“Odin’s balls!” He flipped onto his back and snapped open his eyes.
Across the room, the blue mist swirling around the woman stilled and dipped just low enough to give him a clear view of her full, round breasts. They shone beautifully in the soft luminosity cloaking her, teasing him with their creamy, lush swells. Her nipples were taut, sweetly puckered and thrusting, as if she felt the cold, damp air streaming in through the shutter slats.
Or, saints help him, as if he’d been palming her breasts, rubbing his thumbs round and round their pink-tinted tips, making them tighten with excitement.
Bran scowled.
He wanted nothing to do with the woman, no matter that she had a lush and creamy bosom.
Wishing he hadn’t noticed, he curled his fingers into the bedcovers, clenching his hands until his knuckles hurt. He swallowed hard, outraged that his sword’s magic would summon the American here, into the sanctity of his bedchamber.
But furious or not, he was unable to look away.
A fierce lust slammed through him, scalding his blood and damning him with scorching need that made his loins pound and burn unbearably.
When the blue mist began to shift again, once more hiding her breasts, he released his fierce grip on the bedsheets and swiped an arm across his sweat-dampened brow. The mist was glowing even brighter now, whirling faster in glistening colors, sure signs—he hoped—that the vision would soon end.
Instead, the unholy glow parted again, this time presenting him with a quick glimpse of the tantalizing shadows at the apex of her thighs.
“Damnation!” Bran leapt from the bed, his control shattered.
To his horror, the woman jumped as if she’d heard him. Her gaze flashed to his, her startled blue eyes widening as she caught him staring at her nakedness.
She clapped one hand to her breasts and thrust the other one over the triangle of golden curls that—he was doomed—Bran couldn’t stop trying to see behind her splayed fingers.
Naked himself, he snatched a bed cushion and held it strategically, hoping her surprise had kept her from noticing how much she affected him.
Unfortunately, the slashes of deep color across her cheeks said she had seen.
“You can’t be here!” She finally spoke, the blue swirls circling her glittering more brightly than ever. “This—”
“Is my bedchamber and you’re the intruder.” Bran did his best to speak with chiefly authority. No easy task, standing mother-naked and clutching an embroidered and tasseled bed pillow in front of his groin.
He cleared his throat. “Begone and let me return to my night’s rest.”
“No.” She had the temerity to argue. “As I was saying, this is my dream and you can’t be here.”
“I can be anywhere I wish.” Bran glared at her, her boldness making him forget his dignity.
“Not in my dreams.” She stood firm, her chin lifting.
He scowled at her, then flashed an even darker look at the Heartbreaker. The damned sword was a single blue flame, its light brighter than a thousand bale fires.
“No’ in your dreams, you say?” Anger made Bran push away from the bedpost. A muscle leapt in his jaw and he narrowed his eyes, grateful that the blue mist hid her pert nipples from view.
He took a step toward her, his gaze locked on hers. “Did you know there are women who live and breathe to bed a Hebridean chieftain?”
“You’re a ghost.”
“Aye, so I am.”
“A MacNeil.”
“That, too.” Clan pride flared in Bran’s chest. “A greater race ne’er walked this earth.”
“The MacNeils are—” She didn’t finish, clamping her lips instead. Her lovely blue eyes glinted dangerously. “I am going to waken now. When I do, you’ll no longer be here and I won’t remember this nightmare.”
“I have a better idea.” Bran strode forward, drawn by the way her agitated breaths made her breasts jig on each inhale and driven by a mad urge to kiss her. “As you’re here, and we’re both naked—”
She vanished before he could reach for her. The room was empty as it’d ever been.
Bran tossed aside the bed cushion. Wheeling about, he scanned the shadows, but he knew she was gone. Nor did it surprise him to see the Heartbreaker leaning benignly against the wall, the blade’s cold steel and crystal pommel stone gleaming dimly.
