The Presence (24 page)

She bit her lower lip lightly. “Haven't you ever…felt something? Had a sense of déjà-vu, a premonition?”

A premonition? Aye, and it was you in the water, facedown so I couldn't see your face, just the trail of your hair, and my heart was in my throat. And worse. Once, when I was a cop with the Edinburgh Police Department, working a sad case indeed, I was able to crack it because I could put myself in a fellow's shoes.

“Toni….”

She pulled her fingers from his light touch and gripped both his hands.

“Bruce, I need you to take me to the crypts.”

“What?”

“Please!”

“Toni, I think it might be better if I don't take you to the crypts.”

She shook her head. Her eyes were a true sapphire, touching his. Earnest, sincere and alarmingly desperate.

“Look,” she said. “We haven't known one another long, but I admire you, and I've come to respect you tremendously. I've come to care about you, too, and I believe that you feel something for me. So I'm begging you…please, please, just humor me on this. I know it sounds crazy. But you have shown me a great deal more than simple tolerance regarding my strange dreams. You've helped me, been with me, made me feel sane. Help me with this, now…I'm begging you!”

“Take you to the crypts…
now?
”

She nodded. “I've been there at night.”

“Toni, I keep that door locked—”

“I've been there,” she insisted. “Bruce, I can describe it to you! There's a winding stone stairway almost immediately after the door opens. Then there are arched hallways, like in the catacombs of a medieval church. And there's a tomb and monument to Bruce MacNiall, the king's loyal Cavalier, at the end of one of the hallways. I'm assuming it was designed sometime years after his death.”

Bruce stared at her with certain astonishment. It wasn't impossible that the group might have gotten in to the vaults, but…

“I don't particularly want a circus made out of the family crypts,” he said.

“Surely even Thayer has let those girls leave by now!” she said, smiling. “I'm afraid he's been the odd man out here,” she added. “We both used to be a bit on the loose, but since you returned to the castle…well, Gina and Ryan are as close and old hat as Ma and Pa Kettle, David and Kevin have one another, and once you arrived…”

He noted that she didn't say
And I have you.
But Toni wouldn't. She would never be so presumptuous. And yet…

He reached out and smoothed a tendril of sun-blond hair.

“All right.”

She smiled, her appreciation evident, and he thought he actually heard a thump in her heartbeat.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Think we've given them enough time to clear out?” he asked.

“We can see.”

He nodded. “I'll need the key.” The great skeleton key was kept in a drawer in the wardrobe. The thing was ancient, as old as the door and the metal bolt.

He joined her, grimacing, and took her hand as they left the room and started out. They moved silently along the hallway to the top landing, then paused.

“Hear anyone?” he asked softly.

She shook her head. “They could still be in the kitchen,” she said.

“We'll check it out. However,” he reminded her, “they are my crypts.” She smiled at that.

They walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. It was spotless—and empty.

“Want a brandy first?” he asked her.

“I'm all right, really,” she said.

“I'm not.”

“Okay, then I'll have a brandy.”

He poured them each a small snifter, watching her as she sipped the fiery liquid. “There's something more you want,” he said.

“I'll tell you when we get down there,” she said, sip ping the brandy. Again her eyes touched his, searchingly. She cast her head slightly at an angle. “You don't dress up like an ancient laird and run around in the middle of the night, right?”

He arched a brow. “Nae, lass, I really don't.”

She swallowed the last of her brandy, then waited patiently for him.

“You really want to go down to the crypts in the middle of the night?” he asked.

“I really don't. But…I don't suppose I could make you understand. I can't make myself understand.”

“All right, then.” He set the glasses in the sink. “Shall we?”

He offered her a hand again and they went back into the secondary hall, to the door that led downward to the crypts. She winced as the old metal scraped and groaned. He pushed the door inward. “It is a winding stairway, with very old stone. I'll lead. Be careful.”

“You still don't believe me, but I've been here,” she whispered. Though there was really no need for a voice so soft, the night, the circumstances, seemed to demand it.

Bruce started down, hitting the light switch on the side of the wall. They moved down carefully. But at the foot of the stairs, Toni paused.

“What is it?”

“Nothing…well, there weren't cobwebs before, and I had no idea there was a light switch.”

“We've had lights down here since the nineteen-thirties,” he told her with a trace of amusement. There weren't, however, terribly powerful bulbs lighting up the place, and the medieval arches led to a natural state for shadows.

Moving slowly, they walked by shelves and effigies, until they reached the end of the hallway where the man history had recalled as the “great” MacNiall had been laid.

“You know what actually happened to him,” Bruce said. “He met what they called the ‘traitor's end.' But his execution was carried out by a mock court right out in the forest. When Charles II returned to claim his throne, he ordered that Bruce MacNiall's body be recovered from the forest and that a tomb be made. The king even paid for the marble and the artist's work.”

Toni stood pensively for a moment, staring at the tomb.

“It's you,” she whispered.

“I beg to differ. It's not me. I'm right here,” he told her.

She flushed, glancing at him. “But it is uncanny. There are hundreds of years between you, and yet…the resemblance is so great.”

He shrugged. “Maybe we see more than there is.”

“I don't think so,” she said.

“Genetics can be very strange.”

“True,” she murmured. “And yet, does it ever make you feel…?”

“Uneasy?” he asked, slipping an arm around her shoulders. “Never, since I grew up here. And I used
to love to bring friends down. We'd tell ghost stories our selves and run up the stairs screaming, and my da would get mad. We were typical kids. But the great MacNiall isn't still with us, Toni. He lived out his life. He lived hard, passionately, and he arrived here, as all men will. I like the history. I like the fact that the family he served with such ardent loyalty returned that favor in the person of Charles II, restoring him to his home. It's legend, Toni, history and myth, nothing more.”

