Everlastin' Book 1 (35 page)

“Am I or am I not the
mistress of this house?”

“Aye, but shrewishness is
no' necessarily a condition o' tha' position!”

Beth sat on the table then
slipped to the floor and stood on her bare feet. Lachlan's anger
permeated the air between them, crackling as if owning of life. She
faced him, her own turbulent emotions shielded by an outer
calm.

“I'm leaving.”

“Leavin' again, you say? to
sulk?”

She searched his ruggedly
handsome face for a long moment. What she was about to say would
hurt him, but she had come to realize this was the only way to
penetrate his stubbornness. “I'm passing on, Lachlan. With or
without you.”

Painful sensations gripped
her. Lachlan looked as if she had just slid a batter knife slowly
into his heart. “I can't talk to you. I can't reason with
you.”

“The Ingliss.”

His flatly-spoken words
brought a tinge of anger to her cheeks. “Why do you always blame
everything on them? I'm leaving because it sickens me to live with
a man motivated by hatred! We don't belong here, Lachlan. Roan was
right about one thing: this world belongs to the
living!”

“I love you.”

The words welled tears in
Beth's eyes. His tone and bearing were lifeless. “No. I don't
believe you do, Lachlan. I conveniently died here for you, but I
don't think we would have gone beyond testing the chemistry between
us under normal circumstances. You've lived without compassion too
long. You use something akin to it when you want
something.”

“Stop,” Lachlan murmured,
leaning against the table as his legs weakened beneath him. “You
dinna mean wha' ye’re sayin'.”

“I've had plenty of time to
think this through,” she choked. “It's no good between
us.”

“Tis the Inglisses you side
wi'! Ever since tha' mon came to this house, you've been growin'
more and more distant wi' me!”

“No.” Beth's body began to
shimmer then fade. “It's the darkness in you separating us,
Lachlan. You allow it to keep you chained to an existence that goes
against the laws of nature. I won't share in this bondage. I'm
sorry, but sometimes we have to hurt the one we love, to save them
from themselves.”

“Beth—”

Lachlan stared with stark
anguish at the emptiness where Beth had stood moments before. He
refused to accept that she was really gone—had passed beyond the
grayness to a plane of existence out of his reach.

They were more than lovers!
She had to know she was his life!

His despondent eyes searched
the shadowy stillness of the room. Loneliness returned ten-fold
upon him, suffocating him as it closed in tighter and tighter, as
if to squeeze him out of existence.

She was hiding from him
again, but she would return. Between now and then, he would have to
come to understand what exactly it was she expected of him. But
right now a fire was twisting in his gut, and there was only one
way to relieve himself of its tormenting presence.

* * *

He appeared in the carriage
house on a gust of wind, startling Roan as he was about to stretch
out on a cot in the corner of the room. When Roan saw him standing
several yards away, hatred a very real mask on his livid face, Roan
plucked up a blanket from the cot and swung it over his thermals to
help ward off the cold of his temporary quarters.

“Ever hear o' knockin'?”
Roan asked.

“Wha' did you say to
Beth?”

Roan didn't answer right
away. When he did, his words came out on a sigh of irritability.
“When,
old
mon?
I've spoken to the lady a number o' times.”

“This eve.”

“Aye, we spoke at the
graves.”

“Abou' wha'?”

Roan scowled. “It was a
private conversation, Baird.”

“Private, you say? I wouldna
have been part o' tha' wee talk now, would I?”

“Some,” Roan admitted
begrudgingly. His feet were numb from the cold emanating from the
cement floor. “Wha' is this abou'? Or are you simply in the mood to
harass someone?”

“She's gone, Ingliss,”
Lachlan said through clenched teeth. “And I want to know wha'
stirred her up this eve!”

“Wha' do you mean
'gone'?”

“Some place I canna sense
her!”

Roan was genuinely
perplexed. Beth had sworn earlier she would never leave Lachlan.
What had happened since to change her mind?

Roan stiffened defensively
when Lachlan closed the distance between them. He read rage in the
ghost's eyes, but he was also sure he read desperation, and it
touched him.

“Wha' was said!”

“She mostly defended you,”
Roan said, his brow furrowed in thought. “Are you sure she's
really...gone?”

Placing his hands on his
hips, Lachlan clipped, “Why would she have cause to defend me, I
wonder?”

“Och, mon, she wanted one o'
us to see reason.”

“And?”

“No' a thin'— Wait.” Roan
drew the blanket about him more tightly. “She asked if you'd paid
me.”

It seemed incredible, but
Lachlan's face grew more taut.

“You told her I let you know
abou' the jewels.”

“Aye.”

Roan swallowed. He was
violently shivering, but he realized it was not all from the cold.
It was an emotional response to the anguish emanating from his
enemy. “Wha' I said was no' in harsh words. I thought yer ploy
amusin' and childish.”

“You lyin'
snake-in-the-grass!”

“I'm no thief, Baird. And
I've never known a good enough reason to lie abou' anythin'. If she
has gone on, it's yer doin', no' mine!”

“Ye're fired,
Ingliss.”

“Tha' truly breaks ma
heart.”

The air about Lachlan
crackled with electricity. “I've a mind to cram yer sarcasm down
yer miserable throat. Dinna ever come back here. You'll no' like
wha'll be waitin' for you.”

Lachlan turned and
lethargically began to walk from the carriage house. Roan watched
him, emotions warring within him. He was certain Beth had not been
angry when he'd last seen her-disappointed, maybe.

What had happened in the
last hour to make her change her mind about Lachlan?

Sinking onto the cot, he
scratched his nose with a blanket-covered finger.

