Highlander in Her Bed (21 page)

Just before he'd step down out of the heavy gilt frame and proceed to rend every bit of MacDougall tartan in the room. She didn't doubt he could do it, either.

Anyone who walked through walls and vanished off the backs of horses in broad daylight could likely do anything.

Sure of it, she burrowed deeper into the covers. If she lived to be a hundred, she'd never forget how he'd simply disappeared when they'd reached the stables.

O-o-oh, yes, the man had quite an impressive repertoire.

And nothing he might yet do should surprise her.

What bothered her were his slurs against her ancestors. Not that she'd ever much thought about them. Certainly not like her father with his foible for genealogy.

Sheesh, he'd sometimes talked so animatedly about ancestors like Colin MacDougall and the Lady Isobel that Mara had almost expected them to march up Cairn Avenue and ring the doorbell, announcing themselves to dinner.

Hugh McDougall was obsessed with roots.

Much to Mara's surprise, since arriving at Ravenscraig, she found herself caring, too. Not in her father's crazed, glaze-eyed fashion, but enough to be perturbed each time Hottie Scottie sought to blacken their name.

The MacDougalls were a fine Highland clan. Ancient and proud. If they'd viewed Robert Bruce as their mortal enemy, they'd had their reasons.

Now that she could no longer doubt tin man's claim to be a ghost, she had to assume he'd known them. A possibility that left only one conclusion.

He was a blackguard who twisted the truth to suit his own purposes.

History books didn't lie.

But scoundrels did, and he was obviously a dastard of the first water.

Dangerous, intriguing, and way too sexy.

Mara bit her lip. Pulsing, insistent heat began beating inside her. Whirls of tantalizing sensation coiling low in her belly and spreading all through her, clear to her red-painted toenails.

She sighed. There could be no denying it. Just as she loved sleeping naked, so, too, did her heart flip for bad boys.

It was just a shame that this one had to be a ghost.

That pushed the envelope a tad too far.

But before she could thrust him from her mind, a blast of chill air swept into the room, billowing the plaid drapings and guttering every one of Innes's lavender-scented candles. Within seconds, the temperature plunged from cold but endurable to freezing. "O-o-oh, no," Mara breathed, her eyes widening as the hearth fire leapt and hissed.

Peats did not shoot up tall, multicolored flames—peats glowed softly. Gently. Even she knew that.

But then they
were
smoldering gently again and all was still.

Just as it had been.

Mara swallowed, wondered whether she'd fallen asleep without knowing it and maybe just wakened from a nightmare.

Several of the little silver bowls of sacred water were now strewn across the floor, their contents seeping into the thick Turkish carpet—proof enough that the tempest had been real.

At least as real as the ghostly Highlander who'd sent it.

She breathed deep. It
had
to be him. Since he'd let the wind do his dirty work, maybe her precautions were working. At least enough to keep him from manifesting.

Exactly what she'd hoped to achieve. Much as a tiny part of her would miss him.

Being ravished by an honest-to-goodness medieval knight might be straight out of her fantasies, but she'd rather he'd come to her as a time traveler than an apparition. Ghosts just weren't on her agenda. Hot or not, he'd have to be banished.

It was time for Prudentia's secret weapon.

Her heart thundering, she scrambled off the bed and retrieved a bundle of dried sage from behind the row of mirrors on the mantelpiece.

"Away with you," she vowed, speaking the words the cook had taught her. Then she touched a match to the herbs. They caught flame at once, sending a plume of acrid fumes straight into her face, burning her eyes.

"Begone!" she warned, her tone sending Ben under the bed. Mara frowned after him, swiped a hand across her streaming eyes. "See what troubles you cause, Sir Alex! Scaring a poor aging dog. Go back to Dimbleby's and haunt some other stick of furniture! Leave Ben and me alone."

She began choking, but kept moving around the room, waving the burning sage as she went. Soon, noxious smoke thickened the air. A reeking cloud so dense she wouldn't be able to see the bastard if he manifested right in front of her.

"Damn," she gasped, her throat on fire.

Ben whimpered beneath the bed.

