She marched up to him, clapped a hand to his shoulder and used him to steady herself while she put on the shoes. When she finished, she looked up at him. They were standing very close. She could feel his breath on her face.
Damn, he was attractive. She didn’t know when she’d been this attracted to a man. Maybe never.
He moved his hands toward her shoulders, and for one blissful, exciting moment, she thought he was going to wrap his arms around her and kiss her. But the soft touch of fabric on her skin told her otherwise. He was draping a shawl around her, a deep blue silken thing that felt like heaven.
He adjusted it, and his fingers brushed the skin on her upper arms as he did. She shivered a little, closed her eyes against it.
“It was your grandmother’s,” he said softly.
And that gave her another chill, but not the good kind like his touch had given her. This one was decidedly unpleasant.
“Most of her belongings remain in her chambers,” Ian went on. “I’m sure no one will mind should you wish to make use of them during your stay.”
“I think I prefer my own things.” That sounded cold. And she didn’t want him to think it was because of him, so she added very quickly, “Thank you, Ian. That was sweet of you.”
“You’re most welcome.” Then he turned, and extended his elbow for her.
She hooked her arm through it and let him lead her from the room and through the endless corridors, walking far more closely to his side than was really necessary. He didn’t seem to mind it. In fact, his arm tightened on hers a little, pressing it against his side as they moved onward. As they approached the stairs, she smiled up at him. “Tell me, Ian, are you married?”
She saw his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed. “No.”
“Seeing anyone?”
“No.”
“Neither am I,” she told him.
“It’s glad I am to hear that, Kira.” He met her eyes and held them for a long moment as they stood there, halfway down the staircase.
A throat cleared from below, and they broke eye contact, turning at the same instant.
Aunt Esmeralda stood at the food of the stairs, and the look she was sending Ian should have wilted lettuce. “We’re waiting, you know,” she said, but her tone said far more. It said “Hands off.”
Kira bristled at that tone. These women may be blood relatives, but they were also strangers. And they certainly didn’t have any right to go meddling in her love life—or lack thereof.
She was going to have to set them straight on that, and soon, she decided. Because, as odd as it was after such a short acquaintance, she liked Ian. And she was drawn to him in a way that went far beyond anything she’d felt for any man before. To make her point to the aunts in the meantime, she snugged her body a little closer to Ian’s side, hooked her arm more tightly through his, met her aunt’s eyes as they slid to hers, and smiled at her. “I’ve never been very good at marching to the beat of someone else’s drum, Aunt Esmeralda. I’m sorry if I held up dinner, though. From now on, maybe it would be best to just start without me if I’m a little late.”
“That is not how we do things at Castle MacLellan.”
“Then maybe I should find a hotel.” Ian’s arm clutched hers tighter to his side, as if in warning.
The woman’s eyes widened, but held Kira’s, and she met the subtle challenge head on. “There’s not one for miles. So I suppose you’ll have to adjust, Grandniece. And perhaps show a bit of respect for your elders.”
Chapter 4
Esmeralda was positively icy all through dinner, but the conversation was carried on by Ian’s father, Gregory, who entertained them all with stories of the old days when he was a boy and the mischief he used to get into, all in a brogue so endearing that it melted the tension from Kira’s shoulders.
The Reverend MacDougal was humorless. He didn’t laugh at jokes, and didn’t speak unless it was to correct some factual error or add a serious bent to the topic at hand. His wife, Jane, was a meek little mouse, silent and obedient, and she waited on him hand and foot.
Ian’s attention was on Kira throughout the meal, though whenever she looked his way, he shifted his gaze. And Esmeralda seemed to be watching them like a hawk, noticing every exchanged glance, bit of banter, or intimate smile they shared. And they shared a lot of those.
“Well, then, the readin’ o’ the will takes place tomorrow evenin’,” Gregory announced. “Nine o’ the clock.”
“Why so late?” Kira asked.
“’Twas at Iris’s request, lass. She left explicit details. I suggest you prepare yourself, though. She was a rather…unusual woman.” He turned toward his son. “I would suggest, Ian, that you spend the day showin’ our new friend about her family’s homeland.”