“Why do you care?” he
muttered. “Baird will follow her.”

He looked in the direction
the laird had gone.

Roan Ingliss didn't want to
believe that something he said had sent the woman on. For some
inexplicable reason, Lachlan's anguish touched him—deeply disturbed
him. The man had been dead for one-hundred-forty-nine years! But
Roan had responded to him as he would have to any man in such
misery.

Closing his mind off from
the turmoil of his thoughts, he stretched out on the cot and waited
for sleep to deliver him from his conscience.

C
hapter 13

Winter thoroughly blanketed
the land. From Lachlan's vantage point, a stark white world
glistened beneath opulent moonlight. Downy snow swirled about the
tower, swept up upon the minute tides of energy he was unknowingly
frittering away. Loneliness had driven him to seek visual solace.
Since dawn that morning, he had remained atop the tower, watching
the day play upon the land he so dearly cherished. But he knew,
inexorably, he would be drawn back into the house. In the blink of
an eye, he would find himself staring up at Beth's portrait, and
the terrible emptiness he'd known the past weeks would again seize
every part of him.

The torment of her absence
shadowed him, walked abreast with his ever-deepening frustration.
If only he had one more chance to talk to her. One more chance to
understand what she expected of him.

His grudge was part of the
package. He certainly didn't love her less because of
her
temper.

His attention became drawn
to a pair of weaving lights a short distance from his private
access road. Although he'd never ridden in a motor carriage, he
could well imagine how treacherous were the icy avenues. As the
lights drew closer, he leaned over one of the crenellations and
tried to focus better on the vehicle. Then, as if in slow motion,
he saw the lights come up onto his property. The vehicle slid
rightward, and he straightened up. A sickening, echoing crash was
followed by the blare of a horn.

He froze in disbelief, but
the incessant trumpeting from the vehicle prompted him to react.
Vaporizing, he glided through the air then materialized at the
roadside by the accident scene. The vehicle had gone off the drive
and plunged down a steep embankment. The front of it now was bent
around a massive oak. Although the engine was no longer running,
the horn continued to ravage the otherwise stillness of the night.
Steam rose from the beneath the accordioned hood.

Lachlan sucked in a sharp
breath as a small face became visible in the rear window angled up
at him. Scrambling down the embankment, he was beside the car when
two other visages pressed against the rear side window.

Children.

Fear lanced him when he
attempted to open the door and his hand passed through the metal. A
cry of outrage rose in his throat, but he quelled it in fear he
would frighten the children more than they were already. He could
hear their little fists pounding on the glass, hear their
cries.

The horn shrilled on, adding
to his disoriented state.

He forced his attention to
the slumped figure at the steering wheel.

An unconscious
woman.

Passing his arms through the
vehicle door, he made a futile attempt to right her in the seat.
Self-recrimination pounded down on him. He had wasted his precious
energies feeling sorry for himself!

One of the children began to
scream.

Mindless that his
transparency was the cause, he leaned into the vehicle. He
desperately wanted to console the poor little tykes, but he was in
no condition to help whatsoever. Then the largest of the boys
shoved open the far door. To Lachlan's further consternation, the
children fled out of the vehicle and began to run toward the road
beyond the privacy trees.

Moving with the swiftness of
lightning, Lachlan tried everything within his power to herd the
children away from the road. He called upon the wind through his
will, conjured up lightning to crisscross their path, but the
headstrong, frightened children, led by the hand by the eldest of
the three, defied the warnings.

As if his mounting terror
for their safety was not enough, he spied lights coming down the
road.

Lachlan hovered, his brain
afire, unaware that he appeared to be a greenish, brilliant haze to
the driver fastly approaching. The children were forging on, nearly
to the road. Lachlan looked from them to the car...back to them.
Frustration unmercifully knifed him. If he didn't find a way soon
to stop those children....

At first he thought his
vision was playing a cruel joke on him. The vehicle owning of the
lights was rolling to a stop a few feet away. Lachlan could do
nothing but watch as a man climbed out of the driver's side. The
children ran through the laird and into the road.

“Stop them!” Lachlan called,
trying in vain to solidify himself.

The man in the road seemed
at first stunned then, to Lachlan's great relief, he corralled the
youngsters in his arms. Lachlan was about to move in closer when
the man's head turned in his direction. The moonlight lit upon the
man's features.

“Wha' the hell is goin' on!”
Roan bit out, doing his best to calm the boys even now trying to
elude his hold.

“A motor carriage went off
ma drive,” Lachlan breathlessly explained, moving to within a foot
of Roan. “There's an unconscious woman at the steerin' thin',
Ingliss. I canna solidify enough to help her or these poor
children.”

“Lead me ta—”

“Take yer carriage,” Lachlan
advised. “You'll need it to get them to the house. I'll wait for
you by the wreck.”

Muttering beneath his
breath, Roan managed to get the boys into the back seat of his
Volvo. He grimaced at their shouts and wails as he drove cautiously
to the access road and started up the incline. The vehicle slid on
the ice, but he adeptly managed to keep control, even when one of
the boys began to pound the back of his neck with a
fist.

“Calm down, laddies!” he
ordered, bringing the car to a reluctant stop. He focused on
Lachlan's dimming haze then turned to visually locate the oldest
boy, who was sitting in the far corner, glaring at him. “Wha's yer
name, lad?”

The younger boys slunk in
the seat beside their brother, who glared at the driver with
undisguised animosity. Roan searched their pale, defiant
expressions and sighed.

“C'mon, laddies. We'll see
how yer mither's doin'.”

When Roan got out of the
car, the boys refused to join him. And Roan was not about to trust
them alone.