A Highlander for Christmas (12 page)

Too much imagination, she decided.

She should have been delirious with happiness, but she wasn’t. As usual, the nagging uncertainty had returned. Soon she would have to smile and perform, digging deep and remembering a thousand details that her father had taught her. Perfection was expected of Daniel Kincade’s only child.

Did she have it in her?

Maggie watched a pair of swans glide over the moat’s restless currents. She had a centuries-old necklace to repair using authentic period materials. Then she had to diagram the process exactly, explaining each step in terms that any amateur could understand. That part was daunting enough. After that came the task of completing her own designs for the Abbey Jewels collection.

No, she wasn’t smug or delirious; she was terrified.

But she straightened her shoulders and studied the trees beyond her. She would succeed with her newest designs.

She already had two projects in mind, the first a delicate silver tree inset with pave diamond fruit, the other a moat of bronze carrying swans of hammered platinum. Even now the graceful shapes whispered softly, beckoning her to begin the painstaking work of construction.

Jared put down the last of the suitcases. “Is something wrong?”

“Not really.” She crossed her arms, shivering as tendrils of mist brushed the moat. “I was just thinking about two designs I have planned. Already I can see a dozen more. There really must be some kind of magic at work in this place.”

“Everyone who comes here says that.” Jared studied the distant trees, gray with mist. “And yet everyone feels the magic in a different way.”

“What about you?”

He shrugged. “All the usual things. Grand mental panoramas of knights on horseback and arrogant statesmen who struggled to hold this place of beauty and keep its future safe.” He gave a dry laugh. “Everyone experiences a different vision of the abbey’s past, and some people seem to be affected more deeply than others. I’ll give you the grand tour tomorrow if you like, but I think we’d better go inside now.” He studied the dark slope of the woods, then turned south to the long gravel drive.

“Did you see something out there?”

He shook his head. “Only shadows. Are you certain you aren’t hungry? I can produce a tolerable omelet when required.”

“There’s no need.” Maggie stifled a yawn. “Sleep is number one on my list of priorities at the moment.” She pushed to her feet. “Tomorrow I might take you up on that offer, however.”

She raised her hands, framing a bar of moonlight. There was something strangely personal about the silence that wound through the darkness now. Nothing moved in the woods, and even the air was still. Almost as if the house was waiting for her.

The hair prickled at Maggie’s neck. For the space of a heartbeat she had the disorienting feeling that she had been here before, on a night when the moon slid low and darkness reigned at the dead of midwinter.

In that cold moment of awareness, Maggie felt the shadows press close.

Almost like memories.

That’s completely idiotic
, she thought angrily.

Mist touched her face. Overhead a layer of clouds ran before the icy curve of the moon. When Jared picked up the suitcases, she followed, almost without conscious thought. They climbed slowly, crossing broad steps scattered with the first dead leaves of winter. As Jared pushed open the oak door, Maggie had the uncomfortable sensation that someone—or something—was watching them.

~ ~ ~

Draycott Abbey lay still in the moonlight. Its stone towers and twisting chimneys rose dark as dreams atop the Sussex hills.

From a small balcony, Jared stood watching a pair of swans crisscross the moat. He knew he should fall into bed and try for a few hours of sleep. The house was utterly quiet now, and the light in Maggie Kincade’s room had gone off hours ago.

At the mere thought of her, his body tightened with awareness. He remembered the smell of her perfume in the car and her restless, broken breathing. Then her terror as she’d flung out her arms in sleep, nearly catapulting them into a ditch.

He hadn’t accepted her answers in the car or her attempts at calm. She had looked sheet-white in the moonlight and shaken to the core.

Her emotional well-being is hardly your problem
, he told himself. But his awareness of her had grown more acute. The prickling sensitivity that had caught him by surprise in New York had become far worse. He could sense her presence and her mood across a noisy room in a way that was damned uncomfortable. Even a chance brush of their fingers left him sweaty, his pulse pounding.

Since his return from Thailand he’d tried to control unwanted forays into other people’s thoughts. On the whole he had succeeded.

But this was different. Nothing matched what he felt around Maggie Kincade.

Ever since their departure from London, he had been asking himself why. Had he met her somewhere before, perhaps in a museum or a quiet shop when she’d visited England? Had that previous encounter triggered this damnable sense of familiarity he had about her?

No. Had he met her before he would have remembered every detail, every gesture on that expressive face.

His fingers closed over the chill rail of the wrought iron balcony. The why of it didn’t matter. All that mattered was this electric awareness that surfaced too often, slowing his responses and shattering his ability to assess threats. Jared knew just how dangerous that could be.

He paced restlessly, watching a bar of moonlight brush the flagstones while his mind worked through details of the upgrade to be finished on Nicholas’s security systems. He couldn’t afford to be restless, and he definitely couldn’t afford to be careless.

Jared had learned that lesson well at the ultra-secret SAS explosives school in Norfolk when a fellow soldier had been torn apart by the blast from a device that was supposedly disarmed and absolutely safe. He had learned another rule there, equally important:
You only get one chance.

Jared had blown his chance somewhere on a jungle hillside in Asia. He had died there with his blood slipping onto a cold cement floor. In the normal course of things, he would have stayed dead. And the price of his return was a skill that was fast becoming a curse.

Moonlight broke over the restless moat. As Jared stared down, he wondered how the proud walls would look in spring, wreathed in bright roses and warm sunlight.

The odd thing was that part of him already knew the answer, though he’d spent no springs within the abbey’s weathered walls Yet somehow he saw how roses would climb and twist, clustered over the gray stone.

