Christmas Kiss (A Holiday Romance) (Kisses and Carriages) (21 page)

The old man laughed. “She canna stay, good sir. There is no choosing to be done here.”

“Ye have taken my child.” His voice broke. She knew how it must be killing him to be told Angeline could never be his. “Ye have taken my child, now ye would take Brianna as well? What kind of monster are ye?” Heathcliff’s voice boomed across the cold courtyard. If Bree were the coachman at that moment, she would have run like hell.

Instead, the old man snorted and rolled his eyes, then looked back at her.

“The only question left for you, lassie, is this. Did you go back to being happy?”

It was a trick question, it had to be. If she answered wrong, she might just drop dead.
I’ll go back to being happy, or die trying.
“Yes, I went back to being happy, okay?”

“Fine then. That’s fine then. I have a reputation to maintain, you understand. Satisfaction guaranteed and all that.”

“Give him back his child,” she said.

“Does he have a child, then?” The old man’s eyes twinkled and it wasn’t in a jolly-old-Saint-Nick kind of way, either.

“Angeline,” she said.

The old man rolled his eyes and dismissed her question with a wave of his white glove. “Are you not getting cold out here? Ye’ve not much on.”

And suddenly, her suitcase was next to her with her coat laid across it as she’d left it upstairs.

She rocked back on her heels in shock. Heathcliff put an arm behind her to steady her, like he was used to seeing blatant acts of magic.

“A kind heart ye have, to try to keep my child warm. And ye gave her a name as well. Touching, but I assure you, quite unnecessary. As I said, she is but a moon child. But my favorite bit...” The man broke into laughter. It took a minute for him to be able to speak again. “My favorite bit was when ye tried to convince herself, and the lass, that ye were a witch!”

Heathcliff tensed beside her.

The Coachman, moon or not, sobered quickly. He did not look pleased.

“I lent you one of my own,” he told Heathcliff. “You wanted a family. You did not specify how long you wanted one. Satisfaction guaranteed.”

“What year is it?” Bree asked to distract them both.

“Here? Now? No year.” The man was back to grinning, and as infuriating as that was, it was better than him being angry with Heathcliff.

“No year? I thought it was 1806,” she said.

“No, my dear. I took ye both out of time, to give ye your wishes.” He turned to Heathcliff. “I must apologize for the little ruse earlier, sending a sprite to play the part of Charlie. I used a bit of foolishness to get ye away from yer home whilst I collected my child. Ye showed every indication that ye might go out the window after her, so I thought it best if ye weren’t present. I had a devil of a time keeping Miss Colby contained as it was. I could have never controlled the pair of ye.”

The devil rubbed his hands together.

“And now, we can get down to men’s business, sir.”

“Business? You mean to rob the place? If ye be the moon, what need have ye of worldly things?”

“Oh, ye’d be surprised. Besides, it is not yer worldly things I’ll be collecting this night. I truly have no wish to be laird of the manor and all that.”

“Then what is it ye mean to take from me?”

The old man looked at Bree. “All ye have. And at the moment, ye have this woman’s heart. I’ll take that.”

His eyes sparkled as he reached forward, toward Bree’s chest, as if he was actually going to reach inside her ribs and take out her heart. There was something clearly wicked about his smile and she realized he really meant to do it.

She remembered the feeling from only a little while before, like someone had reached in her chest, pulled out her heart, and held it in front of her while she bled out. But she couldn’t seem to move a finger to stop him.

“No!” A blade appeared out of the top of the coachman’s white glove. Heathcliff had stabbed the hand with a long dagger from beneath. Who knows where he’d been hiding it? But no blood appeared.

Heathcliff pulled the blade free. The glove closed over the hole made by the dagger and sealed itself shut.

“Ye will not harm her.”

“Ye mean to make another wish?”

“I give an order.”

They stood nose to nose.

“And why should I take an order from a mere mortal?”

“Because we loved yer daughter.”

“She had no need of yer love.”

“We gave it just the same.”

“Ye got your wish.”

“I take it back.”

“Ye take it back?”

