The Presence (18 page)

His fingers knotted around his wineglass.

He could see the two of them, Toni, with those eyes on him, his eyes somewhere else. Hell, the great MacNiall, the fellow with the castle, the title, the fookin' bulging biceps and cast-iron chest.

Suddenly the glass snapped in his hand.

“Thayer!”

Toni was the first to jump up with alarm, running to his side, her napkin in her hand.

“It's all right, it's all right!” he said quickly.

Her eyes were on his, deep with concern. “Must have picked up the handle wrong!” he muttered.

“You're bleeding. Let me make sure there's no glass in it,” Toni said.

“I'll get the first-aid kit,” Gina said.

“No!” he said, standing.

It had been a bark, he realized, for everyone in the room was staring at him. And was there suspicion in the eyes of the great Detective Inspector Chamberlain, and those of the even-greater Laird MacNiall?

He forced a wry grin. “Sorry, I'm feeling the worst fool, such an oaf,” he muttered.

“Thayer, it's all right,” Toni said, still concerned. “But you are bleeding.”

“A scratch. If you will excuse me, I'll just see to it. Ach, I hope I didn't get glass in any of the food,” he said, causing them all to look at the table.

“None of it even near any food, old chap!” David said cheerfully.

That damned David, always working to make everything fookin' copasetic!
he thought.

“Thayer, are you sure you're not cut deeply?” Gina asked, concerned.

He shook his head. “Embarrassed is what I am,” he said. “I'll be back in a moment.”

Gina and Toni were picking up shards of glass.

“I really don't think we have to worry about any of the food,” Gina murmured. “I think we're getting it all.”

“Aye, don't worry none,” Robert said. “If there's a shard there, your host will be seein' it.”

“Good eyes, eh, Bruce?” David said.

Thayer found himself pausing just beyond the doorway, ignoring the blood that dripped from his hand.

“His eyes are the best,” Robert informed them all. “Hell, when he was with the force, Bruce was run ragged. We dragged him in on everything.”

There was a startled silence.

“You were a
cop?
” Ryan said to Bruce.

“Aye, for a time,” Bruce said. There was a slight edge to his voice, as if he hadn't particularly wanted the in formation known.

Thayer remained in the hall, feeling as if he was very
nearly baring his teeth.
Aye, the fellow was a copper! You never knew, you fools. Never suspected.

But how would they have known? Only a Scotsman would have read all about it.

G
ina tidied up the business area in the bedroom she and Ryan had chosen. She'd liked it especially because of the large expanse of window it offered, looking out on the valley. Probably, at an earlier date, the room had been the domain of a chief guard, or something of the like. The window—evidently put in sometime after the turn of the nineteenth century—looked out over the hillside. From this vantage point, any invader seeking to come upon the castle would have been in clear view.

She stacked the copies of their documents and at last turned off all the machines.

Ryan was already in bed. She gazed at him with a deep and abiding love. She had known from the moment she met him that he was all she wanted in life. He could be fun, sweet—and aggravating at times. And though it appeared he deferred to her, it was only be cause she really did have an incredible business sense. But beneath it all…Ryan ruled the roost. He always had.

His hands were folded behind his head as he lay on his pillow staring up at the ceiling. The white sheets of their bed were drawn to his waist. His shoulders and chest were bronze, and she felt the thrill that she always
did when looking at him. She truly loved everything about him.

It should have been their day for total relaxation, but it just hadn't gone that way. She was tired, anxious to crawl in beside him. He was pretty damned cool beneath the sheets, as well.

She walked to the doorway and turned off the main light. With the moonlight that filtered in, there was just enough light to…

She paused at the foot of the bed, feeling the need for intimacy, and ready to play with it. In that mood, she slowly shed her shirt, then her bra, and made a real act of shedding her jeans and panties. Ryan should be both amused and titillated.

Coming around the bed to crawl in, she realized that he hadn't even glanced at her—not once.

He turned to her then, frowning.

“Just what the hell are we going to do?” he demanded.

“Do? We're ‘doing' it,” she reminded him.

He shook his head.

“What the hell are we going to do about
Toni?
” he demanded.

She felt her blood grow cold.

“What do you mean…about Toni?” she said with a swallow. “She's—she's just Toni. There's nothing to
do
about her at all.”

“There has to be!” he insisted angrily.

“Why?” she whispered, frightened by his tone, knowing it all too well.

“Because she's dangerous,” he said flatly, harshly.

The chill in her bones deepened, and it seemed that her blood turned to ice.

 

Toni went up first that night, leaving Bruce still talking to Robert Chamberlain. She found herself industriously brushing her teeth, washing her face…and finding the white nightgown, aware that it kept her covered, but not all that covered.

