Much Ado In the Moonlight (38 page)

Thomas shifted uncomfortably. “I have lots of tales—”

“Jerk,” Victoria said, before she thought better of it. She marshalled all the resources of her patience. “I mean, please Thomas, humor this very large, very fierce Highland laird who has humbled himself at great personal cost to come and politely ask for your help because, thanks to you, he had the great misfortune to meet me and beyond all reason and no doubt against his better judgment, decide that he wanted to marry me!”

“Well, when you put it that way—”

“It wasn’t a misfortune,” Connor said quietly.

Victoria didn’t dare look at him. His words were enough to make her eyes burn. Heaven only knew what a look would do.

“But I
am
asking politely,” Connor added.

“Besides, he left his sword by the front door,” Victoria muttered. “I’m almost sure of it.”

Thomas looked at them both, shared a long look with Iolanthe, then sighed. “Well, since you asked so nicely, yes, I will tell you what you want to know. But I suggest you let me finish before you yell at me, Vic, for not telling you this sooner.”

Victoria shrugged. “You’re entitled to your privacy.”

“Yeah, well, hold that thought.” He shared one last look with his wife before he took a seat on a chair next to the couch and looked at Connor and Victoria. “You remember that I bought Thorpewold a few years ago.”

“I remember that I was doing King Lear a few years ago,” Victoria said. “I don’t remember anything else.”

“Answer enough. But you do remember that I came over to remodel last summer.”

“Yes,” Victoria said. “I thought you had lost your mind.”

Thomas smiled. “Thank you. I began to think so, as well, once I found out the place was haunted.”

Victoria snorted. “That serves you right for several things. I hope you had several hair-raising episodes. Do I dare speculate on the identity of those ghosts?”

“There were several shades hanging around you might recognize,” Thomas said. He nodded toward Connor. “Your fierce friend there was one of them.”

“You shouldn’t use that word,” Victoria advised. “Friend. He doesn’t like it.”

Thomas smiled briefly. “I imagine he doesn’t like it from either of us, but for far different reasons. But since I’m the one he wants answers from—and Laird MacDougal, I know the questions you have already—I suppose he’ll make nice for the afternoon.”

Connor grunted, but said nothing.

Thomas nodded. “As I was saying, I came and found the castle haunted by a rabble of Scots, but that wasn’t the most surprising thing. It was haunted also by an exquisitely beautiful woman.”

“A real ghost,” Victoria asked, “or just a figment of your overactive imagination?”

“A real ghost.”

Victoria wondered how Iolanthe would react to that news. She looked at her sister-in-law, but Iolanthe was lying on the couch with her arm over her eyes, barely breathing. Maybe deep breaths stirred up more than just air. Victoria looked at her brother. “Well, what does that have to do with us? So, you met a good-looking ghost? I’m sure it was entertaining for you, but I don’t understand what it has to do with anything.” She shifted uncomfortably. “In fact, I don’t know why we’re even talking about any of this. It’s an impossible tangle—”

“I wouldn’t say impossible,” Thomas interrupted.

“Then pick another word that means the same thing.”

Iolanthe cleared her throat weakly. “Ask your brother the name of that poor ghostly wench.”

“What good—”

“Ask him, Victoria,” Connor said quietly.

“All right,” she said, startled briefly by the seriousness of his tone. She looked at her brother. “Who was that gorgeous ghost that kept you awake at night for months?”

Thomas smiled faintly. “Iolanthe MacLeod.”

“Right,” Victoria said. “Well, that’s just plain spooky. I mean, how strange that your wife should have the same . . . name . . .”

She realized she had stopped talking only because her brain apparently had finally engaged itself.

“Iolanthe MacLeod?” she whispered.

Thomas shrugged helplessly, still smiling just a little. “As fate would have it.”

Victoria looked at Iolanthe, green with morning sickness, then at Thomas, who looked as if he’d never felt sorrier for anyone than he did his sister, who was so incredibly dense, then at Connor, who met her gaze expressionlessly.

“You knew?” she managed.

Connor lifted one shoulder in a faint shrug. “Aye.”

