Return of the Highlander (Immortal Warriors) (4 page)

The fair-headed man standing behind her was taller, his face fleshy and ruddy as if he were jolly by nature. But from his narrowed eyes and pinched mouth Maclean knew he wasn’t feeling very jolly just now. He was angry.

“This is a mistake.” The man spat that last word out, and the woman flinched.

This is a mistake, Brian had said.

“A mistake?” Bella repeated, tucking her hair behind her ear. There was a sick feeling in her stomach, just as there always was at the beginning of one of their arguments, but this time it was mixed with a flicker of flame.

“We should have taken a place in Edinburgh, somewhere closer to civilization.”

“But we decided,” she said. “We decided that this was the best place for me to write my book. You know how important it is for me to get close to my…my subject. And anyway, I thought you said we needed a holiday together. Just you and me.”

Brian pulled a face as if she had said something particularly ridiculous. He was good at making her feel ridiculous.

The flame flared up a notch.

“Well, I’ve changed my mind. We only have six weeks left on the lease, and I’m sick and tired of rough
ing it in this hovel with nothing to do. Hamish says I can help him with his antique export business—he says I’d make an excellent front man.”

“But you said you wanted a holiday! That you’d take a break from work so that we could spend time together.” Not that Brian ever worked at any job for very long; he was always trying to “find” himself and so far the perfect profession had proved elusive. “You said you hated antiques.”

“Did I?” Brian’s voice was doubtful, as if she were making the mistake, not him.

“Brian, how can you change your mind like this?”

“I’m bored.”

The silence was painful. Everything was falling apart and she couldn’t seem to find the words to make it right—she didn’t know if she wanted to.

“Let’s pack now.” He was smiling again, pretending it was just a minor hiccup. The liar. “We can be in Edinburgh by—”

“No.”

The word surprised her as much as Brian, but as soon as she said it she knew it was the right one. For the first time Brian appeared uncertain, as if he might not get his way.

“No,” she repeated it, and it felt even better. “I like it here. My writing is going well. I actually feel as if I’m in touch with my muse again. I’m not leaving now, Brian.”

That look again, as if he could hardly believe his ears. “Your muse?” he repeated, and shook his head. Bella could hear his thoughts; he didn’t have to say them aloud.
We both know you’re wasting your time.
You’re just a poor little rich girl playing at being a writer. When will you face reality?

“You know how hard it’s been for me over the past year,” she tried again. “I hadn’t been able to write since I finished
Martin’s Journey
, but being here…it’s as if…” she struggled to make him understand. To understand herself. “As if I’ve found myself again. This book is important to me, Brian. I need these six weeks.”

“You can write just as well in Edinburgh,” he said sulkily.

“No, I can’t. There’s something about this place—”

“You mean apart from the plumbing?”

Had he made a joke? For a moment Bella thought it would be all right, and then Brian reached out and clasped her hands and she knew he hadn’t given in. He wouldn’t give in. He never did. It was always Bella who gave in, because it was not in her nature to confront, and she hated arguments.

Lassie, that’s just pathetic
, said a voice in her head, and it sounded like the Black Maclean’s. Or how she imagined he would sound, if he were not two and a half centuries dead.

“Come on, Bella,” Brian said, smiling, earnest. “I’ve known you for years. Your father asked me to look after you when he died, he always said we were meant for each other. I understand you.”

Her cheeks felt hot. “You don’t understand me any more than he did, Brian.”

Her father had never believed in her, either, although he had dutifully loved her, and left her a sizable legacy when he died.

“I need to get out of here, Bella,” Brian was saying. “It’s driving me mad. I want to give the antiques thing a try, and Hamish and Georgiana will put us up until we can find our own place. Someplace where I won’t be ashamed to bring my friends.”

“Or is it me you’re ashamed of?” She cut angrily through his words.

He laughed uncomfortably, but the truth was in his eyes. Once he had found pleasure in her rather quaint, old-fashioned manner, but no more. Now he wanted someone like Georgiana, svelte and sophisticated. Out with the old, in with the new.