“I do. If it means Miss Colby shall be unharmed, will be returned to her time, to her life, then I take it all back.”

Bree stepped forward. “And what happens if he doesn’t take it back?”

“Then I take ye. There are many moon children. None have a voice. Ye would prove amusing to them, I think.”

“It is done, Brianna. I have taken back my wishes. All of them. Family. Help. I want none of it.”

“Then give me yer name, son.” There was a strange edge to the coachman’s voice that made Bree shiver.

“Never,” said Heathcliff.

The old man laughed, then began to sing. “
Take back the breath, take back the sigh. Give not your name, your boon deny.
Yer grandmother taught ye well, yer lairdship.”

“She did. I’ll not give my name to the devil.”

The coachman laughed long and hard. “Ah, laddie. I be not the devil.”

“The devil’s brother, then.”

Still laughing, the coachman gestured toward the carriage. Inside, a lantern burned brighter.

“I never intended to take the lass’s heart. It was but a jest. The pair of ye are just so serious, it was impossible to forebear teasing.” The man sobered. “But the teasing is at an end. Time to go, lass. Now.”

Heathcliff’s hand clamped down on her arm.

“The deal is unstruck, Laird. The carriage will return her to where she began. This little interlude, out of time, never happened.” He waved his fingers. “Come.”

She wasn’t about to worry Heathcliff by mentioning the fact that she might just be headed back to a partially submerged car in a partially frozen stream. He would worry enough as it was. Or would he?

The man said it never happened. Would they both forget?

But there was no time to wonder. She had to get out of there and not make it any harder on Heathcliff by kicking and screaming and making a scene. He’d lost the child he was hoping to keep and raise. He’d fallen in love with her, only to have her dragged away by...  Dear Lord, she was going to have to commit herself into a real loony bin.

None of this was real.

Heathcliff looked stricken. She must have said it out loud!

“None of this was real,” she said again, taking his hands in hers. “Just tell yourself it never happened.”

He looked deeply into her eyes. “And you, Brianna Catherine? Will you tell yourself it never happened?”

She shook her head and smiled. “Heck no. I’m going to write it all down as soon as I can, so I don’t forget a second of it. I just don’t want you to hurt, that’s all.”

“I’ll cherish every pang, my love.”

She clamped her arms around his neck, this time trying to absorb him, pressing the feel of him into her memory like a flattened flower between pages. “I love you. I’m sorry I never got around to confessing it, but I love you.”

“And I you, lass.”

The coachman cleared his throat.

Reluctantly, she let go and turned away. Just in case, she glanced at the old man to see if maybe his heart might have softened a little and he could just go away and forget about them.

“Not a chance,” he said, as if he’d read her mind.

Hands came down on her shoulders, preventing her from turning back.

“Go,” Heathcliff whispered behind her ear. Maybe he was worried about making a scene too.

Stinging tears spread across her eyes like someone bringing down the curtains. She couldn’t see clearly, but she walked forward anyway. The snow was not very deep, and she wondered if the storm that raged around them all week had only been an illusion.

She climbed into the carriage and faced forward, resisting the urge to look out the window. She didn’t want to see him standing there in agony and she definitely didn’t want to see him
not
standing there. Either way, she’d probably try to get out the carriage and piss off the coachman. She’d seen his magic. She’d watched him scramble her life all week like a bunch of eggs. She didn’t want to see what he might do to Heathcliff while she watched.

She shook her head. She had other things to worry about.

They’d been taken out of time? Was she now
back
in time, since she’d gotten into the carriage? Was she about to find herself in the ditch? If so, she wanted to be prepared.

The bastard started humming his damned song again, so she gave a good solid elbow to the back wall.

He laughed. Her elbow throbbed. But at least the humming stopped. A few minutes later, she felt herself sliding into sleep and hoped she would wake up somewhere warm and dry.

Of course, she wasn’t stupid enough to hope it out loud.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Bree woke in a car. It wasn’t upside down or sideways. That was a good sign.

