Charmed by His Love (35 page)

He didn’t know how she did it, but her nose lifted in the air even while she still managed to keep the headlamp blaring at him. “Women do not discuss their sizes with men. I can’t wait to see what you got me for a bra,” she said, training the light down inside the pack again.

Duncan tried to stifle his chuckle but out it came anyway, although he was afraid it sounded more nervous than humorous. “I didn’t get ye a bra.”

“Because?” she asked far too softly.

“Because last time I checked I was a red-blooded male, and for us bras are just one more confounding obstacle we’ve got to get past.”

That little comment was met by silence as the lamp’s beam dropped toward the ground, only to suddenly shoot up into the forest as she scrambled to her feet. “I’d better go change,” she said.

Duncan jumped up to cut her off and pulled her into his arms. “You’re perfectly safe with me, Peg,” he quietly told her as the beam illuminated his chest. “I would never force myself on you.”

“Yeah,” she muttered. “You’ve even stopped stealing kisses.”

“Did ye ever consider I might be waiting for you to steal one from me?” He pulled the light off her head when its beam hit him smack in the eyes and tossed it on the ground as he took a calming breath. “Sometimes a man needs a little encouragement.”

“We can’t be together … that way, Duncan. It’s not that I really don’t want to, but that we … just can’t.”

“Because our making love might kill me?” He snorted. “Trust me, Peg; what I’m about to show you will make your family curse look like a parlor trick.”

“Olivia
told
you about my curse?”

“No, Mac told me after Olivia told him.”

“She told
Mac
?”

Duncan smiled at the horror in her voice. “What, do ye honestly believe that husbands and wives don’t share their concerns for a friend with each other? Tell me, did you keep secrets from your husband?”

“Um … I guess not.”

Duncan prepared himself for a really big gasp this time. “So ye never told him about the kiss from the ski patroller who got you safely down off TarStone eleven years ago? Were ye not dating your future husband at the time?”

Only instead of gasping, she went as still as a stone. “How do you know about that?” she whispered, the horror back in her voice. “Ohmigod. Ohmigod,” she repeated louder, suddenly struggling to get free.

Duncan crushed her against him with a laugh. “I guess we know what sort of impression I made on you that day, don’t we?” He threaded his fingers through her hair and tilted her head back, turning serious. “Do you have any idea how many nights I lay awake thinking about the bonnie lass I let get away? Ye haunted my dreams for years.” He lowered his mouth to hers. “Ye still do,” he murmured, capturing another “Ohmigod” when he kissed her.

Not that she participated—as usual. In fact, this time she gave him a punch in the belly and started talking the moment he lifted his head.

“It was
you
,” she cried. “Even after I told you I’d gotten separated from my
boyfriend
, you kissed me
again
.”

“Ye had such a kissable mouth, lass. Ye still do,” he said,
pulling her more firmly against him when she tried to punch him again.

“You gave me a card with your phone number.” She snorted. “You actually had cards made up to … What? To hand out to every female you rescued?”

“I saw ye slip it inside your bra when you thought I wasn’t looking,” he said, struggling to hold back his laughter.

“Only so I could show my friends what an arrogant, no-good, rotten—”

He kissed her again, partly to shut her up but mostly to taste her fire. She might not remember their kiss all that fondly, but he sure as hell did. Because even being the skirt-chasing idiot he had been at the time, he’d recognized that the young girl was different; her taste and smell and contrariness at not kissing him back, her not agreeing to meet him that evening because she had a boyfriend, and refusing even to give him her name.

Christ, talk about Providence having two people’s paths cross; he’d searched every damn square inch of the resort for a week after finding her lost and hurt and crying in the woods several hundred yards from the trail, even chasing down every female he saw wearing a bright pink knit hat. But a damn lot of women wore pink hats, he’d quickly discovered to his frustration.