“I really don’t think—” Esmeralda began.
“I’d love that!” Kira said, cutting her off. “Will, you Ian? My stay isn’t all that long, and I’d hate to miss seeing some of the countryside while I’m here.”
Ian’s father stared at him, and so did Esmeralda. But his eyes never left hers. With a soft smile, he nodded. “Of course I will. It’ll be a rare pleasure.” And without looking away, he added, “You needn’t worry yourself, Esmeralda. You’ve known me all my life. Your great niece will be perfectly safe in my company for the day.”
She didn’t argue, but Kira got the feeling Ian was going to hear about this later—and maybe his father would, as well.
“Nothing to fear in these parts, anyway,” the minister said. “It’s a perfectly safe area. God-fearing folk. Good people.”
As the table was cleared, the guests took their leave, Ian and his father pausing at the door. “’Twas a sheer delight to meet you, lass,” Gregory said, clasping her hand warmly.
“It was mutual, Mr. Stewart.”
“Gregory, please.”
She nodded, then looked up at Ian. “Good night, Ian. I’m really looking forward to tomorrow.”
“I’ll come around for you after breakfast. All right, then?”
“More than all right.” He took her hand, and gave a surreptitious squeeze that made her heart flutter in her chest. Seemed he was getting over his shyness, or whatever his issue had been.
Or maybe he was just as much a rebel at heart as she was. Perhaps she owed Aunt Esmeralda a thank you for pushing his buttons.
Kira fell asleep with a smile on her face. But when she heard someone whispering her name, the voice penetrating her girl-with-a-crush dreams, that smile faded. She opened her eyes, blinking in the utter darkness of the bedroom, instantly aware of the chill that hung heavy in the air. This place always seemed cold but this was different. It was bone deep and drew goosebumps on her skin as a shiver rippled up her spine. She tugged the covers higher, hugging them tight.
“Kira…” the whisperer breathed. “Kiiiiiiraaaaaaa.”
She sat up fast, one hand shooting toward the bedside lamp, then freezing in mid-air as her eyes widened. There, at the foot of her bed, was…something. A wisp of fog, in the vague shape of a woman.
“What the hell!” She resumed her groping for the lamp, found it and turned it on.
In the cold light of the sixty-watt bulb, there was no fog. No form. No ghostly apparition looming over her. The chill retreated, too, as the room returned to its normal state of clamminess.
She hadn’t been dreaming. She’d been wide awake, she assured herself of that, even as she lunged out of the bed, snatching up her robe and pulling it on clumsily while heading for the bedroom door.
This was ridiculous. There were no such things as ghosts. And yet she was driven from the room. She needed to find her aunts, demand an explanation. Maybe it was Esmeralda, trying to scare her away. Maybe it was…hell, she couldn’t think of any other explanation.
She yanked open the bedroom door and dashed into the dark hallway, turned in the direction of Esmeralda’s bedroom, and saw it again. That foggy, misty form, floating a few yards down the hall.
“Kira,” it w
hispered.
She turned and ran through the pitch darkness, heading in the opposite direction from the thing, feeling pursued and too afraid to look behind her to find out for sure. She rounded a corner toward the staircase, barely able to see in the pitch blackness of this place. And then it was there, ahead of her again. A segment of mist rose, like an arm, reaching toward her.
The stairs were just to her right, and she turned to race down them, tripped on the hem of her robe, and tumbled headlong. The impact of every stone stair drove screams of pain from her lungs, and when she hit her head at the bottom, she lay there, hurting, dizzy, hovering on the very edge of consciousness.
She forced her eyes open, only to see them, several of them, she couldn’t count, but they were floating all around her, reaching toward her, so close now she could feel the iciness of that mist that seemed to embody them, all of them whispering her name over and over.
She screamed, and then she passed out, the scream dying as her eyes fell closed.
“There, there, lass. You’re all right now. You’re fine.”
