A Highlander for Christmas (38 page)

Jared stood motionless at the window, afraid to turn and see the dark hair tumbled around her shoulders. Imagining was hard enough, but
seeing
her would undo all his careful control.

“The abbey is a place for odd dreams.” Somehow he made his voice firm, level. “Nicholas says it’s a trick of the shadows, something that gives even the most practical visitor, a dose of wild imagination. It can shake a person badly.”

“It hasn’t shaken you.”

He shrugged. “I was prepared.”

“Why don’t you look at me?” Maggie’s voice was a whisper.

Turn? Face all the things he couldn’t have? No, this was safer. Cool, calm distance and never forgetting this was business. He was a man without a future. The cold vision of his death had made that clear enough. Time and again he had watched his body fall in a pool of blood beside a lichen-covered boulder and a tree with a broken limb. Long ago Jared had learned to trust the force of such visions, a gift of his Celtic blood.

He had neither expected the gift nor wanted its terrible weight. Though the power ran long in the MacNeill bloodline, it surfaced ever in the firstborn son, said to be the heritage of a woman who watched all her kin die beneath a Viking’s ax. As the berserk invader laughed, she had called down a curse on all her enemies and a vow that no MacNeill should again ever be taken unaware by betrayal. By her prayer the gift was given, always falling to the firstborn male, who was to guard the safety of the line and the drafty stone walls that brooded above a great loch.

But tradition had been broken.

After the death of Jared’s brother, the gift had moved, falling to a soldier unsuspecting and unprepared where he crouched in a stifling box in an Asian jungle.

For the first time, another MacNeill, second-born, had gained the gift of touch. It had come to Jared as he lay dying, slick with his own blood.

Had he been home when his brother needed him, would the future have changed? Could Jared have stilled his brother’s pain and stopped his hand in suicide? Would Grahaeme still stride those high hills, his laughter shaking falcons from their nestings above the gray seas?

Jared closed his eyes, forcing away a cold wave of guilt.
What if
could drive a man mad more surely than sin, and Jared was already too close to madness.

And to sin.

Linen whispered. Cambric stirred. He sensed her perfume moving in the still air. It pulled him sharply back to the present.

“Look at me, Jared. I won’t melt. I certainly won’t break.”

But I might
, he thought.
Or I might do something neither of us could forgive while so much is still unsettled.
“Go back to sleep,” he said harshly. “I won’t disturb you again.”

He heard her sudden, sharp breath only inches behind him. He stiffened as her hand settled on his arm.

She was worried, uncertain. He read every nuance of her mind, opened to him with painful clarity. She wanted to understand. She wanted to comfort him. She wanted—

He closed his eyes at the image of
exactly
what Maggie wanted to do in that big white bed while their hands met and their skin moved in reckless hunger across the linen sheets.

He felt her clearly.

Heat and surrender. Need and yielding.

Jared cursed.

But it was no good closing his eyes and pretending he hadn’t felt the hot edge of her desire. She might sense it only vaguely herself, but to him the image was painfully clear.

She wanted his hands on her skin. She wanted his body, a warm weight above her. She wanted his laughter and his breathless groan while he brought himself hilt-deep inside her.

“You don’t know what you’re asking, Maggie.”

Her hand didn’t move against his arm. “I’m asking to see your face, Jared. I’m asking for … answers.”

“Answers take a toll. Usually they make things worse.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

What did he believe?

Jared closed his eyes, tried not to notice how her fingers felt against his skin. He tried not to wonder how it would feel if her hand slid to his chest— and then lower. “Whatever you feel is wrong,” he said roughly. “Whatever you want is … dangerous.”

“Beauty always has a price,” she said, her voice husky at his ear. “My father taught me that before I was old enough to hold my own soldering iron.”

He almost smiled at that. Other women cared about clothes or houses or career plans, but Maggie spoke reverently about soldering irons.

“Why are you so afraid to face me, Jared? Because you know I’m right?”

He turned angrily, ready to prove that she was wrong. But he lost what he wanted to say when he saw the moonlight captured in her hair, falling like silver powder on her cheeks. “Beautiful,” he whispered.

“No.” Her fingers twined through his. “But what we make between us could be. I meant that.”

He didn’t answer.

Her hand moved along his arm. “Are you so afraid of the truth? Or are you simply afraid to be happy?”

Jared felt the heat of her skin and the slide of her fingers. He was bound to her, linked in a way that felt as old as memory or time itself. In that moment of shimmering contact, he stared deep into her soul.

There he saw perfect forms of platinum and polished amber, all waiting to be completed. He felt the joy she would bring to each creation with her passion.

Too close
, he thought, already drawing her closer. She shivered, restless, uncertain, and the fine cambric inched from her shoulder, revealing creamy skin and the curve of one full breast. She whispered his name, the sound blending with the moonlight.

Jared didn’t want to see into her heart. He couldn’t bear to know all that she was offering him. Grimly, he fought for distance and sanity. “Maggie? Listen to me.”

“I don’t want to listen. I don’t want to talk.”

“You have to.” He pulled her to the bed and made her sit. With great focus he smoothed the soft fabric, covering the shadowed curves that beckoned still. “Before you touch me again, I need to explain.”

“Your past doesn’t matter, Jared. Not to me.” Her shoulders were squared, defiance burning in her eyes. “Nothing you can say will shock me or drive me away.”

“Maggie, don’t make this any harder.”

“I’ll make it as hard as I
can
. I don’t believe a word that officer said. You’d never set a bomb to take someone’s life. No one who knew you would suggest such a thing.” She crossed her arms, patient and implacable.

“I didn’t set the bomb. But after that, things changed. I worked harder and longer. I followed every case and took on the jobs no one else wanted.” His hands hardened. “Narcotics among them.”