"Okay, I'll stop," she reassured him, shaking the sage to extinguish its burning tip. Her efforts only caused even thicker smoke and sent a rain of ashes to the floor.

"Double damn!" she cried, jumping when some of them landed on her foot.

Desperate, she grabbed a vase of pink delphiniums, tossing the flowers onto the bed and plunging the burning sage into the water. Prudentia's ghost-proofing weapon extraordinaire went out with a last puff of smoke and a fizzle.

Then all was quiet.

Except for the roar of Mara's blood in her ears and peals of rich, male laughter coming from outside the windows.

His
laughter.

She'd know it anywhere.

Even among a thousand laughing mirth-filled men. And the implication made her heart stop.

No, her heart was racing. Pounding with giddy relief that she hadn't banished him.

Worse, mirth started building in her own chest, and only her aching throat kept her from laughing with him.
Alex
, she'd called him, the realization hitting her like a fist in the gut. And that, too, was reason to laugh.

But for very pathetic reasons.

Reasons underscored by the sudden silence from the wall walk.

Hottie Scottie was gone.

And much as she'd like to, she couldn't go chasing after him.

"Oh, Ben, what am I going to do?" she whispered, watching the dog shuffle back to his place on the hearth rug.

Knowing there was nothing she
could
do, she sank onto the now-damp bed and looked around at the shambles of her ghost-busting efforts. The yards of tartan everywhere made the room look like a fabric warehouse run by Scotophiles. Enough candles, crosses, and rowan were scattered about to fill an ancient Celtic church.

Not to mention the mirrors and other touches.

Groaning, she pulled a few crushed delphiniums from beneath her and pitched them to the floor. Not one to wallow in self-pity, she tried to look on the bright side.

At least no one could see her. Heaven help her if they could.

They'd think she'd gone stark raving mad.

But then maybe she had.

Why else would she have let herself fall in love with a ghost?

It was the tartan that vexed him.

And he was still reeling from the shock. Alex shuddered, only half aware of the thick gray mist curling around him. In his mind he still saw the Thistle Room. How he'd stood on the parapet wall walk, unable to do aught but gape.

One look into the plaid-draped room, and he'd forgotten every shred of remorse he'd felt for bedeviling the lass these last few days. Something he'd done for her own good, hoping she'd finally break and leave Ravenscraig.

Resume her work with her Exclusive Excursions and journey to some far-flung corner of the world where she'd forget him.

Especially that they'd kissed.

Or how close he'd come to taking her right there on the sun-warmed grass above the seal colony. He groaned, the memory squeezing his heart. Shaming him. He was a lust-blinded fool, worse by far than Hardwick, for he'd allowed the wench to sneak past his defenses.

Guidsakes—even now he was hard for her. Hot, throbbing, and almost splitting with need.

He blew out a furious breath, rammed a hand through his hair. "Hell's fire and botheration," he seethed, knowing himself lost.

And most damning of all, his burning desire to bury himself inside her was only half of what pained him.

The far greater agony was remembering their wild ride across the cliffs. How sweet and right she'd felt in his arms, nestled so intimately between his thighs. How her gasps of delight and laughter had warmed him, for that short space in time, even making him feel real again.

Those feelings, too, were reasons he'd tried so hard to make her nights miserable.

So she'd leave before her attachment to him strengthened. And before she could realize how desperately he wanted and needed her. Guess how just hearing her call him Alex had nearly brought him to his knees.

Before he caused her the kind of anguish he was now suffering.

Instead she'd stayed, armoring herself with her work and making it her business to lure the saints only knew how many MacDougalls to Ravenscraig, coaxing promises from each one that they'd participate in One Cairn Village.

Or at least be present for the great unveiling of her MacDougall memorial cairn.

A foul and benighted undertaking that filled him with bile. God's blood, he couldn't even walk across the building site without his guts turning inside out. But a dream that lit her eyes almost as much as they'd shone that bright blue day on the cliffs.

Only then,
he'd
put that sparkle there. Until their time together had soured, of course.

Scowling, he clamped his hands around his sword belt, tried to cool his seething temper.