“This same . . . that same . . .” Victoria couldn’t manage to say it, but she did manage to point at the woman laid low on the couch.

“Aye,” Connor said. “The very same.”

“But . . . but how?” Victoria looked at Iolanthe, then Thomas. “How? It’s a fairy tale, impossible, beyond belief—”

“It is quite possible,” Iolanthe said quietly, pushing herself up unsteadily. “I was indeed that poor, unhappy ghost who dared your brother to come and take my castle from me. Now, Thomas, tell her the rest of the tale and don’t make her suffer through a long recounting. I won’t last—” She put her hand over her mouth.

“Are you going to be sick?” he asked quickly, halfway to his feet.

“She will be if you don’t hurry,” Victoria said tartly. “Spit it out!”

Iolanthe waved him away and resumed her prone position with her arm over her eyes. Thomas sat down uneasily.

“Here’s the condensed version, then, before Io loses her breakfast,” he said. “I met her, fell in love with her, and decided that if I could go back in time and rescue her before her untimely end, I might be able to bring her forward to the future.”

“Through a time gate,” Victoria said.

“Well, yes, of course,” Thomas said. “How else?”

“Then that’s how you know Jamie MacLeod.”

“Yes to that, too.”

“And you pretended not to know anything about what had happened to Granny!” Victoria exclaimed.

“I don’t remember pretending anything one way or another,” Thomas said with a smile. “ ‘The better part of valor is discretion,’ as the Bard would say.”

“Yeah, except when it comes to matters of this kind of import,” Victoria said in irritation. “You could have told me!”

“Why?”

Victoria growled in frustration and turned to Iolanthe. “Is Jamie really your grandfather? Does that make him medieval? Are you medieval? Damn it, I need dates!”

She realized that she was starting to lose it.

Iolanthe took a deep breathe, groaned, then rolled over to look at Victoria. “I was born during the fourteenth century. Jamie is my great-great grandfather. He first discovered the time gates because his brother had traveled to the future through them. It was something of a family secret and ’twas for the refusal to tell that secret that I was murdered. Your brother risked all to come and rescue me before that murder took place.”

Victoria had to take a few minutes to digest that. She was looking at an honest-to-goodness medieval gal who had obviously lost her mind while going through a time gate. It was surely the only way she’d managed to convince herself to marry Thomas.

“You couldn’t have liked him,” Victoria said with a frown. “Did you?”

“I thought he was a demon,” Iolanthe volunteered. “When I met him back in time.”

Victoria nodded in satisfaction. “I would have been surprised by anything else.”

“Thank you so much,” Thomas said with a laugh. “It’s all true, though. Even though I’d known Iolanthe—and loved her—as a ghost, she didn’t recognize me when I first found her. And she didn’t like me after she got to know me.” He reached over and put his hand on her head. “But eventually, she remembered all those years of her other life and we worked things out.”

“Poor woman,” Victoria muttered, then she fell silent.

Not because she didn’t have anything to say, but because the import of what she had heard had finally sunk in.

Iolanthe MacLeod McKinnon had been a ghost in that castle up the way. Thomas McKinnon had gone back in time, rescued her from an untimely death, and brought her back to the future. Brought her to the future as a living, corporeal being. And if Iolanthe could be rescued, so could Connor. He could be brought back to the twenty-first century. If it were possible, there would be only one person able to do it.

And that person was her.

She felt her mouth hanging opening very unattractively. She shut it with a snap and looked at Connor.

He returned her look for a very long moment before he stood and made Thomas a small bow.

“My thanks for the tale. Any more personal details will not be necessary.”

“Wait a minute,” Victoria said, standing, as well. “The personal details will too be necessary.”

“Nay, they will not.”

“Yes, they will! How else am I going to pull this off without knowing what Thomas did?”

“I’ve no intention of you ‘pulling this off,’ ” Connor said firmly.

“But—”

“Are you daft, woman? You, traipsing through the centuries back to a time where you cannot speak the language, defend yourself, or throw yourself into my arms and have me welcome you there? ’Tis absolute madness!”

“I can do it,” she said, feeling a rush of stubbornness flow through her. “I went back and got Granny, didn’t I? I can do this, too.”

