“Why you?”
Yes, why him? “Well, I believe there’s a distant … ancestry between the husband of one of my cousins and the Oceanuses.” He shrugged. “I guess Mac wanted to keep it in the family. So we’re good on the magic? You’ve decided ye believe it exists?”
Her pretty little nose lifted just enough that she had to look down it to see him—although he noticed she was also fighting a smile. “I’ve decided I’ll believe it exists when I see this powerful, benevolent magic in action.”
He straightened in surprise. “But ye just did, lass.”
“When?”
“When I returned four children back to ye safe and sound.” He scrubbed his face with his hands, then peeked through his fingers at her. “Because I hope ye know that herding chickens is easier than keeping track of your tribe when they’re focused on catching fish.”
Her eyes widened in mock horror even as her lips twitched again. “Did you end up having to draw your sword?”
He dropped his hands to show her his scowl. “Eventually.”
The mock went out of her horror. “You threatened my babies?”
“I never said a word. I merely drew my sword when they continued to wander in different directions and proceeded to slice a couple of small fir trees off at their stumps with single blows.” He let his smile finally escape with his chuckle. “Ye should have seen your babies, Peg. The bloodthirsty little heathens came running so fast that Isabel didn’t even realize she was clutching her angleworm to her chest.”
He saw Peg blow out a sigh, and her lips finally made it to a full-blown smile. “Maybe the real magic is that they brought you back safe and sound. You do have a tendency to limp down the mountain every time you come up here with Mac.”
He arched a brow. “Is there anything you and Olivia don’t tell each other?”
Peg batted her eyelashes at him, and Duncan saw exactly where Isabel had learned that little trick. “She didn’t tell me which of you won the manly duels.”
Duncan snorted and rubbed his face again to hide his smile. “I did.”
“You did not,” she said with a gasp.
He dropped his hands to glare at her. “Feeling pretty brave, are ye, thinking I won’t kiss you in front of your children? What makes you so certain I didn’t win?”
Her face flushed and she scrambled to her feet. “It’s time to eat.”
“Peg,” he said quietly as she headed down the ledge, making her stop and look at him. “The day will come that ye don’t have them to hide behind.”
“No, actually, it won’t, because the twins and I are stuck together like glue.”
He canted his head, studying her. “Ye forgot I told you the magic goes about its business whether ye believe in it or not. And Peg?”
Up went that pretty nose in the air again.
“Someone who believes holds the advantage over anyone who doesn’t.”
“And … and you believe?”
“I was born believing, lass.”
Whereas figuring out how to make Peg believe was probably going to be the death of him, Duncan realized as he watched her silently turn and walk away, her hands balling into fists as she shoved them in her pockets. Only problem being that in doing so, he’d likely be damning himself to hell for manipulating the magic for no other reason than to prove that he was bigger and stronger than a curse, and a hell of a lot harder to kill than William Thompson.
Chapter Fifteen
Duncan had just reached the mouth of the fiord when the mother of all whales suddenly breached in front of the small boat he’d rented from Ezra. He grabbed the gunwale and cut the motor as the whale slapped back into the water, the force of the splash creating a wave that nearly capsized him. It resurfaced close enough that he could have touched the behemoth as it began swimming alongside the boat, keeping pace even when he opened the motor to full throttle again.
Duncan cut diagonally toward land when he was halfway up the twelve-mile-long waterway and started looking for a place to go ashore. The whale disappeared only to resurface on the other side of him and gently bump the bow. Not wanting to argue with the beast, he continued down the fiord another few miles before the whale surfaced on his left side and nudged the bow toward land.
Guessing it didn’t get any plainer than that, Duncan slowed back to an idle and scanned the shore until the moonlight revealed the small beach spilling out of the dense evergreens growing all the way down to the high tide line. He turned toward it and shut off the engine to let the boat drift in eerie silence until it scraped onto the gravel, and glanced over his shoulder in time to see the whale slip back below the surface.
