Much Ado In the Moonlight

  She walked through the dining room but heard no squabbling coming from the kitchen. It was a safe bet that either Mrs. Pruitt was napping or her grandfathers and sundry were out haunting someplace more lively.

  She marched into the kitchen, then skidded to a halt.

  Connor MacDougal sat at the table, surrounded by books. He was holding a piece of chalk in his hand, looking down at the scribbled-on tablet darkly, and swearing like a sailor. Gone was the man who seemed to think the only thing he should be pointing at anyone else was a sword. In his place was, apparently, a scholar.

  “I’m sorry,” Victoria said. “I didn’t know you were in here.”

  He threw the chalk across the kitchen. It disappeared without a sound.

  “Never mind me,” he said with another curse or two. “’Tis all foolishness anyway—”

  “Wait,” she said before he swept everything off the table, which she suspected by the angle and trajectory of his upraised arm was his intention. “Let me see.”

  He balked. “Absolutely not.”

  She rounded the table and pulled out the chair next to him. She sat before he could say, “Don’t,” and looked before he could say anything else.

  “Wow,” she said, “what beautiful letters. Very ornate and lovely.”

  He grunted.

  She stared thoughtfully at his tablet, which did, as it happened, contain some rather beautiful printing. Connor seemed to be quite uncomfortable, though. She could only assume by what she was seeing that he was just learning to read.

  “I don’t imagine you had many books in your hall,” she offered. “Or much time for reading them, if you had any.”

  She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, just to see how he might react to that opening salvo.

  That was her first mistake.

  She found herself suddenly burning with quite a few things, not the least of which was curiosity. Who was this man who sat next to her and looked as corporeal as she did, but who obviously had been born long ago and had lived in this half-life of existence for centuries? What drove him, besides a great desire to do in any McKinnons he ran across?

  How was it his keep was only filled with men and not with every available female for miles?

  He shifted uncomfortably. “You’re staring at me.”

  “Oh,” she said, blinking. “Sorry. I couldn’t help myself.”

  And she thought that might just be the case. It was an easy thing to sit next to him; an even easier thing to look at his very handsome face.

  His eyes, she discovered, were gray.

  Gray like the stormy sea near Thomas’s house in Maine. She knew all about that gray because a horrible storm had been brewing the day she’d flown back to Manhattan. It had made for an extremely bumpy ride back home.

  She wondered what that meant for her now.

  “You know,” she said, grasping at what seemed to pass for her last vestiges of good sense, “we really haven’t been formally introduced.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “I beg your pardon?”

  All right, so she was losing it. Was this what it felt like to lose your mind, this slow easing away from the shore of sanity? Unfortunately, in her case, she seemed to be putting to sea rather rapidly.

  “Ah, I’m not sure what I should call you,” she said. No sense in not finishing what she’d started. “Though it might be too late to stand on formality, given that you’ve heard me scream.” She paused. “Already.”

  He stared at her in silence for a few moments, probably wondering what would be the easiest way to get away from a madwoman of her ilk, then he frowned.

  “I am accustomed to being called ‘my laird,’ ” he said slowly, “but given that you are not of my clan, I suppose you may call me MacDougal.”

  “How about Laird MacDougal?”

  He nodded, then fiddled with his chalk. “And I daresay Mistress McKinnon would do for you.”

  She could think of worse things. “I think it would. Now, Laird MacDougal, I’m going to make my granny some tea, then head back to the sitting room.” She made the mistake again of looking at him. “You can bring your books and come along, if you like,” she said, sounding appallingly breathless, even to her own ears.

  Then again, who could blame her? She was sitting next to a man who simply reeked of medieval lairdliness and had a six-foot broadsword propped up next to him against the table. Maybe she was allowed to be a little short of breath.

  “I’ll think on it,” he said briefly.

  But she watched, out of the corner of her eye, as he began to gather up his books and his blade. By the time she had everything on a tea tray, he was ready to go.

  “Mrs. Pruitt isn’t there, is she?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I think she’s off cataloging her equipment,” Victoria said. “I wouldn’t worry.”

  “You wouldn’t, but I do,” he said, in a not unfriendly tone.

  “I understand,” she offered. “I’ve seen her at her worst, but you can relax. She’s not hanging out with us.”

  She left the kitchen and was acutely and uncomfortably aware of him following her. It made that Michael-Fellini-induced swoon at the faculty tea look like the faint hint of a hot flash.

  Heaven help her, she was too young to even know the word perimenopausal.

  She managed to get the teapot, cups, saucers, and cookies to the sitting room without dropping or spilling anything. She set them down on the coffee table and breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Granny—”

  “Oh, Laird MacDougal,” Mary said, smiling at him. “How lovely to see you. Oh, I see you’ve brought things to study. There is never enough time in the day to get your lines down, is there?”

  Victoria wondered how it was her grandmother managed to get so chummy so quickly with everyone she met. Victoria was sleeping on a rollaway cot in the same room with her and was quite certain her grandmother wasn’t sneaking out during the middle of the night to consort with ghosts. Then again, who knew? Megan’s room was the biggest in the inn. It was entirely possible that her granny was tiptoeing by and Victoria wasn’t the wiser.