“You cannot and you
will
not.”

Victoria felt a frown begin. “Excuse me?”

Connor leaned forward and looked at her with a matching frown. “I forbid it.”

Thomas whistled softly and rose. “Io, I think we should be moseying along now. Before the fireworks start.”

Victoria didn’t see them go. She supposed it was for the best. Iolanthe was probably not up to listening to what would no doubt be a watershed moment in ghost/ mortal relationships. She glared at Connor. “You cannot stop me.”

“Oh, can I not?” he asked in a very soft, very dangerous tone.

She looked at him for a moment or two, then took an unsteady step backward. “It’s lunchtime. I’m starved.”

He folded his arms over his chest. “You will not do this thing,” he said flatly.

She started to retort, then shut her mouth and looked at him for several moments in silence. She stared up into his beautiful face and marveled that this man, who had had centuries to find someone to love, had picked her.

Well, sort of.

He stared at her, his jaw set, silent and unmoving. Then he let his hands drop down by his sides and took a step backward. He unclenched his jaw. Then he looked at her pleasantly.

Or what he obviously thought might pass for pleasantly.

“I do not want you to do this,” he said.

“Connor—”

He turned away. “Nay, Victoria.”

She stared at his broad back for several minutes in silence, then sighed. “I’m going to go get lunch. And then I’m going to start my Gaelic lessons, because I love you.”

He didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t give any indication he had heard her.

But he had to know he not changed her mind.

Victoria left the sitting room and headed for the kitchen. The Boar’s Head Trio was sitting there, partaking of a healthy repast. Thomas was there, cooking something for someone—no doubt poor Iolanthe—and all of them chatting quite happily together.

In Gaelic, as fate would have it.

Victoria greeted the four men with a smile, fetched herself something she would no doubt not manage to eat, then sat down at the table with the Trio.

“I’m going to go rescue Connor,” she announced.

They looked at her blankly.

“You know,” she said impatiently. “Like Thomas did Iolanthe.”

Fulbert gasped. Hugh’s mouth dropped open and he made inarticulate sounds of horror. Ambrose looked unsurprised. Thomas turned around from the stove and smiled.

“Well,” he said, drawing the word out quite a bit, “you are a seasoned time-traveler, I suppose.”

“Damn straight,” she said.

But she quaked a little as she said it. It was one thing to go back to a place where she could almost speak the language, with her sister for company and a big, strapping six-foot-four Highland ghost as protection. It was another thing entirely to go on her own. To a time she knew nothing of. To a place where she wouldn’t be able to understand anything. To rescue a man who, if Thomas’s experience was any indication, wouldn’t know her from Adam. Or Eve.

And he probably wouldn’t like her, in either case.

“It is impossible,” she whispered. She looked at her brother. “It
is
impossible, isn’t it?”

“
Impossible
is a powerful word,” Thomas said, setting a plate down on the table. “I wouldn’t use it lightly.”

She blew her hair out of her face and looked up at the ceiling. It was a futile effort to try to keep the tears in her eyes. She looked at Thomas and let them slide down her cheeks.

“I can’t imagine my future without him,” she said finally.

“Now, that, my dear, is a better sentiment,” Ambrose said approvingly. “You know, Connor has grown on me of late, as well. I find many things to recommend his character.”

“Me, too,” she said, dragging her sleeve across her eyes. She looked at Thomas. “Will you help me? Or are you headed back home soon?”

“We can stay for another couple of months,” Thomas said. “You’ll want to head to Scotland soon, I imagine. Jamie can give you a crash course in medieval survival skills. His brother and cousin live nearby. You’ll need them, as well.”

“A veritable colony of reenactment whackos, hmmm?” she asked.

“Oddly enough,” Thomas said with a smile.

“Or are they all of the same vintage?”

“Might be,” Thomas conceded.

“All right,” she said, rubbing her hands together briskly. “I’ll make a more complete to-do list later, but for now, what do you suggest?”

“Gaelic,” Ambrose said without hesitation. “Perhaps a bit of knifework, lest you meet a lad or two short on chivalry.”