“Aye, and so I am.”
A strand of her hair was caught on the gold brooch she wore high on her left shoulder. Acting on impulse, he rescued the ebony tendril, rubbing it between his thumb and index finger while his gaze held hers captive. “I’ll ask ye again, then. How long have ye lived here?”
Wide green eyes framed with thick black lashes glared at him in defiance. “I dinna know.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw as he dropped her curl. “I dinna know why ye would lie, but–”
“I SAID I DINNA KNOW!” Her loud shout spooked a pair of nesting grouses. They erupted from the underbrush, wings beating frantically as they took flight towards the open sea. “I dinna know,” she repeated in a velvety whisper. She looked so sad, and so vulnerable, that he was nearly tempted to put his arms around her svelte frame and gather her against his chest where he could protect her from whatever ills had brought her to this place and then abandoned her to it.
“Let’s have a cup of tea,” he said. She squinted at him as if he’d sprouted a second head.
“A cup oftea,” she echoed dubiously.
“Tea settles the nerves and brings a bit of warmth tae the bones.”
She gestured across the rambling lawn to the flowering fields beyond. “It’s not even fully autumn yet.”
“Aye, but it’s cold.” He reached out and captured her wrist, lightly resting his thumb on the web of blue and purple veins that were entangled just beneath the surface. This time, there wasn’t a shock of electricity, but a gentle throb of acknowledgement. Of recognition. Ofhome. “Dinna ye feel the cold, Mara?”
Tears filled her eyes. Pressing her lips together, she blinked them away and nodded.
“Tea it is, then,” he said gruffly. And tucking her hand into the crux of his arm, he escorted her into the castle.
Chapter Five
Mara may havebeen a ghost, but between her and Callum, surely the large Scot was the greater oddity.
While every other man she’d encountered while haunting the castle had run screaming in the opposite direction, babbling on about fangs and claws and other such nonsense, Callum was making her tea. If she wasn’t so perilously close to weeping, she might have laughed. Or at least grinned at the absurdity of watching him struggle to light a fire with nothing more than a piece of iron and a flint. By the way he’d goggled when she had ushered him into the kitchen, she could only assume that the outside world had grown beyond rudimentary hearths and cooking over an open flame.
“Where is the stove?” he’d asked blankly. While her lips had twitched, her heart was too heavy to manage a genuine smile.
For what felt like an eternity, she’d waited for a knight like Callum Campbell. A man who was forthright, and kind, and true. One who didn’t see her as the monster she was gradually becoming, but the woman she’d been. The woman she’d wanted to be before her life and her dreams drowned in the sea.
She was supposed to be a wife and a mother. A daughter and a sister. So many things for so many people, and now…now she was nothing for no one. A bedtime story that parents used to scare their children into staying away from the cliffs.
“Here ye are,” Callum said at last, entering what had once been the great hall and setting a cup of steaming tea on the table beside her. “It’s hot,” he warned, wagging his finger. “Dinna take a drink until it’s cooled properly. I made it overly hot. Ye really need a stove. They burn on coal, and ye can prepare a pot of tea tae the perfect temperature in no time at all.”
“Stove,” she repeated, working her lips around the foreign word.
“Aye.” Sunlight beaming in through a window across the room illuminated the tones of burgundy in his hair as he sat next to her on a rickety wooden chair that groaned beneath his weight. “What is yer favorite food? I like a good ham, meself. Sliced thick and drizzled with brown sugar. Tae me mind, there’s nothing better.”
Whatwasher favorite food? It’d been so long since she’d tasted anything that it was hard to remember what she’d liked. Musing over her response, she reached unthinkingly for the cup of tea that Callum had prepared for her and took a sip. “Berries,” she said at last. “Fresh berries, right off the bush. I used tae go picking with me mum, and I’d eat as many as I put in the pail. It used tae drive her crazy, and–what?” Taking note of the way Callum was staring at her, she stopped mid-sentence. “What is it?”
“That water is fair tae boiling, and ye didna even wince.”
“I know. I can almost taste it,” she said wistfully, looking into her cup. “I havena been able tae taste anything since it happened. Not even tea. I still have tae eat, but all drinks and food are the same. Like a piece of bread that’s been left out for too long.”
“Sincewhathappened?” he demanded.
“Since I died, of course.”
Silence.
And then…
“Mara, ye’re not dead. I’m staring right ye.” He leaned forward and put the tips of his fingers on her knee. “I’m touching ye. Canna ye feel that?”
“Yes,” she said, her throat tightening. “Yes, I can.”