Bran scowled and rammed both hands through his hair. His heart thundered wildly. Cold sweat spilled down his brow and even his palms were slicked damp. Frustration and fury took care of the problem at his loins, but even as certain swellings receded, blood roared so hotly in his ears he could scarce hear himself think.
Though—he had to admit—at the moment, not thinking was a very good thing.
Every thought to have crossed his mind since the Heartbreaker’s warning in the bailey sent terrible shivers slashing down his spine.
And he, Bran of Barra, Hebridean chieftain, appreciator of women, and Highlander to the bone, was not a man to be known for suffering shivers.
He was a lusty soul.
Broad grins, hearty laughter, and a ravenous appetite were his particulars.
He’d never been in love.
Not sure why that truth popped into his mind, he returned to bed and pulled a pillow over his head. A precaution should the closing of his eyes summon the naked American. He wasn’t of a mind to see her again. Not this night or any other.
The Heartbreaker be damned.
The blade chooses its master.
His grandfather’s words came back to him, bringing along a slew of other wisdoms credited to the half-mythic sword. Whispered tales of awe he’d heard in his early years as a lad. The most troubling being his grand-sire’s insistence that he couldn’t promise the sword to Bran. According to clan belief, the Heartbreaker sought the hand to wield it, seeking a new MacNeil in each generation and magically placing itself in the path of the chosen.
But Bran hadn’t cared for clan legend.
He’d wanted the sword. So he’d tagged after his grandfather always, begging to be the blade’s next master. Until at the sage age of four-and-ten, he’d faced his first worthy opponent in swordplay—a well-loved cousin several years his senior—and upon drawing his blade to meet his cousin’s challenge, he’d found not his own sword but the great shining Heartbreaker clutched in his hand.
The blade had been his ever since.
Leastways the ghostly sword whiling so innocently in the shadows. Without doubt the true blade had sought other MacNeil masters through the ages, but Bran had always felt a special affinity with the sword.
Theirs was a special bond.
Even in ghostdom, he’d prided himself on keeping the Heartbreaker at his side.
Now he wished he’d ne’er laid eyes on the legendary sword. But he had and he could feel its powerful presence now, calling to him from across the darkened room. Not that he was going to risk another eye crack. He knew his bedchamber well enough to know there was a strange humminglike thickness to the air. A weird quality he’d noticed earlier, upon retiring, and one that seemed to intensify now.
Even the fat night candle on his bedside table gave off an odd hissing sound. And without looking, he knew the richly patterned tapestries on his walls were rippling with movement. He could hear the swishes and rustlings of their costly, heavy silk. A most curious phenomenon given that the wind wasn’t all that strong and he’d taken care to bolt the room’s window shutters.
Equally unsettling, he’d let the fire burn down, and the cold smell of peat-and-wood ash that filled the room was overlaid by a fresh, delicate scent unlike any he’d ever encountered except the few times ghostly business had forced him to sift himself into the realm of the present.
It was an exceptionally clean scent that he now recognized. The American’s scent, lingering to torment him. Light as a sun-washed spring meadow and with just enough lily of the valley to make a man sigh in appreciation.
Bran favored a scowl to sighing.
But he did wish to do something to keep from breathing in the haunting perfume. Especially since he had a good idea what was causing the scent to remain.
The Heartbreaker surely felt his resistance and was enlisting every otherworldly trick in its steely, gempommeled arsenal to remind him of his destiny.
A fate he had no intention of claiming, so he rolled onto his side and pulled a hand down over his face before he could groan. Groaning, like shivers, was not a trait a Highland man acknowledged gladly.
It was a weakness to be avoided at all costs.
As were American women of the modern day, be they naked or otherwise.
No matter how delicious they smelled.
Or how they tasted . . .
“Hellfire and damnation!” Bran sat bolt upright and glared into the shadowy room, certain his sword would catch blue fire again any moment. Or worse, that the nameless American siren would reappear, this time without her mysterious veil of glittery blue light.