Duncan’s attention suddenly snapped back to the woman he was kissing right now when he realized she’d wrapped her arms around his waist and was kissing him back. Lord, she tasted as good as he remembered when her lips parted and her tongue tentatively touched his. And that’s when he knew why her apple crisps were so sweet, because he caught himself wanting to lick every square inch of her.

“Ohmigod,” she said in a winded whisper, breaking it off and burying her face in—did she just lick his neck? “We can’t do this, Duncan.”

“Okay, we won’t,” he said, grinning over the top of her head.

He was surprised she even knew the cuss word she muttered under her breath, and decided he better not kiss her again, afraid he wouldn’t stop until they were both naked and sweaty and too exhausted to move. Speaking of which, he noticed
she didn’t seem in any hurry to move right now, and in fact actually snuggled into him.

“Is this cave very far from here?”

“Nay, it’s only about five miles to the entrance.”

Her head reared back. “Five
miles
? All uphill? It’s going to take all night to get there. Wait, how far from the entrance to whatever the thing is I’m supposed to get?”

He shrugged. “A little over a mile down.”

She scrambled away with a small shriek. “Down?
Inside the mountain?
” She started backing away, and Duncan could see in the beam of the headlamp lying on the moss that she was shaking her head. “I’m not going a mile underground. Ohmigod, if I wasn’t claustrophobic before, I certainly am now just thinking about it.”

“It’s a really big cave most of the way; only the last twenty or so feet are tight. There is one area we had to build a bridge across, but other than that the going is easy and not all that steep.”

“Can’t you just get a long, flexible stick to reach whatever you’re trying to get?”

“Sorry. I thought about sending the pup in, but Robbie believes it’s going to require someone with opposable thumbs,” he said, smiling when she stepped into a beam of moonlight and he saw her scowl. “I told ye that Mac made it impossible for me to reach
all by myself
.”

“Again, what does Mac have to do with any of this?”

Duncan walked over and picked up the jeans and sweatshirt and handed them to her. “Change your clothes and boots, and on our hike up the mountain I’ll tell ye everything I know about Mac.”

Apparently not believing him, he saw her chin take on a stubborn tilt. “Tell me one thing about him now.”

“Okay. Maximilian Oceanus is a theurgist. Or in laymen terms, a wizard, with the power to move mountains and turn freshwater lakes into inland seas.”

Peg was finding it difficult to dress in complete darkness—she wasn’t about to use the light with Duncan sitting twenty feet away—what with her hands not wanting to cooperate. The only problem was, she didn’t know if she was shaking from being kidnapped, or from realizing the reason the name MacKeage had been familiar is that it had been on the card the kidnapping kiss-thief had given her eleven years ago. Because she really couldn’t be this rattled from Duncan’s telling her that Mac was a wizard, because that was absolutely impossible.

What had Olivia called it? Earth-shaking, mountain-moving, anything is possible magic—which meant her best friend had knowingly married a
friggin’ wizard
.

And Duncan needed her help to find something buried inside a mountain so he could get hold of some of that magic for himself. Magic that Mac had hidden in a place that would force Duncan to kidnap her because she had less broad shoulders and smaller hands—and opposable thumbs—and could climb into a really narrow twenty- or thirty-foot cave a
friggin’ mile
underground to get it for him.

Okay. If this wasn’t the most bizarre dream she’d ever had, then she was tripping out on plumber’s glue or contact cement fumes or something. Yeah, her house hadn’t burned to its foundation;
she was hallucinating and just imagining all this weird stuff—including, she hoped to God, her beautiful new truck being a mangled wreck.

“Do ye need some help?” Duncan asked way too pleasantly.

Peg gave a snort just as she finally managed to get the one-size-too-small jeans zipped up and fastened. She then slipped the hooded sweatshirt over her head, only to discover it came down to her knees and the sleeves hung six inches past her hands. “Jeesh,” she muttered, rolling up the sleeves as she walked over to the backpack and sat down. “Why would anyone think just because a woman might be a size twenty that she has gorilla arms?”