She had made the first move, and it had been far from subtle—since catapulting yourself out of a bathtub, naked and dripping, into a man's arms could really never be considered less than big-time brash. Certainly he would come to her tonight. He had to!

He was slow in coming up. She lay on her own bed, torn. He couldn't feel quite the way that she did—desperate to feel again what she had just experienced—and linger so long. He was unique in her eyes. Maybe she wasn't so special in his. Hell, a naked woman throws herself at you, what else would a red-blooded male do?

She flushed, wondering if she hadn't made a fool out of herself, wondering if he wasn't downstairs pondering how to extricate himself from any further intimacy with her.

She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, wincing. There was more to it. She didn't want to be alone. She didn't want to dream, imagine, envision or see things. And there was something about him that was rocklike and solid, something that defied fear and mist and things that could go bump in the night.

But that wasn't the only reason she had gone to him.

Like David teased, he was…hot. Those eyes, a slate enigma, searching into her, sweeping over her, his hands touching her…the set and structure of his face…

She tossed and twisted around. How long had she been up here? An hour, more?

She rose, walked to her door and cracked it open, trying to ascertain if she could still hear voices from below. She couldn't. Looking up and down the hall, she saw that it was empty.

Cautiously at first, not wanting to run into anyone else and appear foolish, she made her way down the hall to the second-floor landing. She stood in the spot she took up when she told her tale about Cavalier Mac Niall, the great hero, the battle laird who, it now appeared, had come home from victory to murder his wife.

Then she saw him.

He was standing at the great hearth, leaning against the mantel, looking pensively into the embers of the fire. For a moment, it didn't register that he had changed, that he was no longer in the jeans and tailored shirt he had worn at dinner. He was in a kilt. A swatch of his family plaid was stretched over his shoulder, held in place by a large crest brooch.

He must have sensed that she was there, for he looked up at her and smiled slowly.

Any words she might have said froze on her lips. She felt as if she were on the outskirts of the woods again. She didn't think that he really spoke, yet she heard him clearly.

Come, please. I need you.

Instinct warned her not to go, to remain where she was, but there was no denying the flutter in her heart, the compulsion to follow.

She started down the stairs. As she neared the bottom, he turned away from the great hearth and started toward the secondary hall.

“Bruce!” she managed to say.

He hesitated before disappearing, pausing to beckon with his hand.

“Damn you!” she breathed, following, even though she knew it was insane. She was more frightened for herself than ever, not because he might lead her somewhere terrible, but simply because she was seeing him. And because she had to follow.

“Stop, please!”

But he didn't. He disappeared, and she fled across the expanse of the great hall to the secondary one behind it.

He was there, waiting at the rear of the room where there was an ancient door with rusted hinges. It had been bolted tight, so that they hadn't bothered with it. It led underground, probably, Thayer had told them. A castle such as this one would have a crypt—or simple basement space.

Toni was now certain that it was a crypt, because the door was open, and she could see the winding stone stairs that led below.

She walked to the doorway and took the first step. It should have been dark, but there was a glow of light. And in that glow, she could see Bruce MacNiall, heading down the stairs.

She took a step…and then another step. She expected dust and cobwebs. Rats, even. But no spiders clung to tenuous webs in the rafters. There were no old, musty rushes on the floor, no dirt or dust. It seemed it had been kept clean—far cleaner than the main castle.

There were a number of corridors and alleyways, all with arched ceilings overhead, as if she had entered the ancient catacombs of an old church.

“Bruce?” she whispered. Then she saw him. He was down one of the corridors, watching her. Waiting.

She started to walk toward him, but he kept going, into the shadow at the end of the hallway. She hurried along, swearing again beneath her breath. She came to the end of the hallway, and only then realized where she was and what lined the walls.

Tombs.

There was nothing really eerie here. There were no bones turning to brittle dust on family shelves. Every member of the family had a marble flat across their final resting place. Their names were then engraved upon them, along with inscriptions in Gaelic. Wives were proclaimed with their own clan names, as well.
Mary Douglas MacNiall
was inscribed on one freestanding sarcophagus; she had died in the early eighteen hundreds, and she had been, according to her inscription, born to the great family of Moray.

Turning slowly, Toni realized that tombs surrounded her. She couldn't help the natural fear that came from being alone in the dark and the shadows with the dead.

When she turned again, she could see the end of the hall more clearly. There was a nook there, and in it a grand tomb with a marble effigy atop it of the laird, arms folded across his chest, his great sword at his side. A severe tremor shook her, turning her blood to ice. The effigy was so good. She could see the cheeks she had so recently stroked, carved in marble. It was Bruce, the Bruce she knew….

How could any man look so very much like an ancestor? A stone ancestor at that!