Next time—he just knew—she’d be naked without any such wizardry cloaking her. And then he’d be hard-pressed to resist her.
That, too, he knew.
And the truth of it scared him to the marrow.
The sudden pounding on his door angered him. Muttering, he leapt from the bed and crossed the room in three long strides to yank the door wide and see who would dare intrude on his privacy. He’d pleaded head pains and given express orders that no one was to disturb him.
Of course, the grinning fool standing in the doorway didn’t consider himself bound by such wishes.
Saor MacSwain thought much of himself.
In ghostdom as he had in life.
“You’d best have a good reason for bothering me.” Bran gave his friend a soured look. “I was sleeping.”
“Say you?” Saor cocked a brow and peered past him at the mussed bedsheets. “If you come back to the hall, I daresay you’ll rest better thereafter.”
Bran jutted his jaw. “This is my thereafter, if you’ve forgotten.”
“Faugh!” Saor laughed. “I came to fetch you, thinking you’ve forgotten that Serafina is performing her dance-of-the-veils for us this e’en.”
Bran blinked. He had forgotten Serafina’s promise of a dance.
A dusky Saracen beauty who only rarely visited his hall, she was well received when she did. Her veil dance—and her willingness to delight Bran’s manly friends in any manner they desired—made her one of the most popular and sought-after ghostesses in the other realm.
Bran admired her, too.
The last time she’d performed in his hall, she’d ended her dance on his lap. He could still feel how she’d slid her long, shapely legs around him. The sinuous rotations of her naked buttocks across his thighs and then the sleek silken heat of her wetness as she’d lowered herself onto him. He recalled, too, how her large, dark- nippled breasts had bounced and swayed. How, ultimately, she’d leaned close to rub them against his chest as she rode him.
Without doubt, she was the most skilled seductress he’d ever encountered. Just the mention of her name was enough to send a rush of heat pulsing into his groin.
Usually.
Tonight, the thought of her didn’t even bring a single twitch.
His trusty male parts—and, indeed, all of him—remained as cold as the chill night air seeping in through the shutter slats.
A discreet downward glance proved it. Bed-naked as he was, there could be no mistaking.
Bran scowled. “Give Serafina my felicitations and my regrets.” He reached to rub the back of his neck, hoping Saor would believe him. “The pain in my head this e’en is too great for even her wonders to be of service.”
“You truly wish to stay abed? Alone?” Saor’s grin faded. He flicked a quick glance down the dimly lit corridor, back toward the turnpike stair. “Serafina will no’ be pleased.”
“Perhaps these”—Bran flicked his fingers to produce two gold coins—“will sweeten her disappointment.”
“Aye, and the sun will fall from the sky on the morrow.” Saor looked skeptical, but he took the coins.
He also eyed Bran a bit longer, then shrugged and turned on his heel to sprint down the passageway. He vanished a few paces from the arched entry to the stair tower, apparently preferring to sift himself back into the hall rather than take the narrow, winding stairs.
Any other time, Bran would have thrown back his head and laughed. He certainly understood Saor’s eagerness to return to Serafina’s side.
But his own lack of desire to be there troubled him more.
Indeed, it took all his control not to slam his fist into the doorjamb. Something he was even more tempted to do when he turned back to his room and caught the faint glimmer of blue winking at him from deep inside the Heartbreaker’s charmed pommel stone.
“Hellfire and damnation,” he growled, not for the first time that night.
If the sword heard him—or cared—it gave no sign.
Sadly, his gut told him plenty.
Disappointing, or even angering, Serafina was the least of his worries. In truth, his troubles hadn’t even begun. And when they did, they’d be worse than anything he’d faced in seven hundred long years.
Much worse.
Gods help him.
Chapter 3
“Ghosts?”
Margo Menlove’s voice rose on the word. Her eyes rounded and she grabbed Mindy’s arms, squeezing tight. “A whole troop of them here at the Folly—bearded, kilt-swinging ghosts—and you didn’t tell me!”