Kira blinked her eyes open, and stared up at the faces that surrounded her. Her great aunt Rose and her aunt Emma gazed down at her. Rose held a cold compress to one side of Kira’s head, her ample rump perched on the edge of the bed. Emma stood on the other side, bending over her, stroking her hair. A little further away, Esmeralda sat in a hard-backed chair. They all wore night clothes, long nightgowns, housecoats, slippers.
Kira closed her eyes, pressing a hand over Rose’s, to her head, which ached monstrously. “What happened?”
“You took a tumble, lassie. Right down the stairs. ’Tis a miracle you didn’a break every bone in your wee body,” Rose said. “Whatever possessed you to go wanderin’ about the castle in the dark like that, bonnie girl?”
She opened her eyes, looking from Rose to Emma, and then spearing Esmeralda with a steady gaze. “I saw something. Someone was whispering my name, and then I saw…something.”
Rose sucked in a breath. Esmeralda pursed her lips, lowered her gaze.
“I think they were supposed to be ghosts. I think someone is trying to scare me away from here.”
“I didna think the ladies would bother you, Kira. Most assuredly not so soon,” Rose said.
“The ladies?”
Rose and Emma both looked toward Esmeralda, as if seeking her permission to speak further. Esmeralda got to her feet, moving to the table beside her, where Kira saw a tea service that hadn’t been there before. She poured from a delicate china pot, filling a cup that matched, and then brought it to Kira in the bed.
“I suppose it’s time we told her,” Esmerelda said. She handed the cup, balanced in the center of its tiny saucer, to Kira.
Kira sat up before taking it, and Emma quickly adjusted the pillows behind her. She took the tea, sipped it. “Don’t even tell me they were ghosts. I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said. And then she sipped some more because the tea was warm and sweet and it felt good going down.
“Aye, they were lass. They linger here. All of them,” Rose said.
“All of who?”
“The MacLellan women, the ones who died at the hands of their husbands,” Esmeralda said. “Your own dear mother lives among them now. They’re trapped between the worlds. We’ve no idea how to put them to rest, though the dear lord knows we’ve tried.”
Kira pinched the bridge of her nose and squeezed her eyes tight. “Maybe you’d better start from the beginning.”
“Aye, perhaps we should,” Rose said.
But she didn’t speak. Instead, she looked to her sister to do that. And with a deep sigh, Esmeralda began.
“There is a curse on the women of the MacLellan clan, lass. It began more than a century ago, when Miranda MacLellan was wed to the love of her life, Robby Stewart.”
“Stewart?” Kira asked.
“Aye, an ancestor of Ian’s, just as you’ve likely guessed,” Esmeralda said. “The marriage, it is said, was blissful for her. But her bliss was built upon a lie. For Robby soon found himself in the arms of another woman. And when Miranda returned a day early from a journey to visit a cousin, she found Robby and this harlot, locked in a passionate embrace in her own wedding bed.”
Kira closed her eyes briefly. “Men suck.”
When she opened her eyes again it was to see her aunts’ surprised and somewhat perplexed faces. “It just means they’re horrible,” Kira clarified. And then she looked at Esmeralda, the elected storyteller. “What happened?”
“Oh, she was devastated, as you can imagine. She raced from the room, crying and hysterical. Robby sprang from the bed, pulling on his clothes to go after her. But he wasn’t fast enough. She took the shotgun that hung above the mantel, beneath their wedding portrait. Two barrels, fully loaded. And when he came down the stairs for her, she blasted a hole in his chest. Then she calmly stepped over his body, climbed the stairs and shot the woman, one of her own maids, who was still in bed, shivering and clutching the covers to her chin.”
“Some say,” Rose put in, “that the woman was also Miranda’s dear friend, though we’ve never heard her name.”
Esmeralda nodded slowly. “When her rage was sated, Miranda went to the tower room, bolted herself inside. The noise had roused the servants, but no one could get to her. Inside the room she penned a letter to her descendants, a curse really, for though few knew of it then, many of the MacLellan women were powerful witches. Miranda was, it is said, the most powerful of any of them. She wrote the curse in her journal, her diary, and then she calmly set the pen aside, performed some secret spell that involved, they say, the killing of a dove and the removal of its heart, and when it was done, she threw herself from the tower window to her death on the rocks below.”
