The Storyteller: A Highland Romance (Ghosts of Culloden Moor Book 45)

by TERRI BRISBIN

  So, someone had sent her a kindred spirit rather than a cantankerous or argumentative one. The more he spoke of his life and his death and his stories, Fee understood that their lives and losses had led them to a similar ending. Or, in her case, an attempted one. In her opinion, he was the perfect person to whom to tell the truth, the whole truth.

  If this was her moment of clarity, then, so be it.

  They’d walked just a short distance on the path when he held out his arm. She took hold as they moved along, heading toward the ocean. This path was a different one and it would take them downhill to a small clearing that was closer to the beach. And even if it was a smoother, easier surface and not as hard for her to keep her balance, Fee held onto his strong arm anyway.

  It didn’t take them long to reach the clearing, not with his support. She’d noticed that he’d shortened his stride to match hers and let her set their pace. Long legs like his would cover the distance much faster than hers. She remembered staring at his legs in those tight pants and could feel a blush creep up on her cheeks. If he noticed that, he said nothing of it.

  The clearing was just that, a small, almost-circular area without trees which sat overlooking the beach below. The scene of many private and romantic moments in her family happened in this place. Arguments, too. This was where Steve proposed to her that summer before everything in her life changed irreparably.

  “Here, sit,” Struan said, easing her over to one of the huge boulders that lay strewn around the edge. “Ye did well, lass.” Somehow, the way he called her ‘lass’ warmed her heart. That accent and voice didn’t hurt either.

  “Thank you for your help. I can’t remember making it this far so smoothly in a long time.”

  She released his arm and he moved away. He crossed his arms over his chest and nodded in reply to her thanks.

  “Not since the accident then?”

  Fee let out a sigh. Either it was a good guess or Matt, the local gossip, had told him what had happened. “Matt?” she guessed.

  “Aye. Matt. Though he did not say much. He seemed to guard yer privacy as if ye paid him to do so.”

  “Yet he brought you back to the cabin and put groceries on my bill.” Matt and Janet were so soft-hearted, she didn’t doubt that they would have done that for him even if he’d not used her name. “What did you tell them?”

  “Me? I said only that I was staying with ye on this unexpected trip and that ye needed some supplies.”

  Oh gosh, they must have thought Struan was a new boyfriend she’d brought from the city. “What did they say to that?” She smiled then, imagining how they must have almost salivated over this juicy tidbit of gossip they could share with the other residents.

  “Well, Matt said ‘twas about time and that I should enjoy the weekend.” He paused and looked over at her with a very uncomfortable expression on his face. “Janet, well, Janet got a bit teary and told me that we should just be happy.”

  Fee’s eyes teared then and her throat grew tight. “They’re good people.”

  “They care about ye, lass.” He sat next to her then and she eased over on the rock so he could fit there. “So, tell me about the accident.”

  “I’m sure they told you the details.”

  “Nay. They said nothing of it. Just referred to it—‘since the accident,’ and so on.” He settled next to her, his warmth already seeping into her body where they touched. “When did it happen?”

  “Three years, two months, one week and … four days ago.”

  He made a sound then, kind of a soft exhalation out of his nose, that seemed to say he was surprised by her precise measure of time passed and yet not. He nudged her lightly. “Go on then.”

  The words poured out faster than she’d expected. Something in the way he held in any comments and questions and only seemed to wait on her made it easier to tell the horrible story.

  “Do you know anything about me? My family?” she asked. She’d not thought about that until just now.

  “Nay, lass. Only what ye have shared with me. Yer name, yer sister’s name.”

  “My family owns several businesses. Owned.” She owned them all now. “I ran one of them out of a condo that serves as our headquarters in Boston.” She waited for his reaction to that but he didn’t move or speak. “I’d called them all to a meeting about some plans I’d been making. Expansion. Development. Changes. And I wanted their approval even if I didn’t need their permission.”

  “Ye could do such things on yer own then?” he asked.

  “Yes. I could.”

  “Good for ye, lass.” She felt the approval in those small words all the way into her soul. It didn’t make sense that this stranger’s words meant so much, but they did.

  “No one knew that gas was leaking from the heater below us. No one heard or smelled anything until it exploded.”

  “Good God Almighty!” he whispered as he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and held her. “It must have been terrible.”

  Coming from a man who’d faced the cannons of war on battlefields, it made her realize the true situation. She’d lived through it, but remembered almost nothing of the moments after the horrendous sound and the blast of heat and light engulfed them all.

  “I have no memory of the days and weeks after the blast. Most of the surgeries needed to save my life or piece me back together were done in those empty days. They told me that everyone but my sister and me died instantly. She didn’t make it past the first day.”

  “So, ‘twas yer parents, yer sister and brother and ye?”

  “And two of our staff secretaries and a custodian who was cleaning upstairs.”

  He reached out and wiped across her cheek with a gentle motion. Tears. He was wiping her tears.

  “So ye had no one to help ye? No one to have a care for ye?” She choked at his words then and on the tears, on the memories, and the loss.