“Thanks for scaring ten years off my life, you big bastard,” he muttered as he walked to the front of the boat and stepped onto the beach—only to have a surge of energy shoot through him with enough force to knock him on his ass, causing him to hit his head on the bow on his way down.
Go sit on your mountain, Mac had said, and feel the power it wants to give you. Hell, he’d have to sit, as he couldn’t seem to stand on it. He grabbed the bow and pulled himself back to his feet with a curse, fingering the bump on his temple as he wondered if the energy still humming through him might leave him permanently sunburned.
The whale breached again not a hundred yards offshore, and if Duncan wasn’t mistaken, he’d swear he heard laughter. He turned his back to it and set his hands on his hips as he gazed up at the black shadow looming into the night sky. “And you, you big bastard, nap time’s over, so wake the hell up.”
The gravel beneath his feet shifted and Duncan tried to catch the boat even as he lunged toward the trees, only to miss on both counts; the boat surged into the fiord as he sunk into frigid water clear up to his waist. “For the love of Christ,” he growled, slogging up into the woods, “you could at least have a goddamned sense of humor.”
He dropped down on a bed of moss and unclipped his cell phone off his belt, then pulled it out of the leather pouch and poured out the water as he eyed his boat now sitting forty yards offshore. He unlaced his boots, pulled them off, then poured out the water, and unzipped his jacket and shrugged it off. He then started unbuttoning his shirt with a sigh—only to stop midbutton when the boat suddenly lifted on the back of the whale and shot farther out to sea. He set his elbows on his knees and dropped his head in his hands with a muttered curse. For the love of God, he hadn’t grabbed his backpack and sword. He snapped his head up and jumped to his feet. “You dump that boat and I’m coming after you with a harpoon!”
The behemoth sunk below the surface to leave the boat floating in the middle of the fiord, the moonlight glistening off the motor as it rocked on the gentle swells. He heard quiet laughter again, this time coming from the woods behind him, and sat down on the moss then flopped back spread-eagle with a groan. He must have really pissed off the magic sometime in his youth, because he still couldn’t come up with one good reason why he deserved this.
What in hell was so all-fired important about accepting a calling he didn’t even want, anyway? Like he’d told Mac, there were enough magic-makers running around Maine already; what did Providence care if he remained a mere mortal making his way through life one day at a time? Duncan snapped his eyes open when he realized the ground beneath him was slowly moving up and down even as he heard what sounded like … snoring. Well, hell; the mountain really was sleeping.
Then who—or what—had been laughing in the woods behind him?
Okay, he had two choices: He could build a fire to dry out his pants and boots and go find his calling, or he could lie here until he rotted. Neither choice held all that much appeal, but apparently just giving up wasn’t programmed into his DNA. He used a heartfelt groan to propel himself into a sitting position, pulled off his socks and wrung them out, then put them back on and reached for his boots—only to find just one. The cell phone was there along with its pouch, and one boot. And he was far enough away from the water that it couldn’t have fallen in.
Duncan quietly un
did the sheath on his belt and slowly pulled out his knife as he stopped breathing to listen. Other than the soft snore of the mountain, he didn’t—
There, just over the knoll to his right, he heard what sounded like slobbering. He rolled to his hands and knees and silently crawled across the carpet of moss, lowering to his belly when he reached the tangled roots of a large cedar.
He slowly peeked over the top, then blinked to make sure the blow to his head hadn’t messed with his vision, because that sure as hell looked like a dog chewing on his missing boot. A puppy, actually; a gangly blond pup that definitely had some lab in the mix, about seven or eight months old. Which meant one of two things: Either Mac had given him a mountain that was already occupied, or the pup had become stranded here when the earthquake had created the fiord.
Then again, maybe his fall had knocked him out and the puppy fairy had paid him a visit while he’d been asleep. “Psst,” he whispered, causing the young dog to stop midchew, every muscle in its scrawny body freezing except for its ears, which slid back to listen. “Hey, mutt, that boot’s only a month old.”
