Much Ado In the Moonlight (15 page)

Before she thought better of it, she reached out and touched his kilt, just to see if she had lost her mind.

And she felt not his kilt, but his eyes suddenly boring a hole into the side of her head.

“What,” he asked crisply, “are you doing?”

She looked up at him. All right, so she had just made a complete ass of herself, which she never did. It didn’t help that he was looking down at her as if she were a bug he intended to crush under his worn leather boots. She stood up as if she’d meant to do it all along, then retreated to a comfy chair a safe distance away.

“I was just curious,” she said, trying desperately to convince herself that she had every right to be groping his clothes. It certainly seemed to work for Hugh; why couldn’t it work for her?

“Were you indeed?” he asked, his voice dangerously soft.

“Can you blame me? You look so real.”

“I’m real enough,” he muttered. “But yet not.”

“Can you touch things from the mortal world, then?” she asked.

“It is not easy. It takes a great amount of strength and drains me quite thoroughly for several hours afterwards. Or days, depending on what I’ve done.”

She looked into his gray eyes and had the oddest feeling that she’d looked into them before. Yes, she knew she had and that morning, to boot. But this feeling was something far different, some sort of cosmic déjà vu that made her wish for a chair.

Fortunately, she was already seated and there was nowhere to go besides the floor. She cast about desperately for a distraction.

“Who did this . . . um, how did you . . .”

“Die?” he finished briskly.

“Yes,” she said, in what sounded to her like a very, very small voice.

“My wife cuckolded me and I was murdered by her lover.”

She felt her mouth fall open of its own accord. “But what woman in her right mind . . .”

She decided belatedly that maybe she was headed in a place she really shouldn’t go.

“I think I’m sorry I brought this up,” she said finally.

“You likely should be.” He stared unseeing at the other side of the room. “I have told no one this tale,” he began slowly. “At first, I was too full of rage. Then I could not grasp that I was dead and had no chance for living the rest of the life that should have been mine.” He met her eyes. “I suppose I should have grieved.”

“I think it might be easier to stay angry.”

“I daresay.”

“I like to forget my troubles in work,” she offered. “It keeps me from thinking too much. But, of course, I don’t have any great tragedies in my life.” And she didn’t, unless you could counted being thirty-two, not married, and her only prospect in the last two years being a man whom she suspected was far more interested in her play than in her.

Well, at least she wasn’t a ghost.

“Did you love her?” she asked quietly.

Connor looked at her in surprise. “My wife? Of course not. She was fair enough, I suppose, but she was my enemy’s daughter. Wedding with her seemed as good a way as any to keep the McKinnons from stealing my cattle.”

“She was a McKinnon?” Victoria gurgled. She reached for her tea and downed a swig. Damn. Cold.

Connor was, to her complete astonishment, almost smiling. It was more of a wry quirk of half his mouth, but that made her spew what was left in her mouth out—fortunately not onto him.

“Excitable, aren’t you?” he asked.

She mopped up with one of Mrs. Pruitt’s linen napkins. “No wonder you don’t like us.”

“Aye, well, I’m considering making an exception or two. I’ve still no use for your brother, but your sister Megan is quite a fetching wench and I like her laugh. I think I could become quite fond of your
grandmère
as well.” He pulled up a chair out of thin air and sat down comfortably. “I haven’t come to a final decision on you.”

“How nice,” she managed. She dragged her sleeve across her face, giving up any semblance of dignity. “So you married a McKinnon. What happened then?”

“She bore me twins. A lad and a wee lassie.”

“Oh,” Victoria said. “How lovely—”

“And then a pair of years later, she took up with a French minstrel who had come to try and pluck out a living from whatever foolish Highland chieftain he could,” Connor said, his frown returning with vigor. “If she’d had a thought in that empty head of hers, she would have realized he could not keep her as she desired to be kept.”

“And the children?”

He looked down at his hands again. “When she fled with the Frenchman, she took my bairns with her. Of course, the fools couldn’t find east when they were staring straight into the morning sun and they became hopelessly lost. A fortnight hadn’t passed before they sent a messenger back to me, begging for me to come and aid them.”

