Everlastin' Book 1 (24 page)

“Robert died afore the turn
o' the century.” Lachlan released a dry, low laugh. “Tessa brought
in gypsies and the like to banish me. But funny thin' abou' the
powers tha' be, Beth, we have mair control than we're led to
believe in life. So I stayed on.

“In 1902, Tessa died. Her
spirit passed on swiftly ou' o' ma reach. Her eldest son, Robbie,
took over the house. His plan was to make some minor improvements,
then sell ma home for wha’ever he could get for it.

“They amazed me, these
Inglisses. No matter wha' I did—the howlin', the tossin' thin’s,
the threatenin'—most o' tha' idiot clan refused to believe I still
existed. O' course, Tessa's story had been I'd deserted her. Cool
and calculatin', tha' one. The family was never sure wha' was
hauntin' this place—no' till Robbie uncovered me.”

Lachlan linked his fingers.
“Two things altered ma existence then, Beth. When Robbie opened the
wall, I felt maself expel a breath—a great, roarin' breath tha'
gave me a sense o' truly bein' alive again. Some kind o' energy
moved abou' me. Its power pulled me through the grayness I'd known
since ma death. At first I thought I was comin' back to life. It
felt—
feels
—tha'
real. Like we are now, darlin'.”

Beth's head lifted slowly.
Her tear-filmed eyes reluctantly looked into Lachlan's. He wanted
to pull her into his arms and soothe her, but he knew he had to go
on. It all had to be explained before she could begin to accept her
own death.

“This energy gives us the
ability to materialize and spend portions o' time livin' in this
world...dimension...wha’ever you wish to call it. I canna explain
how it comes to be, but I know it comes from wi’in this house. I've
no' been able to tap into it anywhere else. And as long as I'm full
o' maself—you might say—this energy allows me to move beyond this
property.”

“Leave. Like at Borgie's
place,” Beth accused with quiet disgust.

“Aye. I wanted to kill him.
Didna, though. He was alive when I left, and tha' was for Agnes'
sake. She attended yer funeral—”

Lachlan sucked in a breath
as Beth shot to her feet and walked to the far end of the room.
After several moments of silence, he went on, “I guess Borgie didna
realize you were... gone, lass. No' tha' a little matter like that
would sway him. But I'm gettin' ahead o' maself.

“I'm no' sure wha' I
expected o' the Inglisses once the truth was exposed. Perhaps a wee
show o' pity for ma untimely end. But no' one o' them shed a tear,
and it hurt like hell, it did.

“Ta further frustrate me,
they decided I was no' fit to be buried in a church yard.
Hypocritical swines!”

He rose to his feet and,
with a hand clamped on the back of his neck, walked to the
fireplace and looked longingly up at Beth's portrait.

“They interred me ou' by the
old oak withou' benefit o' a kist or words o' remorse. No' a prayer
for me, Beth, and it made me furious. I'd done naught to them but
marry tha' greedy wench. No' a conscience among the bloody lot. to
this day, they exist on ma money—their homes and businesses
acquired from ma own sweat and blood. And buried me, they did, in
tha' cold, lonely place, like some craiture wha' died on a
roadside.

“Tha' verra day I swore, for
as long as this Ingliss clan's blood runs warm, they will serve me
and this house.”

Lachlan's voice became husky
and deeper, and laced with bitterness. “Lest I visit them in their
cozy homes and remind them o' their debt to me. Might sound cruel,
Beth, but I've come to realize tis ma hatred for this clan that's
kept me here—tha' alone givin' me the strength to co-exist wi’in
the grayness and this world.

“Till you came into me
life.”

Amid the tension in the
room, a voice as cold as the Arctic said, “I don't want to hear
anymore.”

“Have you listened to a word
I've said?”

Absolute loathing contorted
her features. “You're a master at deception, but I'm not buying any
of it.”

To Lachlan's disbelief, Beth
ran for the door. His energies began to plummet. “Beth!” he called
as she flung wide the door to the hall and dashed toward the front
doors.

Electricity crackled about
him, causing a breeze to lift his hair back from his face. His
features lined with anguish, he bellowed,
“Och,
Beth!”

His corporeal body broke
down into a greenish mist, which moved in the same direction Beth
had gone. He had to stop her. He had long ago learned that unstable
emotions in this form of existence could evoke strange
meteorological occurrences. Poor Beth was so desperately clinging
to the hope of life. Her emotions were indeed unstable, her sanity
teetering.

Lachlan had to force her to
accept the truth.

Silver-blue beams of
moonlight bathed Beth's blind flight. She was determined to escape
this nightmare, even if it meant running indefinitely.

Several peacocks called out,
shattering the stifling quietude of the night. Beth ran on faster
and faster, her heart a fragmented thing within her chest. A
deep-rooted fear that maybe it wasn't all lies, fueled her
desperation to escape the entrapments of Lachlan's words. She
couldn't let her heart go out to him.

To believe any of what he'd
said would put her in a position to question his claim of her own
death.

And she was definitely
alive!

Her heart was thundering
behind her breasts. Her lungs were aching with the strain to
breathe. The cool night air had raised gooseflesh on her
arms.

She was alive!

She'd either been drugged,
or she'd gone insane. It really didn't matter which. Either way,
she was lost to the world she'd thought she'd belonged to, or lost
to the only love of a man she'd ever known.

A sound stirred her
awareness. A sound both familiar and offering her hope.

The tarred private roadway
passed beneath her feet, and when she came to its end, she forged
into the street beyond. The high beams of a car came swiftly around
a bend in the road. Beth laughed with elation as she flagged her
arms wildly above her head to attract the driver's
attention.

The headlights rushed on
toward her, the bright beams smarting her eyes, impairing her
vision. But more afraid of losing this chance to escape Kist House
than of being struck by the vehicle, she jumped up and down and
began shouting for the driver to stop.