The pup reared up so fast, it somersaulted over backward with a yip of surprise, then bolted into the woods up the mountain, its tail tucked protectively between its legs. Duncan sighed and stood up to walk over and pick up his boot, brushing his hand over the teeth marks in the leather. The damn dog appeared to have been trying to eat it. He looked in the direction it had run off, wondering if it really might be stranded and nearly starved. He went back to his mossy spot above the sunken beach and dropped down to dress his feet, and then just sat staring at his boat. Dammit to hell; he had a change of clothes in his pack, and he really wanted his sword—although not enough to spend the night playing keep-away with a whale.
Duncan lay back on the moss again and closed his eyes and slowed his breathing, trying to bring the mountain’s heartbeat into rhythm with his—just like Ian had told him TarStone had done the night he’d claimed his own calling. Except his nephew had been given a tall, gnarly staff to control TarStone’s power, where he had … nothing. What in the name of God had Mac hidden over here? Hell, did his mountain even have a name? He wasn’t sure it had even existed before the earthquake, despite being covered with some pretty impressive old-growth timber. But then, Mac could have merely folded the existing earth when he’d split the land to form the fiord.
“Focus, MacKeage,” he muttered, closing his eyes again. “Feel where the energy is coming from.”
Wait. Ian had also had a mentor; a thieving, cantankerous old hermit by the name of Roger AuClair de Keage—who also happened to be the original MacKeage.
Then why was he stuck with zilch? No gnarly staff and no mentor—because Mac needed a little vacation to recover from turning an entire state on its ear—no instruction manual or treasure map or sage animal familiar to guide him, no … nothing. Just a goddamned sleeping mountain with no sense of humor. Didn’t Providence realize he could blow himself and half of Spellbound Falls to kingdom come messing with something he didn’t know anything about?
Duncan bolted upright. The pup. If it had been living here since the earthquake almost a month ago, it must know the mountain pretty well by now. All he had to do was follow it around until it led him … someplace. And it was obviously hungry, so befriending it shouldn’t be any harder than feeding it. But feed it what? The snack he’d brought was in his backpack, which was in the boat in the middle of the fiord being guarded by the mother of all whales.
Duncan stood up with a smile and pulled his knife out of its sheath again. He had a mountain, didn’t he, which would be home to all manner of furred and finned and feathered food? And roasting partridge or trout could be smelled for miles if the nose doing the smelling happened to be canine.
He unscrewed the cap on the hilt of his knife and turned it upside down to shake the contents into his hand: a small coil of fishing line with a hook, a magnesium flint, a really small medical kit, a sandwich bag, and a length of fine wire. He’d taken out the salt tablets and replaced them with aspirin the day he’d bought the knife, since sweating vital minerals wasn’t a worry in Maine because, hell, he just had to lick a pothole. He’d also tossed the compass cap and replaced it with something solid enough to pound with, and wrapped the hilt with rough black tape for a better grip. So he was basically good to go for his hike around the goddamned fiord—or indefinitely, actually—assuming he didn’t mind being cold and miserable until he built a fire and dried out.
Duncan stuffed the fishing line in his jacket pocket, carefully worked everything else back into the knife, and screwed on the cap. He blew out a sigh and headed up the mountain at a diagonal in the direction the pup had run, figuring he’d eventually come across a stream. Damn, he’d like to have the huge trout Jacob had caught and insisted they throw back when its watery eye had stared up at the kid, its mouth gaping open as it gasped for breath. That particular twin, he decided, was going to make some lucky woman a really good husband—whereas Pete was probably going to see the inside of an emergency room and juvenile detention hall a couple of times before he pulled his act together.
Duncan heard the gushing stream long before the moonlight revealed its glistening water cascading down over a long series of weatherworn boulders, ending in a pool spanning a hundred yards across. It wasn’t a vertical waterfall like the one in Spellbound, but it was still a rather impressive sight.
He shed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves as he knelt beside the pool and dipped his hands to splash some water on his face, only to jerk back in surprise. He stuck his hand in the water again and swirled it around, and yup, it was the temperature of bathwater. He sat back on his heels and gazed up at the stream rolling down over the boulders, wondering why it was warm. He cupped his hand in the water and lifted it to his nose and sniffed, then dipped his tongue into it. It smelled and tasted fine; it was just warm.