Another tomb was at its side, but there was no effigy.
And though bold words proclaimed Bruce Brian MacNiall, Laird of Tillingham, victor against all tyranny, the great laird of the true Scots and the true king, there was nothing at all on the other tomb.

She stared at the grave for long moments. The cold in the crypt seemed to creep around her. The light was fading. The shadows, as if they were living beings, began to creep across light once again.

“Bruce?” she called out. Her voice was definitely tremulous.

She turned and ran back down the long hallway of the dead, racing for the stairway. In her wake, shadow covered all that had been light.

She ran up the stairs, terrified that she would reach the doorway and it would be bolted again, shut tight on its rusty hinges. She felt a sense of hysteria coming on then.
What if she was locked down here? What if the shadows kept coming, if they swallowed her, if they sucked her into a miasma of the death and terror and tragedy that had come over the centuries?

She rammed against the door—and went flying into the open space of the secondary hall, spinning, stumbling and landing on the floor.

With a deep breath, she got hold of herself. Then she was angry.

She stood, looked ruefully at the tear in her gown, and swore that she wasn't playing this game anymore. It was Bruce who had lured her down. It had to have been. And Bruce had been in the forest earlier. Maybe he wanted to get even with them or teach them a sick lesson, so he was seducing her and tormenting her at the same time!

Furious, she started up the stairway to the second-
floor landing. Her strides were long as she walked the hallway to his bedroom door.

She didn't knock, just burst in. And then she froze.

He was there, seated in the chair by the hearth, studying a book, in the jeans and shirt he had worn to dinner.

 

Eban Douglas stood outside the castle, down the driveway, looking up. He cocked his head, as if listening.

“They've found her!” he said, his voice a half whisper, half cackle. “They've found yer bride, Laird MacNiall. The wee lass. A horrid sight, so they say. Bits o' hair and flesh and…well y'd not want to be hearing that, wot, eh? They didna let me see her. Me, who might care for her so tenderly!”

A wind seemed to rise as he stood there. Clouds raced over the moon, throwing it into shadow.

He cast his head back and began to laugh. “Aye, the lasses, the lasses! They be in the forest, them, all of 'em strangled and gone, pretty, pretty maids…but with wicked ways. Ah, Laird MacNiall, I be beggin' yer pardon. Fer she was maligned, eh? Yer lady wife, she were. But not the others. Nae, not the others.”

He shook his head sadly. “Poor wee sinners! Lost and alone.”

Tears suddenly fell down his cheeks. “Nae, not the others!” he whispered.

Then he sighed. His shoulders fell. Dispirited, he turned away from the castle on the hill and started for his cottage, his own wee cottage where he lived, thanks to the kind graces of the great Laird MacNiall. He'd do anything for the great MacNiall. Aye, anything. Things,
maybe, MacNiall didn't even know that he needed done himself.

He'd lie, steal or cheat. Indeed, he'd kill for MacNiall, he thought.

Ruefully, he smiled to himself. Aye, that was that. Time to retreat to his little cottage, where he was a little man living a quiet and secretive life, barely even noted by others.

 

Toni felt as if she hadn't moved in hours, as if she had just stood there, frozen in time. And yet…could it have been so long?

He rose, his eyes on her. Tenderly? she wondered. Or mockingly?

“There you are,” he said quietly, and smiled. “What were you doing? Raiding the refrigerator? Actually, I was about to come searching. You weren't here, and you weren't in your bed.” His smiled deepened. “Or in the bathtub.”

She couldn't move. Or speak. Her mind raced.

He was just a damned good shyster, tricking her down stairs, then running back up, changing clothing again. Was he trying to scare them out of his castle? And why would he? He seemed to have the legal right to it. All he had to do was tell them that they had to go!

It couldn't have been Bruce by the fireplace. But it had to have been—or else she was seeing ghosts.

His eyes narrowed sharply as he stared at her. He snapped the book closed and walked over to slide it into a drawer of his desk. Then he walked across the room to her and took her by the shoulders, staring into her eyes, his own a silver sheet of concern. “Toni? What's wrong?”

She shook her head, unable to speak for a moment. She was going crazy. No need to tell him so. It was unlikely that many men wanted to have an affair with an insane woman. Or was she just giving free vent to imagination? Was it all
suggestive,
as David tried to assure her.

She blinked, trembling, knowing that nothing mattered when he came to her, when he looked at her that way, when she felt the security of his hands upon her.

“Toni?”

She shook her head, gaining strength. She was an ac tress of some merit, wasn't she?

“I…was thirsty,” she lied. “I went down for a drink.”

He shook his head, frowning. “Toni, I have drinks up here. Not just brandy and such—there's a mini refrigerator, water, some sodas.”