  “Nay, there is not enough time,” Connor agreed. “And it would aid me greatly if I could read the bloody words to start with. Put indelicately, that is.”

  “You should have Vikki help you. I’m sure she has her afternoon free and nothing would please her more. Would it, dear?”

  Victoria wished her grandmother wasn’t too old to have something thrown at her. This was turning out to be another in a long line of fix-ups. Victoria was still trying to get her name and profile removed from several online dating services on which she was listed thanks to her grandmother’s ability with the Internet.

  “I would happily help,” Victoria found herself saying, despite her better judgment—and her sense of self-preservation.

  “Then I’m going to have some tea and a nap before Victoria’s menagerie returns and ruins my peace. Laird MacDougal, I would like to hear you read your lines when you have them learned. He would make a fine Hamlet, don’t you think, Vikki?”

  “Sure,” Victoria croaked. She looked at Connor, who was standing uncomfortably near the fireplace, his books and other scholarly trappings in his arms. “Shall we get started?”

  He paused, then slowly laid his books out on the table. Then he dragged up a stool of his own making and sat down.

  There was nothing quite like the sight of a Highland laird perched on a little stool in front of a low table spread with things he intended to learn to read to make a girl wonder if she’d just lost her mind.

  So Victoria pulled up a footstool, sat down next to him, and proceeded to do the best she could.

  Until the afternoon wore on and he began to swear with regularity.

  “I have a thought,” she said.

  “A nap?” he glowered, nodding toward her grandmother, who was snoozing peacefully in her chair.

  “No, let’s go over the ghost’s part. In the play,” she added qu
ickly.

  “I cannot read it,” he said grimly.

  “Maybe not now, but you will eventually. Besides, all actors end up memorizing their parts one way or another. I always did.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “You’ve done this business on stage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why do you not continue with it? Besides the obvious reason that you found sense.”

  She smiled. “It’s a very long story.”

  “We have a very long afternoon before us.”

  She thought about it for a few minutes, but decided it just wasn’t a tale fit for his ears. She hadn’t even told her family. All they knew was that she’d fallen off a stage, broken her arm, and decided that directing was her calling. She hadn’t dared tell them that she’d been doing some stupid trust exercise with her acting class and that the guy who had been supposed to catch her as she ran across the stage with her eyes closed had let her slip by. Accidentally, of course.

  She’d landed in the orchestra pit. It was probably a good thing it had been empty; she might have done some serious damage to the cello section otherwise.

  That accident had been enough to point her in a different direction. There was really no going back now.

  She smiled at Connor. “I like directing.”

  “Do you?”

  “I like being in charge.”

  He almost smiled.

  She almost fanned herself.

  “I share that feeling,” he said, with something of a purr. He seemed to consider his next words for several moments. “And the actors? What do you think of them?”

  She took a deep breath. That was the question, wasn’t it? “It is difficult to be an actor,” she said finally. “It takes a special sort of person to be willing to get up on a stage and create a character.”

  “Hmmm,” he said.

  “I like them, for the most part,” she admitted. “As for the rest, I put up with them because of their talent. If I only hired people I liked, I wouldn’t have a theater for very long.”

  “Would you,” he began slowly, “truly not prefer to be up on that stage?”

  “No,” she said firmly. She’d been saying it firmly for years. She didn’t want to act. She didn’t want to dig deep for emotions night after night on stage, then go home afterward and sleep it off like a drinking binge. She didn’t want to wake up every morning with an emotional hangover.

  Really. She didn’t.

  “I much prefer just directing the plays,” she said. Firmly.

  He looked at her thoughtfully. “Indeed.”

  “Indeed,” she agreed briskly. “But you might like acting in them very much. Let’s get with these lines, shall we? You’ve been watching us rehearse for a few days now. We don’t need to go over the storyline, do we?”

  “I believe I have that in my head,” he said, raising one eyebrow. “Death, death, and more death. A bit of madness. A little romance. More death.”

  “That about sums it up. Let’s start where Hamlet sees the ghost for the first time.”

  She tried not to remember the first time she’d seen a ghost. Namely the one sitting next to her, dutifully repeating the lines she fed him, then giving them back to her on his own without hesitation.

  She was impressed.

  And she did not impress easily.

  Things went along swimmingly for the space of about an hour, then Connor’s mood soured rapidly.

  “What?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I do not care for how the king was murdered. And I like it even less that his lady wife could not wait until he was cold in his grave before she wed with Hamlet’s uncle.”

  “Hey, I didn’t write this stuff,” she said, holding up her hands in surrender. “I’m just directing it.”

  Connor stood up and turned toward the empty hearth. “I’ve little liking for these lines. Little liking at all.”

  She was tempted to ask him why, but she suspected that he didn’t want to talk about it and, if she pressed him, he would probably either draw his sword or disappear.