  “My fiancé helped. At first.”

  Struan released her and turned to face her. “Ye are betrothed? Then where is the bastard now if not at yer side in a time of such dire need?”

  Chapter Nine

  She wanted to kiss this man. She wanted to throw her arms around him and hug him so hard for his disgruntled anger at a man he did not know. Angry on her behalf. No one had ever expressed anything but understanding for Steve and the broken engagement just two months after her release from the hospital for the final time.

  No one had understood her needs. He’d boasted about an offer of a better job in New York City and how she needed to focus on her recovery. It had sounded caring and concerned but the man did not care for anyone but himself. He did not want to have to wait around and he did not want to wait on her. Her physical therapy and emotional support would be too hard for him.

  Fee had been too weak and torn apart and devastated to realize it at the time. But, that revelation was one of few good ones she’d had in all the counseling that followed.

  Struan stood then and took a few steps away before looking at her.

  “He is no man if he would desert ye at a time like this,” he said, anger infusing every word. Then, he spit on the ground at his feet and shook his head. “No man at all.”

  Once more she was struck with the urge to run to him and hug him. Instead, the untimely need that bubbled up from deep within her could not be controlled. She laughed then, a loud, inappropriate laugh that had the man staring at her across the clearing.

  “I am sorry, Struan. I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just that no one in all this time has ever taken my side. No one thought him the bad guy in our situation. I had myself convinced that I did not deserve him.”

  “Aye, lass. Ye have the right of it—ye did not deserve such a lack-witted, milk-sop, self-centered cur as that. Thank the Almighty ye are not saddled with him in matrimony.” He stopped then and his expression went blank. “Oh, Holy Mother of Christ, tell me ye didna marry the bastard!”

  Fee did it again. She lau
ghed until all the muscles in her face and stomach hurt. When he approached her, still staring quite seriously at her and waiting for an answer, she held up her hand and shook her head.

  “No! I am not married to him.”

  “Weel, thank the Almighty,” he said as he sat down at her side. “That would have been a mistake not easily undone.” He lifted her hand in his and stroked it with his thumb, his motions gentle and soothing. “I beg yer pardon for losing my temper, lass.” He leaned in closer and spoke in a softer tone. “Why is he not here by yer side, easing yer burdens and helping ye during yer troubles?”

  She stared at the movements of his thumb on her scars there and knew the truth—this man would have died with his family if he’d been there. He would have fought to his death to protect them. Loyalty shone in his gaze and Fee understood right then and there, that her story would have had a different ending if she’d met a man like him instead of Stephen Richards.

  “He chose himself over me. Simple as that,” she admitted. “When I survived but was injured and not perfect according to his standards, he found excuses not to stay.” She let out a sigh then and shrugged. “I thought if one more surgery could repair the damage, if one more treatment or therapy could restore me, he would stay and love me.”

  “Bastard.” He whispered the word under his breath, but she heard it and it made her smile again. “Ye lived through hell, lost everyone and he left ye. My mam would say ‘better to leave the rubbish behind than to carry it in yer pocket.’”

  “I think I would have liked your mother.”

  Struan smiled back and nodded. “Aye.”

  They sat silently for a few minutes, with only the sound of the relentless crashing of the waves on the rocks and beach around them. The lochs where he’d lived could get quite wild and rough but never like the ocean did. He’d visited his uncle who lived out on one of the islands and found himself completely under the spell of the motion of the waves.

  “Ye have not spoken of why ye are responsible for their deaths.”

  Her body reacted, he could feel the way she began to pull away from him then, but he refused to allow it. He held her hand firmly until she gave up trying. His thumb traced the web of scars then. He’d noticed the motion seemed to ease her in some way.

  “I called them there that day.”

  “This explosion? It could have happened at any time?”

  “Yes, but I brought them there when we could have spoken at home. And …”

  Struan comprehended that her next words were the heart of the matter. He’d never truly confessed his own guilt in his family’s death to her but she was about to reveal hers to him.

  “I was in charge of overseeing the maintenance of the heater. I’d ignored the reminders from the service company. They’d warned me that cleaning and … upkeep was long overdue.” She met his gaze then and he read the guilt there. “If I had done my job, they’d still be alive today.”

  “Fiona—”

  “It’s true, Struan. Instead, I’m the one who caused it and yet I’m the only one alive.”

  He’d thought on this very matter a lot over the passing years and centuries. If he’d been home, he could have saved his parents. He could have saved the wee ones. The only thing that consoled him at first was the fact that he was dead. He had died to pay for his sins, even if he’d accomplished it by his own actions. He’d not been alive and breathing while his kin moldered in their graves.

  But Fiona Masters lived with her grief and guilt and it would kill her, even if she did not take her own life with her own hands. For she suffered from the same delusion he had—that he could have stopped the fate of his loved ones.

  The same belief that filled survivors long after the devastation or loss they’d experienced. He’d heard the cries and prayers of those who’d survived the battle and made their way back to the battlefield when it was safe to do so in the years after the battle and the Hanoverian’s vengeance on the Highlands and Highlanders for supporting the Pretender’s claim to the throne.