“Work was a distraction. It’s perfectly understandable.”

“Not a distraction, an obsession. In six months I had more arrests than men twice my age. It was like a sickness, the need to cleanse the filth I saw everywhere around me.”

“I understand.”

“You don’t. You
can’t
. It’s a different universe, Maggie. There are places in Asia where girls of fifteen are dead of old age, disease or drugs they never wanted.”

Maggie didn’t look away. All he saw in her face was her concern and sympathy. Suddenly Jared needed to shock her, to show her exactly how far apart their lives were. “I was posted to Thailand, to work with an American Drug Enforcement team. Nothing shook me. I was relentless, incorruptible, and completely off my head. I fit in perfectly with the unit I was assigned to.”

“You had good reason to be bitter after all you’d seen. And the things you did were to protect, not to harm,” she argued fiercely. “How can that be wrong?”

“If only it were so simple. When you push the way I did, people always die. But that didn’t matter.” He turned away. “Only getting even mattered. Maybe it’s good that I was stopped when I was.”

Jared leaned against the wood bedpost, fighting his way through the blood and shrapnel of dark memories.

“What happened, Jared?”

He drew a harsh breath and watched moonlight on the moat, feeling like a stranger lost in a place of pain and darkness. The words seemed to rise in a cold wave. “You can buy anything in Asia. Drugs, guns, people—it’s only a matter of finding the price. I stumbled on a market one night when I got lost after an investigation. But they didn’t sell pirated software or rubies smuggled in from Burma. They dealt in babies. For one hundred
baht
you could buy a healthy infant. Four dollars got your pick. The price fell if you bought in quantity, of course. But there was no need to choose. Appearance or health didn’t matter.” He drew a harsh breath, reluctant to face those icy memories.

“I’m here, Jared. Tell me the rest.”

He heard the din of insects beating at oil lanterns. He smelled the pungent blend of cooking oil, fish, and human fear. The night market was all around him, as real as if it were only a day before. “It didn’t matter how they looked. They never even had names, because they were simply a means of concealment for the high-grade powder that would earn millions on a city street in Europe or America. It was brilliant, the perfect way to slip through customs. After all, who’s going to take a second glance at a sleepy baby beneath a blanket. Except of course by that time, they wouldn’t be sleeping, but dead.”

His hands locked at the memory of what he had seen at that night market. Thirty tiny forms, alive but not for long. Strictly a means to conceal the white powder.

“They used babies to carry drugs?” Maggie’s voice was a wisp of sound.

“For almost two years. The night I found them was the first bit of bad luck they’d had. I saw to it that they had a lot more bad luck after that.”

Maggie wondered what kind of mind could plan such horror. Surely there had to be a special part of hell reserved for men like that. “So you hurt them. I’d say you had every right.”

“They became my new obsession. Day or night, I was always too close. They weren’t used to police who didn’t play by their rules. When all the scrutiny started hurting the bottom line, they decided I was an annoyance they could do without.”

She covered his locked hands with her own. “They threatened you?”

“They tried,” he said mechanically. “Twice they nearly cut me down in backstreet ambushes. But that’s the bloody thing about dying—when you don’t care a damn, it never happens.”

Maggie couldn’t stand to think of him bleeding in the filth of a noisy alley. “They didn’t hurt you. Thank God,” she whispered, her hands sliding around his waist. At least she understood the pain in his eyes now.

“But you’re wrong. They did … hurt me.”

Maggie closed her eyes, afraid to hear—and more afraid not to hear. “Tell me.”

“I disrupted their annual buying event. We ran the mothers off, then torched the building. No one was hurt, but their operation lost face. I suppose I was coming to feel I was invincible. In two years I’d only been hit once, and that was just a flesh wound.”

“I’m sorry,” Maggie said softly.

“Oh, don’t be sorry yet. You haven’t heard the best.” He stood stiffly, his body tense, but she didn’t let him go. “I found out where their next market was to take place, their biggest yet. I should have wondered when I found all the details so easily. But that was part of the plan. I was to be the guest of honor.” He spoke slowly, and Maggie knew he was back in the horror, part of a nightscape of greed and unimaginable suffering.

“We were up north near the Burma border, in real frontier territory. There were already dozens of women waiting when we rumbled in from the jungle.” He shook his head slowly. ‘They’d been told their babies—girls, all of them— were going to be adopted by rich Americans and taken off to the land of golden streets. Who were we to spoil their fantasy?”

“You saved their children,” Maggie said fiercely. “If they had known the truth, they would have thanked you.”

“You think so? But no one likes to see their dreams trampled. We soon had a riot on our hands, with a hundred screaming mothers who refused to go away without their adoption receipt—absolutely phony—and their precious one hundred
baht
. That’s when the local police showed up. Of course that was part of the plan too,” he said coldly. “We were needed to close down a big heroin processing lab barely ten kilometers away. The local police were only too happy to lead us to it.” Tension gripped Jared’s body. “With each kilometer the locals grew more talkative. Suddenly they were our best friends, offering cigarettes and tea. I suppose that’s when it began to sink in that something was wrong. By twilight the road had dwindled to a footpath through a wall of jungle. Our
friends
led us over a hill to a scattering of lights. We closed in and I still remember that hellish darkness all around us.” Jared laughed softly, and Maggie shivered at the sound. “By then the locals had vanished, and there was no missing the stink of a setup, but of course it was too late. We were heading back to our jeep when the mountain exploded, and the buildings behind us tore apart like straw. The man I was with took twenty bullets through the chest. Then they came for me.”

He waited, his hands twisting over the polished wooden bed frame.

Maggie put out a hand, hating the flat impersonality in his voice. “Jared, don’t.”