“Ye look like a kid playing dress-up,” Duncan said, holding the beam of the headlamp toward her at an angle that didn’t shine it in her eyes. “I’m really sorry that I messed up on the sizes, Peg. Are the pants okay?”

“Sure, they fit perfectly as long as I don’t breathe. I’m just glad the salesgirl wasn’t a size three.” She pulled off her knee-highs and slipped on the wool socks, then grabbed the boots and pulled them on and started lacing them. “What did you mean when you were trying to get me out of the boat that you need the magic to keep me safe?”

There was what Peg considered an ominous pause before he answered. “I can’t say exactly, as it’s just a feeling I have that our little run-in with Dubois tonight won’t be the last.” He reclined back on an elbow and toyed with the headlamp even while keeping its beam trained on her feet. “I don’t like that he’s targeting you, and I have a worry that an army of sheriffs won’t be able to find him if he doesn’t want to be found. Ye said he’s a logger, so he knows these woods better than anyone.”

She stopped lacing. “And you think if you have whatever’s in the mountain that
you
can catch Chris? Duncan, you can’t just take the law into your own hands like that.”

“No,” he said, sitting up. “But I can make damn sure the bastard doesn’t get close enough to harm you—or your children. And with the magic, I’m fairly certain I can do it in a way that’s … well, that’s inoffensive to Providence.”

“Providence?”

“That would be the power of life, lass, the very heartbeat
of the universe.” He grinned. “And ye don’t ever want to piss off Providence, so you make sure the magic ye work is always for the benefit of mankind.”

“But didn’t your father tell me you flew helicopters in Iraq? How do you reconcile the benevolent magic you and Olivia keep talking about with being a soldier?”

He snorted. “War is completely devoid of magic.” He grinned again. “But ye may recall I mentioned that a strong arm is sometimes needed to help benevolence along.” He started toying with the headlamp again, working the straps and making the beam wobble through the darkness. “I may have been raised a warrior, but I’ve never relished the fight.” He swept the beam through the treetops above them. “I much prefer to battle the elements in God’s cathedral. Ye like the outdoors yourself, Peg; I’ve watched you spend every day at your beach that ye could, and see you teaching your children to embrace nature.” He dropped the lamp and rose to his knees in front of her, and clasped her hands in his. “That’s why I wasn’t worried about bringing ye here to hike a living, breathing, magical mountain with me, and have ye sleep on the ground and drink from its springs and eat the food it willingly provides. You and I are kindred spirits, Peg, and that’s a gift I’d given up on ever finding. Will ye give me a chance to prove that together we can be stronger than a curse? If not for yourself, then would ye do it for Charlotte and Isabel?”

“What do they have to do with … us?”

“Together we can make sure your girls are given the chance to grow old with the men they love.” There was enough light for Peg to see his smile. “And also your mum and your aunt Bea. Wouldn’t ye like to see them find love again as well?”

“You’re using my
family
to persuade me to have sex with you?”

His smile widened and he nodded, and Peg was sure she saw a sparkle come into his eyes. “We MacKeages can be real bastards like that sometimes, especially with the women we love.”

His hands tightened on hers when she flinched on an indrawn breath. He let her go to cup her face.

“Yes, ye heard correctly; I love you, lass.”

“You can’t,” she barely managed to whisper. “We’ve known each other a week.”

“Nay, more than two.” He pulled her toward him even as he leaned closer. “But it’s been two weeks and eleven years for me,” he murmured just before he kissed her.

And Peg was instantly transported to a mountain forest where she’d sat crying in the snow—lost and hurt and scared to death—when this big, strong, and way too handsome man in a TarStone ski patrol jacket had appeared out of nowhere and dried her tears, assured her that her ankle was only sprained, and then pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Oh, she remembered Duncan MacKeage, right down to how he’d made her insides clench and her mouth go dry and her heart pound so hard she’d thought she was going to pass out, only to then wake up to find it had been nothing more than a wonderfully exciting dream—just like she must be dreaming now.