  Sometimes they came alone, furtively like thieves in the dark of night. They would walk the field like the ghosts did. Always back to a place they remembered—where they’d lost kith or kin in the terrible throes of fighting. Sometimes they brought someone with them. But always, always, they confessed their guilt that they should have died that day on the moor.

  Much later, the descendants of the clans that stood for the Bonnie Prince would visit and even erect monuments and cairns of remembrance to those who died. That too struck Struan as a sense of guilt. When visitors and tourists arrived, he would hear them discussing other possible outcomes. If only this happened or if that clan or another rose in support or if the French did this or that. Centuries of guilt over actions or inaction.

  And though he’d felt the same way about his family’s destruction, the other ghosts did not. Instead they carried other regrets about what they would miss … or rather who they missed.

  Now, recognizing the same guilt in the eyes of this lovely, brave lass, he could offer her counsel much as he had to the other ghosts through his stories. But not with a story … just the truth.

  “And, if ye had died there that day, would it bring yer loved ones back?” The words pierced him as he spoke them for they were him as well. “Would yer family had wanted ye to die with them that day?”

  She jerked as if he’d slapped her. Blinking several times against the tears he saw gathering there, she began to answer him several times and was unable to speak the word.

  “Nay, lass. They wouldna. Ye ken it as I ken that my family would not have wanted me to die with them. They loved ye. They love ye even now.”

  “But I …” She stopped and wiped at her eyes with her sleeve. “If I …”

  “If ye had done whatever, would it have mattered? Did ye choose the day of their deaths? Only the Almighty can do that. And clearly, ye were not meant to die that day.”

  “But why? Why am I still here when they are all dead?”

  Something within him let go then. The guilt he’d been carrying for centuries released its hold on his heart and soul as he spoke the words he finally accepted and that she must hear.

  “Because ye were not meant to die that day, Fiona. There is still some task undone that ye must see to before ‘tis yer time.”

  “It’s too painful to live without them, Struan. You know that.” Her blue eyes searched his face. “And what purpose can there be for a nearly-crippled, scarred woman who cannot even aim the gun she meant to use to kill herself?”

  “The scars are marks of yer battle, yer successful battle, against death. Do not worry over them, lass. They proclaim yer victory. Yer power.”

  She startled then as he lifted their joined hands up and kissed hers. He released it and turned it to place his lips on the worst one and kissed it. She would have spoken then, but he placed his finger on her mouth to stop her. He was not done.

  “And I suspect that, even if ye didna die three years, two months, one week and four days ago, ye did stop living. Once ye forgive yerself, ye will find a purpose to make ye want to live.”

  “What about you, Struan? If you survived the attack that killed your family, what was your purpose?”

  He stood then and tugged her to her feet. Pulling her close, he wrapped his arms around her. He felt her hands move around him and grab hold of the sweater he wore. It felt right, holding her like this.

  “Mayhap this was my purpose? I did not die with my family so that I could die on Drummossie Moor that day and be caught up in this bigger plan? So, after a time in purgatory itself, I could be sent here to make ye see that ye do not have to make the mistake I did?”

  When she lifted her face to his and met his gaze, Struan did what he’d wanted to do since the first moment. He leaned down until he could feel her breath against his lips and kissed her. This remarkable, beautiful, strong, brave woman who thought herself not worthy to live. He kissed her deeply,
truly and with a new passion he had not felt before.

  “I pray ye not to make the same mistake I did, Fiona Masters.”

  Struan kissed her with all the hope he’d had before taking the first step that set his course. He kissed her as a man does a woman he wants. He kissed her because not kissing her was not possible. When he finally lifted his mouth from hers, they were both breathless. She reached up and touched his face then, sliding her hand along his brow and cheek and jaw as if to memorize the shape of it.

  “Come. Let’s go back inside,” he whispered. “The winds have turned and a storm is building again.”

  He released her and took her hand in his, placing hers across his body on his right arm and encircling her with his left arm. In this moment, he did not want to lose the feel of her against him. They walked out of the clearing and toward the cabin slowly, never letting go of the other. When the cabin came into view, Struan stopped there and took a breath.

  “To understand, I must confess that I didna tell ye the whole truth, Fiona.” She tensed in his arms, trying to ready herself for another blow.

  “In those last moments on the battlefield, when my lifeblood drained away, I kenned I’d made a terrible mistake. I kenned that I’d been a coward choosing an easy death over a hard life. My last thought was that I wanted to live.”

  “You did?”

  “Aye. In that moment, I prayed for forgiveness. I prayed for my family. I prayed for life.” He shrugged then. “’Twas too late for me, but ‘tis not too late for ye.”

  Struan turned back toward the cabin and only then noticed that they were being watched.

  “Who are you?” Fiona asked of the young woman who stood there in the shadows of the trees watching them.

  “Hello, Soni,” he said. “’Tis over then?”