  So she took the opportunity to look at him while his back was turned. How was it he could look no different than a mortal man would have? He put his hand on the mantel just as any other man in torment would have. He bowed his head and his hair fell over his face in a way that any hairdresser would have killed to copy. She could see his chest rising and falling as he cursed his way through his distress.

  Before she thought better of it, she reached out and touched his kilt, just to see if she had lost her mind.

  And she felt not his kilt, but his eyes suddenly boring a hole into the side of her head.

  “What,” he asked crisply, “are you doing?”

  She looked up at him. All right, so she had just made a complete ass of herself, which she never did. It didn’t help that he was looking down at her as if she were a bug he intended to crush under his worn leather boots. She stood up as if she’d meant to do it all along, then retreated to a comfy chair a safe distance away.

  “I was just curious,” she said, trying desperately to convince herself that she had every right to be groping his clothes. It certainly seemed to work for Hugh; why couldn’t it work for her?

  “Were you indeed?” he asked, his voice dangerously soft.

  “Can you blame me? You look so real.”

  “I’m real enough,” he muttered. “But yet not.”

  “Can you touch things from the mortal world, then?” she asked.

  “It is not easy. It takes a great amount of strength and drains me quite thoroughly for several hours afterwards. Or days, depending on what I’ve done.”

  She looked into his gray eyes and had the oddest feeling that she’d looked into them before. Yes, she knew she had and that morning, to boot. But this feeling was something far different, some sort of cosmic déjà vu that made her wish for a chair.

  Fortunately, she was already seated and there was nowhere to go besides the floor. She cast about desperately for a distraction.

  “Who did this . . . um, how did you . . .”

  “Die?” he finished briskly.

  “Yes,” she said, in what sounded to her like a very, very small voice.

  “My wife cuckolded me and I was murdered by her lover.”

  She felt her mouth fall open of its own accord. “But what woman in her right mind . . .”

  She decided belatedly that maybe she was headed in a place she really shouldn’t go.

  “I think I’m sorry I brought this up,” she said finally.

  “You likely should be.” He stared unseeing at the other side of the room. “I have told no one this tale,” he began slowly. “At first, I was too full of rage. Then I could not grasp that I was dead and had no chance for living the rest of the life that should have been mine.” He met her eyes. “I suppose I should have grieved.”

  “I think it might be easier to stay angry.”

  “I daresay.”

  “I like to forget my troubles in work,” she offered. “It keeps me from thinking too much. But, of course, I don’t have any great tragedies in my life.” And she didn’t, unless you could counted being thirty-two, not married, and her only prospect in the last two years being a man whom she suspected was far more interested in her play than in her.

  Well, at least she wasn’t a ghost.

  “Did you love her?” she asked quietly.

  Connor looked at her in surprise. “My wife? Of course not. She was fair enough, I suppose, but she was my enemy’s daughter. Wedding with her seemed as good a way as any to keep the McKinnons from stealing my cattle.”

  “She was a McKinnon?” Victoria gurgled. She reached for her tea and downed a swig. Damn. Cold.

  Connor was, to her complete astonishment, almost smiling. It was more of a wry quirk of half his mouth, but that made her spew what was left in her mouth out—fortunately not onto him.

  “Excitable, aren’t you?” he asked.

  She mopped up with one of Mrs.
Pruitt’s linen napkins. “No wonder you don’t like us.”

  “Aye, well, I’m considering making an exception or two. I’ve still no use for your brother, but your sister Megan is quite a fetching wench and I like her laugh. I think I could become quite fond of your grandmère as well.” He pulled up a chair out of thin air and sat down comfortably. “I haven’t come to a final decision on you.”

  “How nice,” she managed. She dragged her sleeve across her face, giving up any semblance of dignity. “So you married a McKinnon. What happened then?”

  “She bore me twins. A lad and a wee lassie.”

  “Oh,” Victoria said. “How lovely—”

  “And then a pair of years later, she took up with a French minstrel who had come to try and pluck out a living from whatever foolish Highland chieftain he could,” Connor said, his frown returning with vigor. “If she’d had a thought in that empty head of hers, she would have realized he could not keep her as she desired to be kept.”

  “And the children?”

  He looked down at his hands again. “When she fled with the Frenchman, she took my bairns with her. Of course, the fools couldn’t find east when they were staring straight into the morning sun and they became hopelessly lost. A fortnight hadn’t passed before they sent a messenger back to me, begging for me to come and aid them.”

  “And did you?”

  “Of course I did!” he exclaimed, looking up at her. “What kind of man do you think me to be?”

  “Honorable,” she said promptly. Maybe a little irritated after seven hundred years of haunting, but that was justifiable.

  “For all it served me,” he said. “I hadn’t ridden half a mile from my home before I was murdered by that French whoreson. But before my life ebbed from me, he let me know that my bairns were dead from the ague. My wife as well.”

  She shivered.

  “But I invited him to come with me to the grave with a sword across his belly.”

  “Oh,” Victoria said, feeling a little faint.