His friend meant well, but he didn’t understand.
It’d taken Bran days and fiercest concentration to hold his world together tightly enough that Mindy could join him here, albeit quite briefly.
Even so, he’d done the best ghost magic he’d ever managed in all his centuries, and—his heart dropped like a stone to admit such a scalding truth—Mindy should have been able to stay with him much longer.
At least until his honor told him it was time to return her.
Unless she left by choice.
Either way, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to go to her now. And that knowledge gutted him. Hadn’t he told her that nothing would keep him from her?
He’d said the words with a grin and so much swagger.
His heart had swelled and he’d been so proud. He’d been able to speak such words because they’d been true.
Yet now . . .
Something wasn’t right.
He could feel the difference in the air, though he didn’t know what it was.
Bran slumped against the side of the window arch. He did know that the rocks below his tower and the whitecapped waves were looking more blurry by the moment. Even the sharp, gray edge of the horizon was no longer distinguishable. He couldn’t tell where the sea ended and the sky began.
And when he turned away from the fool window, he found that he couldn’t see his room very well, either.
His eyes stung too badly.
“Damn it all!” A painful tightness squeezed his chest, pulsing and burning until he could hardly breathe. When a tear rolled down his cheek, he balled his fist and almost slammed it into the wall.
Instead, he sank to his knees and buried his face in his hands.
But when familiar footsteps announced a certain long-nosed, flat-footed gowk’s return, Bran leapt to his feet and brushed at his plaid.
Broken or no’, he was Barra. And no one, not even his best friend, was going to see him in such a state. So he grabbed a linen napkin off the table, then blew his nose as discreetly as possible. He was standing at his window again, hands clasped casually behind his back, when Saor strode into the bedchamber.
“I spoke with everyone in the hall.” Saor joined him at the window. “No one has seen the lass. Nor does anyone have an idea as to where—”
“Word does spread like a fire in the heather, what?” Bran shot him a glare.
“I thought you’d want me to question them?”
“What I want—” Bran couldn’t finish.
If he’d blurted how much he loved Mindy and needed her, ached for her, Saor’s face would have filled with pity. And he didn’t want to suffer his friend’s sympathy.
He wanted Mindy.
“Is there naught I can do for you?” Saor was looking at him oddly.
Bran set his jaw, trying to appear resolute rather than crumbled. “Nae. I require nothing.”
“As you wish.” Saor eyed him a few moments longer than necessary, then walked from the room.
Suddenly, Bran desired to be elsewhere, too. His bedchamber held lingering traces of Mindy’s scent. And although he’d pulled the bed-curtains to hide the mussed and tangled sheets, he knew they were there.
He’d probably never sleep in his bed again.
Could be, he’d avoid the room entirely.
And just now he needed air. A brisk turn about the bailey, or two or three, followed by an hour or so of vigorous sword practice should help banish the god-awful ache in his chest.
He hoped so, anyway.
If need be, he’d go down into the keep’s vaulted basement and spend the day shoving heavy wine barrels from one end of the storage rooms to the other.
He’d do whatever it took until he could at least walk again without feeling like an auld done man.
A pity he couldn’t address the sorrow in his heart as easily. Wishing he could, he started for the door.
“Come, Gibbie.” He glanced at his dog, clicking his fingers.
Gibbie was sprawled, snoring quite loudly, on his tartan-covered bed before the fire. But now he cracked one eye and peered at his master.
“Come, laddie.” Bran waited on the threshold. “I’m for the bailey, I am.”
Understanding bailey, Gibbie found it worth his while to abandon the comfort of his bed. Leaping up, he bounded across the room, making for his favorite exit from the bedchamber. It was a small section of wall near the door that, unlike the other walls, wasn’t covered by a tapestry.
But instead of flitting through the wall, Gibbie stopped before it, barking.
Bran stepped into the corridor, waiting.
When Gibbie didn’t join him, he folded his arms. He should have known even his most faithful friend would make this morn difficult for him.
“Gibbie, come!” Bran was growing impatient.
Gibbie started to whine.
“Odin’s balls!” Bran strode back into the room.
Then he stared, puzzled. His jaw slipped.
His great beast of a dog stood trembling in front of the wall. Bran rubbed his beard, not knowing what to do. Gibbie wasn’t a shivery, whimpering lapdog.
Yet . . .
There the dog was, cowering.
Bran frowned and went to the table across the room. It still held the remains of last night’s victuals. He snatched a bit of cheese.
He tossed the cheese at the dog’s spot in the wall, knowing Gibbie would chase after it. Then they could be on their way to the bailey.
But the cheese didn’t pass through the wall.
It bounced off and dropped to the floor.
Gibbie barked like mad. He didn’t even touch the cheese.
Bran stared, disbelieving.
Then, like his dog, he began to shake.
There could be only one reason the cheese didn’t go through the bedchamber wall.
The wall was solid.
But that couldn’t be. Not in Bran’s own ghostly realm, where, thanks to his strength of will and experience, everything appeared real yet, in truth, was as insubstantial as Highland mist.