“And did you?”

“Of course I did!” he exclaimed, looking up at her. “What kind of man do you think me to be?”

“Honorable,” she said promptly. Maybe a little irritated after seven hundred years of haunting, but that was justifiable.

“For all it served me,” he said. “I hadn’t ridden half a mile from my home before I was murdered by that French whoreson. But before my life ebbed from me, he let me know that my bairns were dead from the ague. My wife as well.”

She shivered.

“But I invited him to come with me to the grave with a sword across his belly.”

“Oh,” Victoria said, feeling a little faint.

“Breathe,” he instructed.

She nodded. She had to put her head between her knees. She half expected that when the sitting room stopped spinning, Connor would no longer be sitting across from her.

But when the stars cleared and she could see again, he was where she had left him, sitting quite comfortably in a wooden chair of his own making.

“I’m sorry,” she said weakly. “I’m sorry to have asked, sorry to have suggested the play—”

“Are you?” he interrupted. “Do you think I am unequal to the task?”

“Of course not,” she said. “I actually think you would do a very good job. I’m sorry for the memories it dredged up.”

He shrugged. “They are never very far below the surface anyway, so you did nothing that a thousand other small things during the day don’t do on their own. Who knows that this might be of a purging nature, to settle my humors—”

Victoria opened her mouth to agree that it very well might, when she heard a ruckus in the entryway.

Michael’s voice soared above the rest.

It was not a sober voice.

Connor’s expression was grim. “I could see to them all, if you liked.”

“If I thought I could allow it without most of my actors bolting for the nearest airport, I would take you up on the offer.” She sighed and rose. “I’ll handle it, but thank you just the same.”

He stood as well. “And my thanks for the aid with my lines.”

“It was my pleasure.”

“Nay, the pleasure was mine.”

Victoria was just certain that she was feeling faint from the thought of lost sales and bad press thanks to actors with hangovers. It couldn’t have had anything to do with the man standing not three feet from her who made her feel small, fragile, and protected.

Good heavens, she
was
losing her mind.

“I have to go,” she managed.

He took a step back, then made her a very low bow. And when he straightened, his gray eyes were full of something that was not at all hostile or irritated.

Then again, her own eyes could have been crossed from too much speculation on the emotions being entertained by the medieval laird of the Clan MacDougal, who was not only out of her league, but out of her century and out of her mortal sphere, as well. Besides, she was infatuated with Michael Fellini.

She was.

She was almost certain of it.

“Gotta go,” she said, then she turned and bolted from the sitting room. She ran right into a gaggle of performers, who staggered about the entryway in a most convincing manner. Now, here was a problem she could solve with a loud voice and a few threats.

She wasn’t at all sure how she was going to solve the dilemma she’d left in the sitting room.

Connor
stood on the newly completed stage behind the deceased King of Denmark and wondered, very briefly, if he might have set himself to a task for which he was not particularly well suited. Never mind that he had blurted out all his secrets the day before as if he hadn’t a thought in his empty head.

Nay, his troubles lay before him. By the saints, could this fool do nothing but stride about and moan in that ghostly fashion? Was this acting?

He thought not.

“Adieu!” the ghostly king bellowed suddenly. “Remember me!”

“By the saints,” Connor exclaimed, “I daresay we won’t have a bloody chance to forget you, what with all that noise you’re making!”

Hamlet’s dead father continued bellowing his parting words, accompanying them with the moans a man is wont to make when he has ingested victuals that do not agree with him. Connor rubbed his ears in annoyance as he watched the would-be shade make his exit stage right, finally disappearing behind a handy bit of scenery and giving vent to one final moan that Connor could only assume was intended to convince all and sundry that he was indeed a ghost.

Pitiful.

Connor looked at Victoria to see how she was reacting to this piece of particularly bad acting.

She was standing there with her arms folded over her chest, her expression inscrutable. Connor supposed she was afraid to show her true emotions lest the king of Denmark burst into tears.