His mouth tightened. Too much imagination played havoc with a man’s coordination and tactical responses, making abilities, making him useless in a threat. He’d tried to tell Nicholas this a dozen times, but his friend had refused to listen. That kind of loyalty could get someone killed.

Jared’s body tensed as he revisited the dark alleys and cold nights of his past. He had faced more anger and despair than most men. One by one, he had fought down his enemies and conquered his regrets. But the sense of limbo he had felt since Thailand was a special kind of hell, and waiting was all he had left. He had already glimpsed the manner and place of his own death.

It was moments like this, past midnight in the ragged hours of night, that the man from box 225 yearned for the brush of soft hands and the gentle glide of a woman’s hungry skin. If he were very lucky, maybe even with a woman of passion and curiosity like Maggie Kincade. In their heated joining Jared might have found some semblance of peace.

But the peace wouldn’t endure, he thought grimly. And he had never been a man to settle for pretense or empty fantasy.

So his bed went unshared and his pain went unassuaged. If he muttered or twisted in the night, there was no one else to hear, which was probably just as well.

He smiled wryly at the moon hanging over the gatehouse. Since his return, he’d learned to be versatile in his methods of physical distraction. A ten-mile run over steep, wooded slopes worked fairly well, but a predawn plunge in the abbey’s icy, spring-fed moat worked better still.

For the moment he decided to check the e-mail messages waiting for him on his laptop. Moving inside, he scrolled through a half dozen messages for products he didn’t need from companies he didn’t know. There was nothing of any importance waiting for him.

With a yawn, he flicked off his laptop and listened to a woman’s silky voice purr goodnight. The sound file was a little joke from his computer-genius friend, who had assured Jared that the voice belonged to a sedate grandmother of six in rural Indiana. The knowledge did nothing to dim the effect of her smoky farewell.

Jared settled in a deep wing chair beside the French doors overlooking the south lawn. Tomorrow he planned to finish testing the upgrades he’d made to the abbey’s security. With luck the whole process should require no more than several hours, in spite of the minor bugs he had discovered in the new program. If he was very lucky, he’d manage to be out of sight whenever Maggie Kincade was present.

Frowning, he picked up the latest techno-thriller, hoping it might ease him down into sleep. His gaze narrowed on the slouching figure on the jacket flap, a writer who supposedly had captured the gritty reality of post cold war Asia. The truth, Jared knew, was a lot more boring—and far more callous than any best-seller.

The man from box 225 understood that better than anyone else could.

Still, a diversion was a diversion. He flipped on a single desk lamp and settled back, book in hand, only to feel a ripple of uneasiness. Mist drifted past the window as he rubbed the knotted muscles at his neck and told himself there was no reason for wariness. The abbey’s security system was running perfectly, and no alarms had been triggered This tickle between his shoulder blades had to be pure imagination.

Shaking his head, Jared plowed into the story. After three pages, his vision darkened and the book fell forgotten at his feet. He plummeted into the cold tunnels of sleep, his heart pounding, gripped by a pain that felt as old as the unsmiling Draycott ancestor in the portrait that hung above his bed.

His fists clenched.

A dream, Jared told himself. Nothing more.

Just another bloody incomprehensible dream…

~ ~ ~

Moonlight.

Cold wind on a lonely cliff. Rain that slammed over rutted roads while danger hung like a silent, twisting noose.

He had until dawn to find her. After that she would be lost to him—and to everyone else who loved her.

He ran through trees, feeling the slap of cold boughs against his face and chest. Panting, half lost, he was. Half blind. Completely sick at the certainty of her loss.

He should have sensed her desperate plan at once. When she ‘d come to his bed, he should have known it was a ploy. Tying her to the great oak posts would have kept her from her reckless plan.

A plan meant to save him.

His dirk dug into his hip, and somewhere in the darkness came the stamp of feet. A musket discharged with sullen fury.

His hand clenched at the woman’s cry, off to the north.

The woman he had vowed to cherish and protect.

His fault.

All his fault.

Desperate to find her, he ran through the skeletal trees, heedless of safety or sense, falling straight into the trap that they had laid for him…

~ ~ ~

Jared awoke to a silent house and pain drumming in his head. No horses stamped in the courtyard. No screams filled the chill hour before dawn.

With a curse, he fought away the ragged edges of sleep. Was it the cry of a bird that had woken him or the mist that whispered against the window? Or was it simply his unconscious awareness of the woman who slept only a few rooms away?

Outside the moon hung in fragments, caught between the arms of skeletal trees.

Another bloody dream, Jared told himself. Exactly like the ones that had begun in that cramped box dug into the jungle slope.

He was scanning two files that Nicholas had left for him when a beeper sounded on his laptop. He frowned as a message flickered onto the screen. He began to type his reply, only to catch a hint of something moving down on the lawn near the moat.

Make that someone
, he thought grimly, seeing the glint of pale clothing. The hour was far too early for lost hikers or innocent tourists, and hard experience had taught Jared to be suspicious. Quickly, he pulled on worn jeans and soft-soled shoes. He half expected to hear the distant chime of church bells while the notorious abbey ghost shimmered into view beside the gatehouse, all rustling lace and hideous laughter. At least that was what a dozen tourists swore they had seen.

Jared didn’t believe a word of the stories. But at the window he froze.

A woman stood by the moat, dressed all in white.

A muscle tightened at Jared’s neck. It was Maggie.

Why was she outside near the woods at the dead of night? And why was she wearing what appeared to be a nightgown?

There was an odd, dreamy quality to her movements that made him frown.