“We can explore the city,” he was saying. “We can eat out, party. Live it up. You’ll love it, Bella, really.”

“I’ll hate it,” she said quietly, and knew it for the truth. This time she was not going to take the road of least resistance.

His mouth twisted. “I didn’t want to tell you this, Bella. God knows I’ve tried to be supportive, to steer you in the right direction, but it’s too late for subtleties now. You’re turning into a selfish bore. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about your silly little books, and neither does anyone else. That’s why no one reads ’em. Look at you! You used to take care of yourself, but lately you just don’t care. Couldn’t you find something to make you look less fat? I mean, in God’s name, what
is
that you’re wearing?”

“Is my robe not Gucci enough for you, Brian?” she asked bitterly, and now the flames were in her eyes, because he took a step back. “And as for fat, well, this is the body I was born with. Marilyn Monroe would be called
fat these days, too. And for your information, if I don’t take care of myself—and I’m not saying that’s true—it’s because I’m unhappy. You make me unhappy.”

“
I
make
you
unhappy!”

“Yes. Yes! You’re a mean-spirited, egotistical bully. Go to Edinburgh. I hope you and Hamish and Georgiana will be very happy together.”

He stared at her as if he had never seen her before.

“Good,” he said in a flat, cold voice. “I didn’t want you to come with me anyway. I’m tired of playing second fiddle to a dead man. I’ll just leave you to your pathetic delusions.”

He walked over to the wall and ripped down the copy of Maclean’s portrait and crumpled it into a ball.

She gave a cry of distress. “For God’s sake, are you really jealous of a painting?”

He didn’t bother to answer her, his face filled with vicious satisfaction. “When you decide to rejoin the human race you know where to find me,” he said, and flung the paper into the corner as he turned to the stairs, making certain he got the last word.

Bella listened to him opening and closing doors, and throwing his cases around up in the bedroom, and then the ominous clatter of his shoes on the stairs. Brian was leaving again and this time it was for good.

She was glad. She was, she really…

The front door slammed.

…was.

Bella felt her shoulders sag a little as the flames died. It was over. Brian was gone and she was all alone in an isolated cottage in the Highlands of Scotland.

Bella and her muse.

Maclean stood listening to the receding monster. He hadn’t liked the man. He hadn’t liked the way he had spoken to the woman. Maclean felt strangely indignant on her behalf, almost…protective. As for the wee cottage…Maclean looked at it with distain. He was Chief of the Macleans of Fasail, the Black Maclean, and this was no place for him.

He had drawn himself up in his pride, but now his shoulders slumped. What was the point of such arrogance if no one knew he was here? If no one could see him to obey his every word? If his people were all gone and his lands empty apart from the rain and the wind?

The Highlander stood outside in the night, gazing in through the window, his emotions twisting and turning inside him like serpents’ tails. A night bird called out, the eerie sound echoing across the loch. He felt more alone than ever.

There was nowhere else for him to go. He knew it. The knowledge was a bitter bubble in his throat. But if the
Fiosaiche
had meant such a realization to humble him, then she was mistaken. Maclean did not bow to man or woman.

He almost, in his pride, turned away again, but at the last moment his gaze was drawn back to the woman. She was cutting vegetables on a board, behaving as if the argument with the man had never happened.
As if she had never driven her man away
, he corrected himself, pushing aside his earlier indignation. Betrayal, deception, mistrust. The words hammered his brain, and he knew that something very similar had happened to him, if only he could remember what it was….

He breathed hard, and then stilled. She tugged at him. Was she some sort of witch? His gaze slid over her soft cheek and full mouth, and the way her lashes lay long and dark against her pale skin. Aye, maybe she was a witch, for as he stared he felt his ghostly self begin to ache for her in a manner that was all too mortal.

And then he saw a tear roll down her cheek, followed by another.