He had watched her, surreptitiously of course, herd all her actors to their chambers on Sunday. The tongue-lashing she had given them had led to a cessation of all pub visits by those so chastised. Connor suspected that was her intent.

Connor leaned back against a bit of scenery and watched the rest of the play unfold. Or, rather, he watched Victoria watch the remainder of the play proceed. He’d told her he would call her Mistress McKinnon, but he realized, with a start, that such was not how he thought of her.

Victoria
.

He wondered, as he watched her watch the play, how she would have been on stage with that flaming red hair and her face a marvel of creation. She likely would have made that bleating sheep Cressida look much like . . . well, a bleating sheep. Connor wondered how it was Victoria could bear watching Cressida’s descent into Ophelia’s madness without wanting to slap her briskly a time or two and bid her get on with it. Connor blamed Michael Fellini. He had spent more than enough time instructing Cressida in his particular brand of pitiful acting.

But Victoria merely stood there, impassive, and let the play unfold as it would. And when it was finished, she bid her actors be about their business and prepare for another attempt at the beginning of the following se’nnight.

But only a fool couldn’t have seen that she was less than pleased with their efforts.

Most souls scurried past her and bolted for the gates. Fred chatted with her for several minutes and seemed impervious to her measured, even answers. Mary barked out orders to her seamstresses, then came and hopped up onto the stage. She sat on its edge and glanced back at him. She nodded toward the spot next to her. Pleased, Connor walked across the stage and dropped down to sit with her.

“Good morrow to you, lady,” he said politely.

“You could call me Granny,” she said, with a twinkle in her eye.

“It seems disrespectful, somehow,” he said seriously.

“Then call me Mary.”

“Lady Mary,” Connor countered. “ ’Tis all I can do.”

“It works for me.” She nodded toward Victoria. “She’s not pleased.”

“Aye, so I gathered.”

“We open in less than a week. The cast is still making mistakes.”

“I cannot lay those at Victoria’s feet,” Connor said seriously. “But I can lay them at Fellini’s.”

Mary nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, that’s my feeling, too.” She looked at Connor and smiled. “It’s too bad you can’t give him a little scare.”

“Ambrose attempted that and all it served was to make the man soil his trousers,” Connor said, feeling his nose turn up of its own accord. “And Ambrose doesn’t dare do more, lest the coward turn tail and flee, leaving Victoria without a Hamlet.”

“You’re certainly friendly of late with the lads down at the inn,” Mary said, looking at him assessingly. “Softening toward those dastardly MacLeods?”

“Desperate for a captain for my guard,” Connor corrected. “I’ve managed, in spite of my heavy schedule shadowing Denmark’s sniveling king, to weed out several more candidates. I fear I must begin to look farther afield. It reduces me to asking Ambrose for suggestions.”

“How awful for you.”

“My lady, you’ve no idea.”

Mary laughed. “You are a delightful man. I don’t know why Thomas told me to be careful around you.”

“Perhaps I threatened to cleave his head in twain once too often,” Connor offered.

“Perhaps,” she agreed with a smile. “I promise not to tell him how kind you’ve been. I wouldn’t want to ruin your reputation . . . Connor.” She smiled at him. “May I call you Connor?”

“Is it possible to stop you?”

“I doubt it,” she said with a laugh.

“Then you may,” he said, feeling himself begin to smile.

It felt quite odd.

Indeed, he wasn’t sure the last time he’d done the like.

“Don’t show that smile to Vikki,” Mary said in a conspiratorial whisper. “At least not until the run is over. She won’t be able to concentrate otherwise. Not that she would say anything, of course. She’s quite closed-mouthed about you.”

“She is?”

“I imagine you had quite a conversation while I snoozed last Sunday in the sitting room.”

He looked at her darkly. “Did you eavesdrop?”

“I did my best,” she said unrepentantly, “but an old woman apparently needs her rest. I’ve been trying to pry details out of her for almost a week.”