Even In Darkness (Between) (20 page)

“Happy Christmas,” I replied. Then he moved his hips and my grin was lost as my eyes rolled back in pleasure.

Chapter 22

As I lay there afterward, circled in his embrace and feeling the languorous pull of sleep, I decided the time had come to stop keeping secrets. The thought of spilling my fears to Aiden still made my stomach clench, but I was unwilling to allow anything to come between us.

I splayed my fingers across the flat plane of his stomach and he covered them with his hand. A soft hum of pleasure came from his throat.

“Aiden?”

“Yes, love,” he replied, stroking the back of my hand with his fingertips.
I concentrated on the feel of his skin against mine and said a prayer. Apparently, I waited too long to continue because he shifted onto his side so he could look at me.

My heart fluttered in my chest and I bit my lip. He reached out and touched my
mouth, so I pressed a kiss into his palm. He cradled my cheek and bent forward to kiss me, but I put a hand on his chest to stop him. His eyebrows furrowed in concern and I breathed out a sigh, knowing the time had come.

“I’m pregnant.”

A beat of shocked silence greeted my announcement, then his eyes flew open wide and his face broke into a beaming smile. Childlike joy radiated off of him. My heart pinched and I hurried to tell him the rest.

“It might be Eagan’s.”

His face fell into a confused jumble. “What?”

“We were on the ship for weeks
, and they told me at the hospital that I’m not far along at all, that it must have happened within the last couple weeks. And since time is not the same in Between as it is here, it could be—”

He bolted upright
in the bed. “No.”

“Aiden…”

“No. Absolutely not.”

I understood his reaction, but after stressing about it for so long, his blatant refusal to even consider the possibility was rubbing me the wrong way.

“I’m not saying it is his baby. I’m just saying it might be.”

He shook his head, his face hard as stone. I rubbed my temples and tried to reason with him.

“How can you be so sure?” I asked, with more of a challenging tone than I’d meant.

“Do you want the child to be his?” he spat back.

“Oh, for God’s sake! What kind of question is that? I’m just freaked out here and I need to face facts and I can’t do that if you’re not even going to listen.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at me, but at least I had his attention. Of course, now that I had it, I wasn’t sure what more to say.
I decided to attack this with reason, since that was easier than dealing with the emotion behind it.

“Do you or do you not think it’s possible to get pregnant in Between and carry the baby back here?”
I asked. His frown wavered a bit, but he did not reply. “Your ring came back with me. Your dirk, your clothes… even Willie’s pocket watch!” I jumped up off the bed and dug into my bag to find the watch and held it up like it was Exhibit A.

Aiden’s eyes lost their iron strength as they landed on the relic from his long dead brother. His gaze traveled down my arm and rested on my stomach. The wind in my sails plummeted and I dropped my arm to my side, not sure where to go from here.

“Fine. I’ll grant ye that the possibility exists,” he said quietly. “But I know in my heart that it’s not so.”

“How can you know? And what if it is part demon? Oh, my God, I just—”

Quick as a jungle cat, Aiden leapt over the bed and wrapped his arms around my waist. “Look at me, Lindsey.” I pulled my eyes toward his. The certainty and joy that I saw in them drew me like a magnet. Countless doubts and fears still pulled at me, but I tucked them away and locked them in a steel box deep inside. Aiden was so sure that the child was his. I didn’t know how he knew, but I wanted nothing more than to believe him.

Our baby.

The thought made me lightheaded all of a sudden.

Aiden reached down and rested his palm against my stomach in wonder. I stared down at his hand and the two of us stood there for a long moment, lost in the newness and strangeness of the idea I had a little person
growing inside of me.

“Will he have your green eyes, I wonder?” Aiden mused out loud.

“A boy, is it?” I teased and he grinned in response.

“Well, I’ve only had brothers, never a sister. What would I do
with a wee lass?” His eyes misted over as he stared at my tummy like he could see the tiny child within.

“Maybe she’ll have red hair like Willie and your dad,” I offered. A wet, shaky laugh bubbled up out of him.