She was crying while she worked, and her lips were moving. Talking to herself? Or, could it be, singing, to try and lift her spirits? Whatever it was, it wasn’t working.

She was not so hard-hearted after all, he realized. She was hurting. And alone. Maclean was stunned to think that there was a fellow creature in this strange new world who suffered.

Instinctively he stepped forward and splayed his hand against the glass, as if to touch her, to give comfort to her.

And just like that he was inside the cottage, inside the warm comfortable room, with the darkness behind him.

Bella slid the vegetables into the pan. They
would cook up nicely into a stir fry and…well, she was the sort of woman who always felt ravenously hungry when she was stressed.

She lifted her chin. Too bad what Brian would think about that. She wouldn’t allow him to destroy her, even though there was a little voice in her head, the voice that belonged to her mother, telling her that what he said was true. Her mother, as thin as a whippet and perfectly turned out in her Chanel suit, could demolish her daughter’s shaky self-esteem with a single glance. She was never unkind, she didn’t need to be, but she couldn’t hide her disappointment that her daughter wasn’t as perfect as she would have liked. She left when Bella was six and now Brian was going, too.

Back to Edinburgh
. Back to his own world among his own people; people who appreciated his wit and charm. Unlike her, who saw his other side. Hamish and Geor
giana would sympathize with him, shaking their heads, smug in the certainty that they were right and she was a lost cause. Well, let them!

It’s over.

Brian and Bella’s Story had ended and now Bella had to write a new one, called Bella on Her Own. The prospect left her daunted and uncertain, but she told herself that being alone was better than listening to Brian belittle her. Loneliness was like an old friend, one she was comfortable with.

Then why wouldn’t the tears stop?

The food in the cooking pan spat and a burning droplet touched her skin. Shocked, she gasped and stepped back, holding her wrist. Swearing under her breath, she turned toward the sink, ready to run cold water over the small burn.

And that was when she saw it.

The ghost.

In a split second, out of the corner of her eye, between one heartbeat and another. He must have been standing behind her so that as she turned he was to her left. He was a big man. Taller than her, taller than Brian, so tall he had to bend his head to stand beneath the low ceiling of the kitchen. He wore a plaid of mostly green and blue that was fastened about his hips and swept over one shoulder in the traditional way, and a black velvet jacket with silver buttons over a loose white shirt. Dark hair hung in wet swaths about his head, brushing his shoulders. His face was intensely masculine, domineering, and very handsome. But it was his eyes that riveted her attention. They were pale blue, the same color as this evening’s sky, and they were looking straight at her.

One moment he was standing in her kitchen and the next…

He was gone.

Bella cried out and fell against the sink, holding herself up. Dear God, what was that? The room was empty. Her head swung back and forth—yes, definitely empty. And silent. The quiet was like a sound in itself. Rationally Bella knew she was alone, that Brian was on the road to Edinburgh, that outside her window this land was deserted and had been for centuries.

Was he a ghost? Shocked as she was, the man had looked oddly familiar…those pale eyes in that fiercely beautiful face. She knew him, she knew him—

Smoke was beginning to rise from the pan. Oh God, the food was burning! Bella moved, warily, toward the stove. She was loath to go anywhere near the spot where
he
had been. She edged around it, and as she took the pan off the heat she realized why he had seemed familiar.

Bella spun and stared at the wall above the bookshelf. The portrait was gone—Brian had seen to that—but she did not need to see it to know that the ghost—if that was what he was—resembled the Black Maclean. Not so elegant, perhaps, for the ghost’s clothing had been damp and untidy, but essentially the same. The odd thing was…his eyes. The pupils were large and dark. Wild, just as Bella imagined her own to have been. As if seeing her had been just as much of a shock to him as seeing him had been to her.

Were ghosts frightened by human beings?

The idea made her giggle hysterically, and she bit her lip.

“Stop it,” she whimpered. “Just stop it.”