Bran felt a sickening dread in his stomach. He crossed the room and dropped to one knee beside Gibbie. Then, still trembling as badly as his dog, he reached to press the flat of his hand against the wall.
His hand didn’t go through.
His palm and fingers remained splayed against cold, hard stone.
“Dear God in heaven!” Bran stared at his hand, tears blurring his vision. His entire body shook and blood roared in his ears.
Gibbie was suddenly beside him, licking his face. Bran scarce noticed, though he did sling an arm around the dog and draw him close.
He needed his old friend’s support.
The unfathomable had happened. Something that he would never have dreamed possible—or even desired—had changed his world, taking him and everything in it straight back to, well, his world. They were no longer ghosts.
There could be no other explanation.
Bran looked at Gibbie. He saw at once that the dog knew. His excited eyes and wagging tail said as much. As did the sudden silence that had descended upon the tower so eerily, heralding—they’d all believed—a stop to the noisy restoration work.
Under different circumstances, Bran would have bent double with laughter.
It would seem the cessation of building noise was due to his tower no longer being in the day of the moderns.
Only now—he could still scarce believe it—the fourteenth-century world around him was real.
Just as he was real again.
And Gibbie.
And everyone else in his unsuspecting household.
Somehow the return of his tower’s stones to their rightful setting had also thrust them back into their own time. It was an unexpected miracle that would have delighted him had it happened sooner.
Before he’d fallen so desperately in love with Mindy.
A woman whom, he now knew with surety, he would never see again.
Ghostly magic made anything p
ossible, but the divide between the true fourteenth century and her day was a barrier he couldn’t cross.
For the first time in seven centuries, Bran of Barra felt cursed.
He didn’t think he could bear it.
Weeks later, Mindy stood alone in the bailey of Bran’s tower, taking the most difficult farewell she’d ever had to make in her life. Completely restored to its former strength and glory, the tower with all its outbuildings and curtain walls truly appeared as if it’d never been anywhere else except here, on this tiny spit-of-a-rock island where it was first built so many long centuries ago.
Jock MacGugan and his men had done beautiful work.
And, she knew, the whole of the Hebrides stood in awe of the speed with which he’d done the next-to-impossible.
MacNeil’s Tower was magnificent.
And only Mindy knew how much more grand it’d really been then.
With each passing day, it became more difficult to believe that she’d really been there. That Bran had taken her across the bay in a medieval coracle, leading her up the same tiny stone jetty where Jock MacGugan had dropped her off an hour ago, reluctantly accepting her wish to spend the afternoon alone on the islet.
She needed to make her good-byes in private.
And—for what was surely the thousandth time since she’d entered the tower—she fished around in her jacket pocket, retrieved her damp cotton handkerchief, and dabbed the tears from her cheeks.
This was why she’d wanted to be alone.
She didn’t want anyone else, not even a man as kindly as Jock, to see her break apart.
And she was breaking.
Everywhere she looked, she saw Bran. She saw him standing in the shadows of the door arches. Or she’d see him striding across the cobbled courtyard. He was up on the battlements, too. She saw him there as she knew and loved him: a big, brawny man, looking out to sea, surveying his world. But then he’d turn and see her and his face would light with his wicked smile and he’d tear down the stone steps and run at her, his arms held wide. He’d grab her by the waist, lifting her in the air and twirling around and around until they fell, laughing and dizzy, to the ground.
And then he’d reach for her again, this time bracketing her face with his strong, calloused hands as he kissed her and kissed her.
And she’d throw her arms around him and kiss him back.
So fiercely!
She’d hold him as tightly as she could and never stop kissing him, because she absolutely couldn’t bear to let go of him.
How sad that when it came to it, the choice hadn’t been hers.
Or his, she was sure.
She knew he loved her with the same fierceness. And knowing that he did just made everything hurt even worse.
“Oh, Bran . . .” She drew a ragged breath, pain sweeping her. The agony of losing him felt like being pierced by hundreds of scorching, razor-sharp knife blades.
She. Just. Couldn’t. Stand. It.
Needing to sit, she dropped onto a stone bollard near the newly restored chapel. She closed her eyes and tipped back her head, taking long, deep breaths and releasing them slowly. Finally, when the sharpest edge of the pain eased, she reached down to touch the bollard.
Worn smooth and shiny by the lines that had held countless MacNeil galleys, or so she’d been told, the bollard dated to Bran’s time. Sitting on it made her feel somehow closer to him. It was, after all, something he would have passed, and seen, every day.
Much of the castle belonged to later centuries. As so often with such places, each generation of chieftains had added his own embellishments. So she’d decided to spend her time seeking out all the special spots that, she knew for certain, hailed from Bran’s day.
Such as the little stone bollard.
She was making memories.
Not history as Bran had assured her they’d do on their fateful last night together. She was touching, seeing, and absorbing images—memories—she could cherish later, when she returned home.
“Damn!” She reached for her crumpled handkerchief again, wishing she’d brought more than just one.
Who would have thought she’d come to think of Barra as home?
But she had.
And it was going to crush her to leave in the morning.
Her last tie to Bran . . . gone.