“I’m telling you now.” Mindy broke free of her sister’s grasp and went to stand beside the kitchen’s antique refectory table. Its solidity soothed her. As did the ultramodern kitchen appliances lining the thick stone walls. Gleaming state-of-the-art ranges and refrigerators didn’t smack of spooks and things that go bump in the night.
Better yet, the quiet hum of the dishwasher made it difficult to imagine the zing of a sword being whipped out of its scabbard.
The lingering scent of breakfast bacon helped, too.
Mindy doubted ghosts had much of an appetite.
Even so, she was grateful that no ancestral portraits hung in the huge barrel-vaulted space.
Only the massive double-arched fireplace hinted at the room’s medieval origins, but she took care not to glance in that direction. The Folly’s staff—invisible and discreet as in the Age of Victorians—took great pains in keeping the kitchen fire blazing, and its crackling, well-doing flames were just a tad too atmospheric.
Under the circumstances, that was.
Mindy shivered.
She also refused to think about the flicker of eerie blue light she’d seen earlier—a large man’s silhouette reflected near the warm glow of the fire. Nor would she dwell on the faint skirl of pipes she’d heard coming from one of the kitchen’s darker, more echoey corners.
Above all, she wasn’t going to mention last night’s dream. Margo didn’t need to know everything. And she chose to credit the incident to nerves.
She rubbed her arms, determined to suppress the chills sweeping her.
No mean feat, considering.
Mindy swallowed, her gaze sliding briefly to the wall next to the kitchen hearth. A collection of the last century’s cooking equipment hung there. Highly polished copper pots and kettles, preserving pans, and jelly molds winked brightly, attracting the eye. But nothing stirred. No dancing shadows and certainly no man’s silhouette. But the fire glow did cast a weird reddish tint on the basket of aromatic juniper branches that the castle staff enjoyed tossing onto the flames to scent the room.
Even so, Mindy knew what she’d seen.
The big man’s outline, insubstantial and fleeting as it’d been, had reminded her instantly of Bran
of Barra. The castle’s burly, fourteenth-century builder hadn’t exactly accosted her as the other MacNeil ghosts had done, but he had glared at her from inside his portrait.
Heaven help her if he really had invaded her sleep.
Her pulse quickened just to remember.
She also recalled that his portrait sword was the longest, most wicked looking of all Hunter’s fierce oil-painted-cum-real-live-ghostie forebears. It might have been her imagination, but she was pretty sure the silhouette man had worn an exceptionally long blade low by his hip.
A chill sped down her spine.
Had there really been a time she’d romanticized men with swords? Foolish days when she’d secretly thought of kilted men with swords as walking orgasms?
She closed her eyes and bit her lip, knowing it was true.
Wishing it weren’t, she trailed her fingers along the thick, age-smoothed edge of the table. A ploy to keep her sister from noticing that her hand trembled. She glanced toward the nearest window, not surprised to see rain beginning to pelt the ancient leaded panes. The stone mullion window surrounds already gleamed blackly with damp.
Mist curled through the nearby pines, hovering low, and making the dark woods look even bleaker than usual, the wet morning drearier than need be. Mindy stifled a grimace. For all intents and purposes, the Folly might already be on some godforsaken Scottish island.
Only Scotland, she was sure, would be much worse.
“You should have phoned me.” Margo was in her face again. “I would’ve come right away.”
Mindy started. “I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Bother me?” Margo’s brows arched.
Mindy flicked a toast crumb off the table. “I knew you were busy.”
She also knew that if she’d called Margo in the middle of her four-day Ye Olde Pagan Times-sponsored Gettysburg Ghostwatch Tour, she would’ve risked having her sister arrive on the Folly’s doorstep with an entire busload of camera-happy, EMF-meter-toting paranormal zealots.
It would’ve been like living inside a goldfish bowl.
With the Twilight Zone theme music piped in to set the scene.
Some Like It Kilted Page 5