The research she had done on present-day Loch Fasail said nothing about any sightings of Maclean’s ghost. Maybe the cottage was haunted? Bella knew that although Castle Drumaird had been built in the thirteenth century, her cottage was only a hundred years old. But it
had
been built with stone from the ruins. Perhaps stone could contain past memories; perhaps with the stone had come the ghost.

The thought startled her into remembering something that happened earlier, when she had gone for her walk. As she was leaving the ruins for the path down the hill she had felt something odd. A cold tingle down her backbone. An awareness. A sense of something that shouldn’t be there.

She’d forgotten about it. Brian being in the cottage when she arrived back had emptied everything else from her mind. But now she could not help but ask herself:
Did Maclean follow me home?

Had he walked a pace behind her, silent, unseen, those pale eyes fixed on her back, his breath a cold touch against her skin?

I’m waiting for Maclean.

“Oh my God.” Bella turned a full circle, checking the shadows again. The trouble with being a writer was her vivid imagination; she’d frightened herself. Maybe she should call Brian’s cell phone and ask him to—

But Bella stopped right there. Brian was gone; it was over. Ghost or no ghost, she was staying. Her writing was going well and leaving would be a mistake, especially when she wasn’t even certain whether or not she had seen
it.
In fact, the more she tried to remember ex
actly what had happened, the more she doubted it was anything other than a…

“Hallucination.”

Yes, that’s all it was. She’d had that weird dream and her emotions had been in an upheaval with Brian leaving, and then she’d been writing about the Black Maclean. It was natural that she would imagine him appearing to her…. Well, it made a sort of sense. Ghostor no ghost, Bella wouldn’t phone Brian, not after what he had said and done. She knew she was better than that.

The food was cooked. She tipped it out of the pan onto a plate and carried it over to the kitchen table and sat down. She and Brian had been eating in the other room. Brian had found a proper dining table from somewhere, and every night they’d lit candles and set out cutlery and crockery, just as he liked it. But tonight she refused to go through that charade. What was the point when she was by herself?

If
she was by herself.

“Stop it!” Ghost or not, she was alone. Face it. Deal with it. Move on.

Murmuring a song by Jewel under her breath, she opened one of her notebooks, propped it up beside her, and began to read about life as it was in the Maclean stronghold of Loch Fasail in the eighteenth century.

Maclean focused his attention on the woman at the table. He hadn’t imagined it, he knew he hadn’t. She had seen him! Her eyes had widened, the brown of them completely surrounded by white, and she’d made a mewling sound like a kitten. Aye, she had seen something, and she had been looking directly at
him
.

Hope blossomed. She had seen him. He could work on that. If she had seen him once, she could see him again. He’d
make
her see him again!

“Lass?”

She did not look up from her book. A little frown wrinkled her brow.

“I know I can make you hear me,” he muttered, moving closer. He stood, looking down at her. The gloss of her dark hair shone in the light that dangled from the ceiling like an overripe pear and hurt his eyes if he looked directly at it. So he didn’t, and looked at her instead. Her robe gaped open at her throat, giving him a fine view of her plump breasts, her skin was pale as snow.

The sight of the woman stirred something in him. It was true she had the looks and body that he admired in a lassie, but it was not just lust. This was another emotion, something he had not felt in a very long time. It was the same feeling he had when he saw her crying, a softening inside him, an ache that had no name. He pushed it back, smothered it, denied it. Just as he had been doing all his life. He was a warrior, his father’s son, and women were just another possession to be owned. As valuable as his livestock, but not worth as much to him as his broadsword. They served their purpose and beyond that they were invisible.

And he saw nothing ironic in the thought.

Maclean took another step closer, his kilt brushing her elbow. She continued to read, the food on her plate forgotten. He reached out a hand and touched her hair, lightly, attempting to feel the texture of it. His fingers slipped through it, touching nothing but air.

He swore.

She turned a page.

“You
will
know I am here,” he said hoarsely, staring at her so intently he was certain she must feel his presence. “I promise you that, woman.”