She smiled, inching just a bit closer to him, still staring at the grave and the marble effigy of his ancestor.

“Bruce, there's a second sarcophagus behind the first.”

“I suppose they believed that one day they would find the bones of his beloved.”

“They've been found now.”

“Aye. But who knows when the forces that be will release the remains, eh?”

She turned to him, solemn, deeply concerned.

“Bruce, she needs to be given a proper burial, here, with her laird.”

“Well, lass, I'm sure that she will be. In time.”

Toni shook her head vehemently. “They may try to keep her. The levels of preservation were rather bizarre. Someone may want her in a museum. Bruce, you can't let it happen!”

He looked down at her, smiling a little. “Ah, Toni, so you think my ancestor comes back, hauntin' your dreams at night, to have his lady buried at his side? They'll want a bit of my blood, you know. To verify that the lady was my great, great—whatever!—grandmother. And then she'll come home. When it's proved she is my ancestor, I'll bring her home.”

“I'd really like it if we could rush them as much as possible,” she said.

His smile deepened. “All right, but…”

“But?” she queried.

“I've a bit of problem with it all, you see. I haven't always been the most religious of men, but I do have a rather deep-set belief that there is a greater power—God. And perhaps, because like all men, I don't want to consider myself merely mortal, I do believe in an afterlife. But I also like to believe that beneath it all, we're something finer than the weakness of flesh and bone. And that being the case…well, Bruce MacNiall did not want his bones to lie here for him to be legend, to find his peace in death, or whatever. And though, certainly, I'd not want the remains of an ancestor treated with anything less than respect, I cannot believe that an ancestor of mine would haunt you, tease or torment you, over earthly remains.”

“Maybe he doesn't think he's tormenting me,” Toni said. “He just wants to make sure that the remains of what was once the living, breathing woman he loved are treated with the due respect to which you refer.”

He swept his arms around her tightly, caught, even here, in the realm of the dead, by the sapphire sincerity within her somewhat anguished gaze.

“We'll see to it, eh?” he said softly. “Now…if you don't mind, it has been a bitch of a day. Shall we?”

She nodded, smiling, and led the way out of the crypts. But at the base of the winding stairway, she paused.

“What now, Miss Fraser?”

She flashed him a smile, and shook her head. “I…Nothing.”

“What?”

“No, nothing, really. Just a sense of…”

He sighed. “Toni!”

She exhaled. “Just a sense that someone was be hind us!”

“Shall we walk back?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No.”

They proceeded up the stairs. He followed her, watching the way the cotton clung to her curves. At the top, she stopped again, looking back at him.

“What?” she asked, perplexed.

“Keep going,” he said.

Outside the door, he paused to close and lock the door. It creaked loudly.

“I did know what it looked like, exactly!” she whispered. “I told you, right? And I knew that the tomb would be there, knew that the old Bruce and you were spitting images of one another.”

“Aye,” he said.

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“I don't know…exactly. Aren't you going to admit there's something a bit weird about it?” she queried.

He shook his head.

“No?” she said.

“Not tonight.”

“Then why were you staring at me?”

He caught the innocent confusion in her eyes.

“I hate to admit to having feelings of a rather base inclination at the moment, but frankly, Miss Fraser, I was watching your hips, the machinations of the way you moved, and thinking I wanted nothing more to do with the dead, the old, the past. I find that my concern right now is extremely focused and has everything to
do with the present. The immediate present. Dare I be crass? Madam, I was watching your ass.”

The confusion left her eyes. She laughed softly, a breath of anticipation, of excitement in the sound that stimulated every sensual essence in his being.

He drew her against him then, allowing his fingers to ripple down her back and form around her buttocks as he drew her close. “This is my castle, and as laird here, I do have the right to every sexual fantasy known to man, as far as mind and place are concerned. Before the great hearth, in the kitchen, on the stair… But the place is filled with your associates and, God knows, they may well wander at night. And, truthfully, stone is quite hard on the back and the bones, so…”

“You do have a great bed,” she mused.

“And you have a great—great assets,” he assured her teasingly.

She escaped his hold, scampering ahead of him up the main stairway. In the hallway of the upper landing, she waited, looking back. Her smile was still in place, her eyes bright, her hair like a halo in the dim light. He was rather certain that she had chosen the cotton gown with the full intention of getting him to show her the crypts that night, that she had worn it in case they had, indeed, run into any of her friends.

She couldn't know how the soft fabric molded to her with sheer seduction, or that he would find her as appealing in burlap. Or that, even standing in the hallway so, she could arouse him to a staggering heat and hunger.

She turned, heading for the room, and he caught up with her just as she plunged into it, drawing a little cry of surprise from her. With her in his arms, held against him, he kicked the door closed, turned and found his
way to the bed. They fell heavily upon it, and in moments, were tangled together.

That night he loved everything about her. It wasn't just that she was made beautifully, with the right assets, curves, flesh, breasts, skin, face, lips, or her innate ability to use all to the most erotic levels. No. Her seduction was in her laughter, the husky, silver whisper of it, and her eyes, conveying an excitement, a thrill, that elicited a masculine response of ego, that sheer, pulsing, hard, desperate, devil-may-care arousal.

Neither her gown nor his clothing actually left their bodies as they came together in a wild clash of fabric and flesh that needed no play, for that had come before, in the simple act of getting up the stairs and closing the door. In a smile, in a whisper, in the sapphire pools of her eyes. That time.

Then there was laughter as they untangled themselves from wool and cotton, kicked away sheets so that they could be drawn back up. There were the jokes about kilts, more words whispered, the sweetness of being close in the aftermath, eyes touching again, hands against one another, naked flesh against naked flesh.