She was in the back seat of a cab, parked next to a curb at Heathrow Airport. She sat up and looked out the window at the same doors she’d come out of nine days ago. Or was she back to the day she’d arrived? If so, she was in no mood to tour the country. She just wanted to go home. If Heathcliff had been sent back to 1806, there was no use looking for him. And the last thing she wanted to do was stumble across his headstone surrounded by twenty tourists.

“Yer awake, then? Excellent,” said the cabby. “I’ll just get your bag from the boot. No charges, Miss. I’ve been ‘andsomely paid, I ‘ave. If I’m given a ha’penny more, I’ll be forced to seek out me priest, I will, for stealing. See if I don’t.”

And with that, he jumped out of the car like he was afraid she might give him a tip and therefore damn his soul. She resisted the urge to ask him who had paid her fare because she didn’t want to hear that her benefactor was the stupid Man in the Moon.

She climbed out and the handle of her purse slid down her arm. She should be thrilled to have it back, but she wasn’t going to be grateful to the moon for anything. She pulled it open and started going through it in the middle of the sidewalk. Her passport was there. Her folder with her itinerary and return flight confirmation. Her driver’s license. She dug and dug, but found no cell phone.

By the time she looked up, the cabby was gone.

The airline took pity on her, even apologized for whatever it was that kept her from making her flight two days before. They had plenty of room for her and her abused suitcase on a plane that was leaving within the hour. The bag weighed even less flying home—no surprise there; she wasn’t taking any souvenirs.

At least not the tangible kind.

She had a window seat on the leg from Atlanta to Spokane, but night was falling again. The moon was the last thing she would risk seeing, so when the chick in the aisle seat asked if she’d lift the blind on the window, Bree shook her head.

“If I open it, I’ll puke.”

What she really wanted to say was “If I see so much as a moonbeam I’m going to get hysterical and they’ll have to land the plane on a freeway. Do you really want to risk it?”

The woman asked the flight attendant if she could sit elsewhere, then the guy next to her got up to use the restroom and never came back. So for the rest of the six hour flight, she would have the entire side of the plane to herself. Plenty of privacy for crying.

But she wouldn’t cry. She wasn’t even going to think.

She was going to pretend like everything was fine for the next two weeks. Then, when she was stronger, she was going to deal with everything she was leaving behind her in Scotland. If she still needed it, she’d have a good cry. And if the crying never stopped, she was going to find a therapist—someone slightly under-qualified, someone without the power to lock her away when she started telling her story.

Their story.

She wondered what Heathcliff would think about therapists. She could imagine him rolling his eyes.

If there had ever been a Heathcliff.

Nope. Not going to think about him. Not for two weeks.

She lasted another twenty seconds. It wasn’t her fault though; the stupid, cheap airplane blanket was plaid! That, of course, reminded her of the plaid he’d covered her with one night when he thought she was sleeping.

She cried on and off for the rest of the flight, slightly enjoying how uncomfortable she made the flight attendants. But she paid for it when the plane descended. She thought her ears were going to explode. She wished she would have taken the piece of hard candy the one of them had offered, to help her ears pop. 

Would she ever go back? If she did, would the moon take pity on her and make Heathcliff’s castle appear in the mist?

“Not a chance,” whispered a voice next to her, where no one was sitting.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Heathcliff McKinnon and his castle were returned to their proper year. He knew because his servants arrived the morning after he’d lost all.

For a moment, he considered taking the housekeeper aside, or his man of business, or even the stableman and telling them his tale. But it wouldn’t be believed. Even
he
wondered if he hadn’t dreamt it. And knowing he would often wonder, he gave orders that the window in the first bedchamber was not to be repaired. Nothing at all was to be disturbed there. 

He let the staff wonder about the Arabian tent in the parlor. No doubt they’d share a giggle when they found his turban and robes beneath. What they made of his cords and tassels, he didn’t care.

What he did care about was finding something that might help him best the bloody moon. His grandmother had to have known something more than just the song. Perhaps she’d dealt with the blighter herself. He’d seemed to know of the woman at the very least. But he could not tear the house to pieces looking for it, not with the servants already peering at him askance. No, he’d have to search calmly.