She glanced up as if something had attracted her attention. Her face had a blurred, distant look, her thoughts still with the book.

“I’m here, my pretty lassie,” he said. “And aye, you’re a bonny one, all right. If I were a man again, I’d see you dressed in silk skirts like the fine ladies of Edinburgh, and enjoy taking them off you.”

She cleared her throat.

He held his breath.

She turned back to her book. “Strange,” she murmured. “I thought I heard an insect buzzing….” And she flipped over the page and kept reading. “‘The Macleans of Loch Fasail are unrelated to the southern clan of the same name who reside near Loch Linnhe. They are a branch who settled in Fasail around 1270, gaining their lands from the powerful Mackenzies, and ruling from their residence of Castle Drumaird. They lived a relatively peaceful life, apart from a continuing feud with their nearest neighbors, the Macleods of Mhairi.’”

Maclean rolled his eyes.

“Hmm, let’s see, what’s this? ‘An Eyewitness Account of a Traveler in the Highlands, 1742.’ He says here:

As he listened to the sweet rise and fall of her voice, he began to remember the bridge. The winter had been the worst he had known, so cold many had not survived it, and when the snow and ice had melted from the moors and mountains, the loch had brimmed its banks and the stream had raged like a wild thing. Maclean remembered searching for the body of a young woman, but she had been drowned too deep to be found. He had ordered his carpenters to build the bridge as soon as they were able and, wood being a rarity, had sent for sturdy hardwood to be carted to Loch Fasail. No mean task.

“So, Maclean, a railing low enough so that wee children didn’t slip through.” The woman tapped the page and smiled as if such a thing amused her. Or maybe pleased her. “Not so black-hearted, after all.”

“’Tis a matter of practicalities,” he said angrily. “Every winter children die, and children grow into men and women who work my land and fight for me against
my enemies. I need them all. Why would I no’ save them if I could?”

His face felt hot. Something about the woman’s knowing smile made him uneasy, as if she saw things he preferred she did not. He glowered at her a moment more, but it did no good, so he went to explore the rest of the cottage. There was little to see. He noted gloomily that the rooms were poky and chilly, and halfway up the narrow stairs the lights went out. He paused, listening to the woman cursing and bumping into things in the darkness.

“Aye, now you’re no’ smiling,” he muttered with some satisfaction, and continued on. The darkness did not affect him. It was as if, like him, it did not exist.

Upstairs there was a room with a shiny bath fixed to the floor and a thing with a lid that looked enough like the water closet he’d had built in Castle Drumaird to make him think a man might piddle in it, and another bowl, shiny like the bath, with a cake of soap in a little dish nearby. Next he found the chamber where she slept, under the slope of the roof. The height of the room was uncomfortably low, even worse than those downstairs. Maclean tried to straighten, expecting his head to pass through the ceiling, but instead it hit the wood with a dull crack.

Cursing, rubbing his skull, he spent some time examining her belongings. Female things, fripperies, he thought with disdain, and yet he was curious enough to peer into the open pots of cream. They smelled like her, sweet and fragrant. There was a bristle brush for her long dark hair with some of the strands caught in it still. Clothing of many colors lay untidily on the bed, the
materials different from any he had ever seen. Did no one spin and weave anymore? In Maclean’s time the women of the glen wore a plain shift with a skirt and jacket over it, and over that an arisaid, the female equivalent of the plaid.

There was a looking glass, but when he went and stood before it he had no reflection.

Frustrated, he turned to the table on the far side of the bed. It was swept clean. Even the second pillow had been removed from the bed.

The man really was gone, and it did not seem as if he were returning.

Had she driven him away as the man had seemed to be accusing her? Maclean had disliked the man, but that did not mean he should take the woman’s side in this matter. A man’s thoughts and feelings must always come first. Man was superior to woman, and Maclean did not believe two hundred and fifty years had changed that fundamental law.

Still…“The lass shouldn’t be alone. She needs a man to care for her, to warm her in the night, to make children in her belly.”