The lights came at her,
bearing down on her with a swiftness that was startling. The driver
had to see her. She was directly in front of the vehicle's
path—

She felt her body jerk in a
spasm of shock as an image of herself catapulting on impact blared
before her mind's eye. Air was sucked sharply into her lungs, then
galed back out when she felt the car pass through her.

Not over her.

Not around her.

Not touching her in any
usual sense of the word.

It passed right through her
as though she were nothing more than thin air. She could feel an
icy rush go through her at the precise moment it happened—a rush
and a turbulent several seconds of her atoms dispersing in every
direction, then regrouping.

Terror swelled within her
stomach and rocketed upward, but lodged within her throat. Her head
bent back, she frantically clawed at her neck to release the agony
within her. When the sound finally erupted, it was in the form of a
blood-curdling wail.

The peacocks in the distance
raised their voices in a cacophony of shrill calls.

Unbeknown to her, Beth's
newly acquired telekinetic properties were released from her
empyreal subconscious. A wind materialized, increasing in strength
until its howl became a fierce, piping sound through the branches
of the trees. High in the night sky above her, an enormous vortex
yawned to life. Beth felt herself slipping upward and away, beyond
the reach of the raging elements she had unknowingly evoked. She
didn't try to stop her flight. She was too frightened, too
confused, too exhausted to care what awaited her.

“Hold on!” The voice was
omnipresent. “I've got you!”

Beth was only conscious of
moving with great speed. Her body and mind were buoyant. It was a
horrible place, this endless nothingness. There was nothing to see
or feel. Utter obscurity in its most horrifying form.

The fall went on and on, but
she was dimly conscious of an element of control in her
momentum.

Lachlan.

He was guiding them through
the gray void.

Their semi-transparent
figures, wrapped tightly about each other, passed through the roof,
the attic, and came to fall upon the bed in the master suite. Beth
lay beneath him, her glazed eyes staring into space. Lachlan,
panting out of reflex, propped himself up on his elbows and peered
down into her face.

It had been too close a
call, and this frightened him.

What had she done to cause
that opening between the two dimensions?

What would have happened to
them if he hadn't had the willpower to whisk them free and return
them home?

Not to mention the faculty
to stop their plummeting at the right moment!

A storm played across his
features when Beth closed her eyes. She had scared the wits out of
him—put him through the worse hell he'd known, and hoped to never
experience again! He had worried about the spontaneous
poofing
she would endure
in the beginning, but he was beginning to discover that was the
least of his troubles. She seemed to have a readier access to the
energies than he. And that could lead to some dire
complications.

“Beth?”

Her only response was a
strong shudder.

Lowering himself, Lachlan
buried his face within the soft curls at side of her neck. “If you
would only listen, I could have spared you this.”

Worming an arm and a leg
beneath her, he drew her onto her side and cradled her against him,
his cheek pressed to the crown of her head.

“You've got to give it some
time. Poor, darlin', ye're shiverin'.”

“I want to go home,” she
sobbed.

Pain racked Lachlan's face
as he fought back a threat of tears. “This is yer home, now. Good
lord, Beth, come to terms wi' wha' I'm offerin.”

He kissed the top of her
head and snuggled her closer. “This is ours, forever. When the
shock o' yer death wears off, you'll start to understand how verra
much we have thegither.”

He released a cry of pain at
something harshly pinching a section of his midriff. His arms
slackened. To his disbelief, Beth wrenched free and sat up on her
bent legs with a swiftness that stunned him.

“How much we have?” she
cried, yanking his exposed earlobe. “You did this to
me!”

With a grunt, Lachlan
scrambled to a sitting position, cupping his throbbing ear with a
hand. “Have you gone daft, womon? I may be dead but tha' hurt like
hell!”

“You're not dead, because I
haven't killed you...
yet!”

She took a swing at his
face, caught him on the jaw and sent him tumbling over the opposite
side of the bed. Her eyes wild with anger, she watched as his
peeked over the edge of the mattress. She lifted a pillow and
whipped it down on his head. He made a feeble attempt to grab it
from her as he jumped to his feet, but she was quicker and hit him
in the mid-section with it.

“Enough!”

But Beth was too fired-up to
stop.

Standing on the bed, she
repeatedly swung and pummeled him with the pillow until its
feathers began to spill into the air. Swearing a stream of Gaelic,
Lachlan made every attempt to anchor her arms. He was getting very
close when she jumped down from the bed and slammed her foot into
his groin. Feathers sailing on his expelled breath, he slowly sank
to his knees and bent over with a groan.

Beth stepped back within the
flurry of feathers. Her anger was winding down. Logic vied to take
over her labored emotions.

“I haven't figured it all
out yet,” she panted, absently brushing aside the annoying feathers
hovering in front of her face, “but I will!”

When he lifted his head and
cocked an eyebrow at her, she completed, “In the meantime, stay
away from me!”

With a guttural,
unintelligible oath, Lachlan cranked himself up onto his feet. The
fury in his face matched that of Beth's. He exhaled theatrically
and made a grand gesture with his arms. “Perhaps you'd like me to
stay in the carriage house? Or would you prefer the top o' a
tree?”

“I would prefer you crawled
into a doghouse!”

“Doghouse!” Crimson flooded
his face. “This is the thanks I get for carin' abou' you, you
ungrateful—”

“You never cared for
anything in your miserable life, you
scheming...womanizing...twerp!”

“Twerp,” he muttered. He
closed one eye and glared at Beth with the other. “Ye're too fond
o' tha' word.”

Beth gave a toss of her head
and backed up toward the door. “Everything's a joke to you, isn't
it? Stay away from me, understand?”