reddish tint on the basket of aromatic juniper branches that the castle staff enjoyed tossing onto the flames to scent the room.
Even so, Mindy knew what she’d seen.
The big man’s outline, insubstantial and fleeting as it’d been, had reminded her instantly of Bran of Barra. The castle’s burly, fourteenth-century builder hadn’t exactly accosted her as the other MacNeil ghosts had done, but he
had
glared at her from inside his portrait.
Heaven help her if he really had invaded her sleep.
Her pulse quickened just to remember.
She also recalled that his portrait sword was the longest, most wicked looking of all Hunter’s fierce oil-painted-cum-real-live-ghostie forebears. It might have been her imagination, but she was pretty sure the silhouette man had worn an exceptionally long blade low by his hip.
A chill sped down her spine.
Had there really been a time she’d romanticized men with swords? Foolish days when she’d secretly thought of kilted men with swords as walking orgasms?
She closed her eyes and bit her lip, knowing it was true.
Wishing it weren’t, she trailed her fingers along the thick, age-smoothed edge of the table. A ploy to keep her sister from noticing that her hand trembled. She glanced toward the nearest window, not surprised to see rain beginning to pelt the ancient leaded panes. The stone mullion window surrounds already gleamed blackly with damp.
Mist curled through the nearby pines, hovering low, and making the dark woods look even bleaker than usual, the wet morning drearier than need be. Mindy stifled a grimace. For all intents and purposes, the Folly might already be on some godforsaken Scottish island.
Only Scotland, she was sure, would be much worse.
“You should have phoned me.” Margo was in her face again. “I would’ve come right away.”
Mindy started. “I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Bother me?”
Margo’s brows arched.
Mindy flicked a toast crumb off the table. “I knew you were busy.”
She also knew that if she’d called Margo in the middle of her four-day Ye Olde Pagan Times-sponsored Gettysburg Ghostwatch Tour, she would’ve risked having her sister arrive on the Folly’s doorstep with an entire busload of camera-happy, EMF-meter-toting paranormal zealots.
It would’ve been like living inside a goldfish bowl.
With the
Twilight Zone
theme music piped in to set the scene.
“You didn’t want me showing up with ghost hunters in tow.” Margo proved how perceptive she was. “That’s why you didn’t call me.”
“And if it was?” Mindy flipped back her hair. “You know what I think about woo-woo wackos.”
Margo laughed. “Does that include me?”
“You’re my sister.”
“Yes, I am.” Margo tapped her with a French-manicured fingernail. “The very one who always smells candle grease and woodsmoke in here no matter”—she wrinkled her nose, sniffing—“how much bacon you fry for breakfast or how many gallons of Kona coffee you brew.
“This kitchen is trapped in the past and always will be.” She glanced around, her eyes lighting with excitement. “It doesn’t matter how many snazzy stainless steel fridges and whatnots you haul in here. This room is a portal—I’ve always known it.”
Mindy flicked another toast crumb off the table.
It was an invisible one this time.
“The ghosts were in the long gallery,” she argued, not at all ready to hear anything odd about the kitchen.
“Do you think they can’t move around?” The gleam in Margo’s eyes intensified. “I can feel whole battalions of spirits tracking through here. Maybe they’re medieval servants, cooks, and little spit boys”—she looked around, warming to her topic—“or perhaps just hungry clansmen coming in to raid the midnight larder.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Mindy rolled her eyes.
“Medieval Highlanders were big strong men.” Margo sent her long-lashed gaze toward the closed door of the buttery. “I’m sure they had appetites to match.”
“If they’re here and hungry, they can have whatever they want as long as they leave me alone.” Mindy folded her arms, starting to get cross.
Margo hopped up onto the table, swinging her legs. “The time for that is past. It’s you disrupting their peace now. They won’t be pleased to see you bringing in workmen and movers. Ghosts never like such things. The noise and—”
“The ghosts are insisting I do this!” Mindy’s head was beginning to hurt. “They appeared to me. They demanded I have the Folly dismantled and—”