Why couldn't she have been reasonable? Lost her nerve and fled in terror as every other MacDougall bed stealer down the centuries had done?

Instead she pursued her plans with all the zeal and determination he never would have credited a lass of her sorry race.

When she wasn't busying herself turning Ravenscraig into a haven for displaced, Highland-hungry MacDougalls, she'd dragged so many lengths of the wretched clan's tartan into her bedchamber, he doubted he'd be able to wipe the sight from his memory for another hundred years.

Mayhap even longer.

"Devil's minx," he swore, frowning into the chill mist and wondering if he'd ever be warm again. "Fiend take the MacDougalls!
All
of them."

Especially her, with all her lush curves and dips, her silky-smooth skin and hair of flame. The bits of black lace she'd donned just to rouse him.

And she had.

"Och, aye," he admitted, clenching his fingers on his belt. He grimaced at the sharp ache in his loins, the viselike tightness in his chest.

The lass could count herself fortunate he'd retreated to this between-the-realms place rather than remain on her wall walk.

He wouldn't have been able to control himself much longer had he stayed.

How dare she outfit his bed in MacDougall tartan? Sakes, the insult was so great, she might as well have slapped him in the face.

It wasn't just that she'd turned his bed into a MacDougall shrine. The brazen wench had festooned her entire bedchamber in the abominable colors.

"She's daft, too," he muttered, stalking through a particularly dense patch of fog. "Daft and dim-witted."

Why else would she have filled the room with those other ridiculous trappings?

"Clusters of garlic and rowan on the windows!" He kicked at a swirl of mist, took some satisfaction in the way it eddied and rippled—almost as if fleeing his wrath.

He hooted a dark laugh and strode on. "Mirrors and silver bowls on the mantelpiece. Crosses on the walls."

Did she think he was a vampire?

A warlock?

If so, she needed her head washed. He was naught but a lost soul. A good and honorable man in his day, trapped in time and place through no fault of his own. Sometimes he wandered about in this mysterious gray place and other times he roamed the earth world of the current present day.

That last whenever his bed happened to fall into the bloodstained hands of a MacDougall.

He could also visit other long-ago centuries if he chose to do so. Only his own time was lost to him.

But a fiend, he was not.

Simply a misbegotten result of MacDougall treachery and their charmed brooch.

The devil-damned Bloodstone of Dalriada.

A brooch he
hadn't
stolen. He'd barely closed his fingers around the bloody thing before Colin and his henchmen had loosed their arrows into him.

"Bloody MacDougall bastards," he snarled, and the swirling mists darkened, turning from milky gray to angriest black, the very air crackling with his anger.

"Spawns of Satan," he swore, girding himself against the onslaught.

But it was too late.

Already jagged bolts of lightning streaked past him and thunder boomed, each ear-splitting clap shaking the cushiony fog at his feet and surrounding him with the sharp stench of sulfur.

A warning.

An unmistakable reminder of the foolhardiness of his wrath.

Fury still coursed through him, but he grit his teeth and forced himself to clear his mind. "Damnation," he breathed, pressing his fingers against his temples until the darkness lightened and the thunder was no more.

He lowered his hands, cursing himself for his folly. How could he have forgotten that particular annoyance of this gray resting-place for the damned?

This land of shadows filled with mist but also quiet. Blessed peace, leastways for those who didn't overstep themselves as he just had and likely as he still was, for he couldn't stop frowning.

And he hadn't come here to scowl.

He'd only hoped to find solitude. Soothing calm to wrap round his ragged edges, make him forget. Trouble was, he couldn't forget, and the hotter his anger blazed, the more he risked another such thunderous visitation.

Only next time the lightning bolts wouldn't merely shoot past him.

They'd skewer him, leaving him with scorched, itchy scars that sometimes needed a half-century to heal.

That, he knew from sad experience.

Just as he knew he was not returning to
her
bedchamber.

He would go where he should have gone days ago. Then, when Hardwick suggested it. But better late than not at all.

His amorous friend would no doubt still be there, enjoying days of revel and feasting. Even if he weren't, Bran of Barra would welcome him.