“God in heaven, but I miss that lad. Seeing him on that ship and learning it was naught but a lie…” He lifted a fist to his mouth and bit down on his knuckle, his eyes closed tightly as he fought to hold it together. After a moment, he continued. “If only I knew what had become of him. Did he die in the explosion as I’d assumed all those years? Or was he safe? Did he live a long, happy life with a wife and children to call his own?” His gaze swept over my stomach again before coming back up to try and find the answer in my face. An idea occurred to me and my eyes widened with excitement.

“Maybe we can find out.”

“What? How?”

“The book I got you for Christmas, the history of the MacRae family. Maybe he’s in it. Maybe it will tell us what happened to him, or at least the year he died.”

Aiden strode across the bedroom to draw the book out from his things and brought it back to the bed. I climbed up next to him and we thumbed through the pages, looking for any mention of his family. There was a long section about the history of the castle and how it was destroyed by the English in 1719. It mentioned the Spanish traitor who told the English about the gunpowder they used to blow up the castle, but it didn’t say anything about the Scotsman who let that secret slip. Aiden’s shoulders tensed as we read, so I quickly continued flipping through, anxious to find a family tree of some sort.

And then, there it was.

“Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh,” I said, pointing a shaky finger at the page.

Children of Hugh MacRae and Leah MacKenzie MacRae:

Duncan James MacKenzie MacRae 1695 – 1719

Aiden Alexander MacKenzie MacRae 1699 – 1719

William Hugh MacKenzie MacRae: 1707 – 1746

Aiden started shaking like a leaf in a thunderstorm, then he began to laugh, this wild, unhinged laughter that only comes from great relief. Once, when I was about ten, my dad and I went on this nature hike. We came across this quick moving stream that was just beyond some tall grass. I broke away to investigate and the ground gave out underneath me, dumping me into the river while the rest of the group unknowingly continued on. But my dad had heard my cry and he bolted down the length of the river, finally getting hold of me by crawling out onto the branch of a fallen tree that was jutting out across the water. When he pulled me to safety, the both of us laid there on the bank, soaked and filthy, and we laughed that very same laugh.

After a while,
Aiden pulled himself together and wiped his face. He tried to apologize, but I didn’t let him.

“He lived,
” he said, his voice scratchy with emotion. “I assumed he died in the castle’s explosion, but a small part of me always wondered if he got scared and ran before the soldiers arrived. But two of them went in and only one returned. How could that be if Willie ran?”

I shrugged. “Maybe one of the Scots guarding the other side took him out. Maybe it
was Duncan who saved Willie’s life. There’s no way to know.” Aiden nodded, considering, then shook his head in wonder at this new information. I curled my fingers through his as we both stared at the book for a long time. Then something bubbled up from my memory bank.

“
Remember when we looked up Scottish history back at the cabin? 1746 was the year of Culloden. My guess is that he gave his life in battle for his country, just like his big brothers.”

Aiden squeezed my hand as a thank you. “Hopefully he knew the love of a woman before that day, maybe even bounced his child on his knee. It’s enough to know he lived, if only for a score of years.”

“Hmmm…” I said, then jumped down off the bed and rooted through my stuff to find my laptop. “Hold that thought.” I settled into place beside him and booted it up. I did a search for ancestry sites, signed up for a free trial of one of them, and plugged in the information we knew about Aiden’s family. And a breath later, the names of Willie’s spouse and children—two boys—were right there on the screen for us, along with their children’s names, and their grandchildren’s names. Nearly three hundred years of MacRaes descendent from Aiden and Willie’s father were listed on the screen before us. Aiden just stared at the laptop in shock, unable to process what he was seeing.

The site didn’t list information for any living people—probably as a security measure—but it didn’t really matter. The internet being what it is, I had names, addresses, and phone numbers for Aiden’s closest living relatives within about fifteen minutes of online sleuthing.

They lived in Orkney: rugged, windswept islands just north of the Scottish mainland.

“We could visit them!” I said, beaming up at Aiden in triumph. He
slid off the bed and started pacing the room, trying to take it all in. While he processed, muttering to himself in Gaelic the whole time, I mapped out a course to Orkney and did some research on the area.