He pulled his fishing line out of his pocket and tied the end of it to a small rock, then got up and walked over to a bed of moss and knelt down again. Using his knife, he cut a patch out of the moss and folded it back, then dug through the dirt until he found a fat grub. He returned and baited the hook and threw it out into the pool, setting the rock on the edge of the bank despite having little hope he’d find trout in water that warm.
He had just started to get up when the rock suddenly slid a good six inches, and he grabbed it just in time to feel the line tighten again with a rather impressive tug. He tugged back, then stood up and pulled in the line, stepping away when an equally impressive trout flopped out of the water to land beside his feet.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, pouncing on the flopping fish that had to weigh at least three pounds. “Okay then. I take back every dark thought I had about ye,” he said out loud to the sleeping mountain.
He returned to the moss and tossed down the fish and found another grub, baited the hook again and tossed it in the water, but held on to the line this time. The hook couldn’t even have reached bottom before he felt the line go taught, and he yanked out another fish half again bigger than the first one. He caught two more before he took his catch down to where the pool spilled into the forest below and quickly cleaned them, then set about gathering fallen branches and had a fire going in less than ten minutes. While it built up a bed of coals, he cut several forked branches and whittled off the bark before carefully skewering the fish. He propped the sticks across two rocks so the fish hung over the coals he’d raked between them, and finally unlaced his boots with a sigh. He may not be making any headway finding the instrument of his power, but he was going to have a full belly when he walked home empty-handed.
And if the pup had half a brain, it would get its belly filled tonight, too.
Duncan slipped off his pants, laid them out on a tree branch near the fire along with his socks, and then propped his boots as close to the flames as he dared. He pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket, then spread the jacket on the ground and sat down, only to rea
lize the tails of his shirt were also wet. So he took it off and tossed it up on an overhead branch, sidled closer to the fire and added some wood, then tapped a few buttons on his phone to see if it was ruined.
To his surprise the screen lit up, and to his consternation he saw he didn’t have any reception. He started to mutter a curse, but stopped. “Sorry. I forgot you’re trying to be benevolent. But is being able to call Alec to come pick me up in the morning really too much to ask?”
He was answered only by the gushing stream. He shoved the cell phone in its pouch, then carefully turned over the fish before settling onto his side and propping his head on his hand. He couldn’t wait to bring the Thompson tribe here, he decided as he gazed across the fire at the pool and watched its ripples sparkle in the moonlight. Isabel would go nuts when she pulled out one of those beautiful trout, Jacob would cry for her to throw it back, Pete would jump in after it, and Charlotte would get a crooked smile on her beautiful face and merely shrug her delicate shoulders.
Peg was doing one hell of a job raising those four kids all by herself. But damn, didn’t she get lonely for male companionship? All that beauty and grace and fierce determination, that sexy, sassy mouth perfectly shaped for kissing, that athletic body built to cradle a man; how in hell did a woman simply turn off desire? How had she gone from sharing a bed with a husband for … what, at least six years, only to crawl into an empty bed every night with no hope of feeling a warm body beside her ever again? Because if Peg truly did believe William Thompson had died from her family’s curse, she wouldn’t dare risk killing off another man.
And what about Charlotte and Isabel? They were female descendents of the first black widow; what did Peg plan to tell them when they fell in love and wanted to marry? Had Peg’s mother warned her what could happen before she’d married?
He might not have children of his own, but if he did Duncan figured he’d do everything in his power to make sure they got to live life on their terms, not pay for the sins of some long-dead ancestor. He rolled onto his back and stared up at the summit of his moon-bathed mountain peeking through the trees, a bit surprised at how angry the idea of Peg and Charlotte and Isabel living under such an obscene curse made him. But even more alarming was how much he cared, not only for the women, but for Pete and Jacob.
Charmed by His Love Page 20