Kira’s throat was tight, her skin, chilled, as she whispered, “What did she write?”
“Read it for yourself.” Esmeralda pulled a small, leatherbound book from one of her robe’s deep pockets, and handed it to Kira in the bed.
A ribbon marked the passage in question, and Kira opened the book skimming the parts Esmeralda had already related, and beginning on the facing page.
“I would have far preferred he had simply murdered me in my sleep, that I might have died believing in his love. For the pain of his betrayal is a fate far worse than death could ever be. And in the end, he has killed me just the same. For surely my life ended when my eyes beheld the man I adore in the arms of another. And so I leave a gift to my daughters, and to their daughters, and to theirs, and on to every MacLellan woman born to my line. And that gift is this. When you wed, if the man betrays you the way mine betrayed me, you will never learn of it. For I curse him in this manner. I curse him to bring about your death by his own hand, for it will be an act of mercy if you die never knowing the truth. And it will be his punishment to live with his deed for the rest of his days. So mote it be, now and forever more.”
Kira blinked and looked up at her aunts. “So anytime a MacLellan woman’s husband cheats on her, he ends up killing her before she ever learns of it? That’s the curse?”
The three woman nodded sadly.
“It’s ridiculous! It’s ludicrous!”
“Is it, Kira? Do you not recall how your own dear mother met her end?”
She did. All too well. “It was an accident.”
“It often is. It was with your grandmother, as well.”
She was almost afraid to ask, but she forced herself. “How…how did it happen?”
“Your grandfather was bedding one of the local girls,” Esmeralda said, her face a grimace.
“You know that’s not what she meant,” Emma said softly. She patted Kira’s hand where it rested upon the bedcovers. “He took Grandmother sailing. The boat capsized in calm waters and she drowned.”
Kira lowered her eyes. Something about Emma’s hand on her own brought a tightness to her throat. Memories of her mother’s lilting voice and ready smile came rushing back to her. “Did he know about the curse???
?
“Aye, but like you, he didn’t believe in it. Until it claimed her, at least.”
“And what became of him?”
Emma sighed deeply. “He went mad. He’s been in an asylum ever since. Doesn’t even know his own name, most days.”
“The curse is real, Kira. It’s the very reason none of us have allowed ourselves to fall in love, to take a husband. To do so is only to invite the curse to take us as well.”
“Only if he cheated, though,” Kira said quickly. “What if he didn’t? What if you could find a man who loved you, one who would be true to you?”
“How could you ever know?” Rose asked softly. “It would be a terrible risk, Kira.”
“Love is always a risk. God, wouldn’t it be better to take that risk than to live your life alone? Wouldn’t it be better to know love once, and die young than to live to be a hundred and never know it at all?”
“No.” Esmeralda said it firmly. Emma and Rose, though, seemed wistful for a moment. “Most certainly not. Why do you think the ghosts of our ancestors haunt these walls?”
“I don’t know. Did Miranda die here? Is this castle where it all began?” she asked.
“No,” Esmeralda said. “They were staying in the cottage, near the shore, at the time.”
“Well then why do you think they haunt this castle?” Kira asked.
“To warn us. To make sure we don’t forget,” Esmeralda said with a firm nod.
It rang false to Kira. Weren’t spirits supposed to move on into some Eden-like paradise after death? Weren’t ghosts generally believed to be trapped souls, unable to move on due to some sort of unfinished business? She wasn’t sure the women of the MacLellan clan would choose to remain in this drafty castle of their own volition. She wasn’t even certain they could.
But at least she had the answers she sought. She sighed, and lay back on the pillows. “How can I get them to let me sleep?” she asked. “How do you?”
“You get used to their visits. If you ignore them, they stop bothering after a bit,” Rose told her.
“I’ll try.”