“It’s just over 200 miles northeast of here. We can drive to the tip of the mainland and then take a ferry across to where they live.
Should only take about five hours.” I set the laptop aside and crossed the room to Aiden, holding his hands to calm his frantic energy. “Orkney has all kinds of cool, prehistoric sites: an underground stone settlement from 3000BC, a huge tomb you can go inside that has Viking runes carved on the walls, a whole slew of standing stone circles… My mom would love it. I’ll tell her we want to go there for a honeymoon. She and Dad can go hit all the attractions while we sneak away to see your family. What do you think?”

Aiden looked at me like I had
started speaking in tongues. “And tell them what, exactly? ‘Hello, I’m your ancestor brought back from the dead. Care if I come in to share a wee dram with ye?’ Can’t see why they’d have a problem with that.”

“Alright, alright.
No need to get snarly about it. We’ll come up with something. Don’t you want to meet them?”

“Of course I want to meet them! You’ve no idea how it feels to have no family, to have everything you’d ever known turn to dust over the centuries, to—”

“You have family. I’m your family. And Ian and Sarah—”

He put up a hand.
“That’s true, and I don’t mean to belittle the fact, as I am more grateful for that than I can rightly explain. But my brother’s blood kin…” He pulled in a deep breath and let it out. “Aye, I want to meet them.”

“Well, then quit freaking out and let’s come up with a plan, okay?”

A slow smile appeared on his face like dawn over the horizon and I couldn’t help but grin in return.

“This is sheer madness, you realize?” The excitement dancing in his eyes did not match his words.

I affected a nonchalant shrug. “Hey, Madness is my middle name. Lindsey M. MacRae. And don’t you forget it.”

“Never,” he replied, and then he kissed me.

Chapter 23

In the end, it didn’t take much wheedling to get Mom to agree that we needed to visit Orkney. She was probably just so happy to see an end to all my sulking that she would have agreed to just about anything. Normally, Dad would have balked at the additional cost since he was footing the bill for this extravagant wedding and everything already, but he was like a giddy teenage boy around my mom. It was cute. Well, maybe a little creepy, too, since they are my parents and all, but seeing them together again healed something broken deep inside me and I was not going to question it.

Aiden was fun to watch on the drive, as it didn’t take long for us to get to the edge of his familiar territory and venture into someplace new. He spent the whole time
enraptured, watching the world pass by out his window. But that was nothing compared to taking him on the ferry, which was hilarious. He didn’t believe we could just drive onto the boat, sail to the islands, and then drive off again. Of course, all of these things he said to me in my mind so Mom and Dad had no idea how these commonplace moments were new to him. I had the thought that someday, he would be all caught up to our world and that nothing would faze him anymore. Somehow, that made me incredibly sad, so I shook it off and tried to focus on seeing the world through his eyes. Everything fresh, new, wondrous.

It made the trip all that much more meaningful.

Despite my best efforts, Mom insisted that we all take in the sights together. So the first day in Orkney, we visited the Skara Brae, Maeshowe, the Ring of Brodgar, and my personal favorite: the Broch of Gurness, which is an Iron Age village from around 200BC that’s right next to the sea shore. Unlike the Skara Brae, which is roped off, we could walk through this stone village and feel the souls of the people who’d lived there so many years before. We saw the tiny beds where they sought shelter from the biting wind, the fire pits where they huddled together, cooking meals and sharing stories, and the grinding stones where they worked to make bread to feed their families. One section likely housed all the animals, our guide explained, because it didn’t have a fire pit in the center. There was even an artist’s sketch of what the broch had looked like when it was in use. Something inside me seemed to unfurl at the sight, almost as though it were familiar, this view from thousands of years ago. Something mystical and ethereal floated in the air around the Broch of Gurness, drawing me into its web so completely that when we left, I felt as if I were waking from a deep sleep.

There was something about Orkney that went beyond
the rugged beauty and history, something that defied explanation, but Aiden knew exactly what I meant. The name he used for it in Gaelic was long and not easily remembered, but when he said that the air between this world and another is very thin at Gurness, I could not have agreed more. And yet, it didn’t scare me. I’d felt the strength and substance pulsing from the other side, something like encouragement for what was to come.

Only, I had no idea what that meant.