Not wanting to think about it—not able to—she turned her face into the wind. She wasn’t surprised that her last day on Barra was also the most beautiful. A fine brisk day, full of sun and with only a light chop on the bay, it seemed like the final indignity.
She’d come to love gray, wet days of mist and rain.
This day dazzled.
She would have preferred wild and blustery.
Mindy sighed. Somewhere a dog barked. The sound was faint, so it must have been a dog on the shore. Much closer, she could hear the waves hurling themselves against the rocks that edged the base of Bran’s curtain walls. And just above her, several seabirds wheeled and dipped, their shrill, lonely cries almost seeming as if they’d come to say good-bye.
Too bad she hated to go.
At least Margo would offer her a sympathetic shoulder. Sisters were good for that and hers was the best. She had missed Margo and would be glad to see her. Perhaps someday they could return to Scotland together and—if she could bear it—she would even bring Margo here, to Barra.
She knew Margo would be ecstatic to visit the Hebrides.
But just now . . .
Mindy swallowed the heat in her throat. It was too painful to think about returning to Barra when she knew in her heart Bran wouldn’t be here. “Damn!” she cried again, this time not bothering with her hankie.
No one could see her tears.
Or that she was clenching her fists so tightly that her nails were digging into her palms.
Nor could anyone guess that she was taking great gulps of air, not just to calm herself, but because she hoped that when she was stateside again—and so many of her breaths would taste of traffic fumes and city smells—she could then remember sitting here on a stone bollard at Barra, drinking in clean, cold air that smelled of the sea.
“Gaaaah!” She pressed a fist to her mouth, not wanting to sob.
This was killing her.
No, she’d died the morning she’d wakened without Bran at the Anchor.
She might not look dead, but she was. Her soul had bled out and she’d never be the same again. Not after having met and fallen so madly, wondrously in love with the man she knew was meant to be hers.
How horrible that their centuries hadn’t matched.
And how annoying that Jock had forgotten his promise not to ferry anyone else out to the islet until she’d said her farewells and was gone.
An old woman was poking about inside the chapel.
Not that Mindy had planned to go inside the little stone building. Even though she knew very well that the chapel was of Bran’s time. For that very reason, she’d decided not to enter it.
The chapel would have been where Bran would have married her if she had been able to stay with him in his time.
So-o-o . . .
Mindy swiped a hand across her cheek again. She knew what was good for her and what wasn’t.
The little chapel was out of bounds.
But it still annoyed her that someone was there.
She’d so wanted—no, she’d needed—to spend this time here alone.
So she sat a bit straighter on the bollard, folded her hands in her lap, and stared down at the cobbles, pretending she hadn’t seen the woman.
But when a shadow fell across her and—oh, no!—she found herself looking at two very small black boots with red plaid laces, she couldn’t ignore the woman any longer.
It was the Hansel-and-Gretel crone from the Oban ferry.
The tiny, black-garbed old woman who’d vanished from the ferry deck. And whom the waiflike red-haired girl had called the Goodwife of Doon.
As she remembered, a shiver raced down Mindy�
�s spine.
She jumped off the bollard, staring at the woman. “I know you.”
“So many folk say.” The woman smiled, her blue eyes twinkling. “That be a fine bollard, eh?” She hobbled over to it, taking Mindy’s seat. “I enjoy a good sit-down here myself, I do.”
“Then please don’t let me bother you.” Mindy clutched her jacket tighter. The day felt suddenly colder.
The old woman gave her the willies.
“You needn’t fear me, you know, lassie.” She gave a little cackle. “I’m on your side.”
“My side?” Mindy’s eyes rounded.
“So I said, just.” The old woman lifted a gnarled hand and clutched a fist, meaningfully.
For some strange reason, Mindy’s heart started to pound. As if the old woman knew, her wizened face wreathed in another smile.
It was a rather cheeky smile that lifted the fine hairs on Mindy’s nape.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Mindy’s mouth was going dry, too. Something weird was definitely going on. “I’m just here to say my fare—”
“Och! I know fine why you’re here.” The old woman placed her hands on her knees. “And what you’re looking for.”
“I’m not looking for anything. I—” Mindy’s heart slammed against her ribs. She blinked, her eyes suddenly brimming again. There was something about the old woman’s words that electrified her.
She set her hands on her hips. “Since you seem to know so much, why don’t you just tell me—”
“There be no need. You’ll see soon enough.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“Nae?” The old woman cackled again. “Then perhaps you should visit yon chapel. . . .” She turned her head, glancing at the ancient stone building.
“The chapel?” Mindy didn’t think so.
The crone nodded once.
Then she pushed slowly to her feet and hobbled away in the direction of the jetty. Mindy wasn’t sure, but she thought the woman was chuckling to herself as she went.
As soon as she disappeared around a corner, Mindy hurried straight to the chapel. She’d so wanted to avoid going in there. Small, damp, and musty, and reeking of age, it was exactly as she’d imagined it would be. Right down to the strange dreamlike atmosphere that seemed to hang in the air, almost a soft, bluish haze.
Some Like It Kilted Page 27
