Maggie fought to keep from being sick. It was Oliver! They drugged him! Now it would be even easier to throw him over the side. Fighting Eleanor was one thing, but how would she get Henry away from Oliver?
She was about to look for Oliver the spirit when she saw him. Her heart sank at what he was seeing—his wife and her apparent lover fitting his heavy gauntlets over his limp hands.
But he didn’t look crushed. He didn’t appear angry. He wore no expression, which made his pale face even more chilling. And then he moved in a rush of speed at Eleanor and stopped just before he went through her. His wife continued to rifle through the sack at her side for his chainmail. Eleanor couldn’t see him.
Yet.
With centuries of fiery hatred burning in him, he shot out his hand and struck her in the forehead with a curse on his lips.
Eleanor’s gaze went to him and though he looked the same in Maggie’s eyes, Eleanor was seeing something entirely different. She screamed in horror and fear and began to flail wildly. Though she was nowhere near the edge of the wall, she looked behind her as if she saw the sea below, waiting to devour her.The first time she screamed, Henry dropped Oliver and hurried to her. To his credit, he held on to her despite her fingernails tearing through him as she tried to hold on.
Finally, she fainted.
“That was better than anything I had imagined in my head all these years.”
Maggie turned to see her ghost crouching beside her. She smiled. “Was it?”
“I always thought of killing her, never of letting her live with understanding of what she tried to do to me.”
“She looked terrified.”
“Good.”
“Henry’s scrambling,” she noted. “Go scare him while I rescue you.”
For a lingering instant before he left, he stared into her eyes. “Magnolia, you made me want to live again.” He put his fingers up to her cheek, but then tightened his jaw and lowered them again when his fingertips went through her. “Even if I can never touch you, restore my home and stay there with me as long as you want.”
She smiled at him through wide, glassy eyes and watched him disappear. She looked toward Henry and saw Oliver close to him. In a second, Henry wouldn’t care about her. She ran forward, keeping her gaze on the live Oliver’s body.
Reaching him, she grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “Oliver! Oliver! Wake up!”
“What’s this?” Instead of being scared witless by Oliver’s ghost, Henry took hold of her and flung her out of his way when he reached for the unconscious earl. “I know you frightened her,” Henry growled out at Oliver. “Just like you’re trying to do to me now. I’ll quiet you!” He pulled Oliver up and bent him over the wall.
“No!” Maggie screamed and drawing strength from panic, she rammed him in the side.
Without wasting a single instant, she rushed to Oliver’s body and began to pull him up. His eyes fluttered open and when they did, they settled immediately on her. When he became aware of where they were, he lifted his gauntleted hands to her arms. But Henry wasn’t finished and he tried to haul them both over the side.
Maggie had a flashing thought that looking into Oliver’s eyes seconds before she died wouldn’t be so bad. But his eyes were closing again, still not completely recovered from whatever drug he’d been given.
She heard a man call out. It wasn’t ghostly Oliver. He hurried to them and beat Henry over the head with something that sounded nauseating in Maggie’s ears.
Henry fell away and left his victims dangling high above the sea. Maggie wouldn’t let go until they were pulled back and her feet were set firmly on the ground.
“My lady, you saved him,” Appleton, Oliver’s guard, pointed out with a wide grin.
Maggie returned his smile, so thankful he remembered and protected his lord. “If not for you, sir, we would both be dead.”
She looked at Oliver in her arms. “He needs a doctor.” She helped Appleton get him to his room inside the fortress and didn’t leave his side for three days.
Chapter Nine
Maggie hadn’t wantedto leave his bedside but she’d put off locking away his gauntlets long enough. She’d touched them, afraid that she might be cast back in the twenty-first century without him, but nothing had happened. Still, she didn’t want the gloves around to cause any trouble. She set them in a wooden box and locked it, then put the box in a chest in the corner of the library. She hoped and prayed that because the gauntlets were his again, they had no power to pull her back.
She smiled thinking about being here with Oliver alive and breathing. Every time she touched him and her fingers didn’t go through him, she wanted to squeal with happiness. Because he was unconscious, she was able to steal some moments of holding his hand or tracing her fingers over his lips.
What would happen when he woke up? Would he remember her? Maggie wondered, ready to leave the library. She hoped so, especially because his ghost was gone. It hadn’t taken her long to realize it. He probably disappeared when his life didn’t end as it had once before. She cried, pretty much the whole night over the loss of him. Did that spirit return to his body? Would he wake—
She stopped when she saw the Earl of Harwich vitally alive standing in front of her. He stood, unreadable, staring at her without saying a word, and then she saw the spark of tears in his eyes. Her knees almost gave out when he moved toward her.
