“You all buckled up back there?” Mark asked, moving the plane toward the runway.
Grey turned to Grace. “You want to keep your son in his cocoon? Or would you like me to set up his car seat in the back?”
She patted her baby’s bottom affectionately. “No, but thank you. He’s sleeping now. I think I’ll just let him be.”
Grey turned toward his window then, so Grace Sutter couldn’t see his face when the plane lifted off the tarmac. He gripped the seat with one hand and the door handle with the other, closed his eyes, and started his usual litany of prayers.
They were the same prayers he used late at night, when he was alone in his bed and felt he had lost his mind. Although he would wake up from the nightmares—where he relived the horror of the great storm, the lightning, and the terror—Grey still found himself in a strange new land where metal machines raced by at unbelievable speeds, where light appeared in a room like magic, and where hordes of people seemed to be everywhere.
At first, Grey and his men and the six bastard MacBains had honestly thought they had died and been condemned to hell. They had survived the storm only to be nearly killed by what they had thought were speeding demons but now knew were automobiles. The sheep and cattle in the pastures they recognized.
The people in those automobiles, dressed so strangely, they did not. They had seen the steeple of a large stone church in the distance and had hidden in an abandoned barn until dark before they made their way to it, hoping to find sanctuary there.
They’d found Father Daar instead.
The old priest had been at the altar praying when the ten of them had walked inside, leading their warhorses into the church with them, not caring anymore what God might think of such an act.
Daar had calmly turned around and welcomed them into God’s house and just as calmly listened to their story. He hadn’t keeled over dead or run away screaming—which was suspect in itself to Grey’s thinking. How balanced could a man’s mind be, no matter how brittle with age, to stand bravely before ten dangerously scared warriors, smiling and nodding as they all rushed to tell him their insane tale.
But Daar had not only understood their language, he spoke it himself, managing to calm their fears even though he couldn’t explain what had happened any more than they could.
Over the next nine months the old priest had patiently and steadfastly given them the tools they needed to survive in this twenty-first century. Daar had taught them the modern language, about money and commerce, as well as manners and the use of eating utensils. He had ruthlessly pushed them to drive vehicles and showed them the wondrous technologies available today. And the displaced warriors had reluctantly but quickly adapted to the new world they found themselves in now.
It had not been easy. In fact, it was still not easy for any of them. They were warriors. They still had a hard time comprehending a world full of so many different people, where courts of law settled disputes and where marriages simply ended and women were left to bring up families by themselves.
But not six months into their painstaking lessons, Daar began to insist that it would be wise for them to leave Scotland. That moving to a more remote, less populated land—such as the northeastern forests of the United States, maybe—might make their lives easier. But before he could convince them that America was where they should go, Grey made the priest take him to the site of their old keep. There was a schoolhouse there now, and the name MacKeage was scattered to all four corners of modern-day Scotland.
And so Grey had agreed to leave.
Michael MacBain and his five men had kept themselves separate as much as was possible, and when the time came for them to go out on their own, he took his men to Nova Scotia.
Daar had sold a couple of their saddles, now valuable antiques, and presented them with bundles of paper money to finance the trip. But it had been Callum’s and Ian’s swords and Grey’s jeweled dagger that had brought them their present fortune, which they had then used to finance the purchase of four hundred thousand acres of Maine timberland and build their home, which they had named Gu Bràth—
which, loosely translated from Gaelic, meant “Forever.”
Twelfth-century weapons, apparently, were rare. Grey often wondered if anyone had checked to see if the blood staining them was as old as they were.
The men had been adamant that Grey and Morgan not sell their own swords. The younger men, at least, they had said, needed to be armed if they ever found themselves suddenly hurled through time again.
And that was another worry that had plagued all of them for the last four years. It had happened once, could it happen again? As suddenly as they’d been picked up and tossed across time, could that same unholy power do it again?
The old priest didn’t think so. The energies that ruled nature were not that fickle, he assured them. If they were here, there was a reason.
It was discovering that reason that was proving difficult.
Grey slit open one eye and peeked at the woman sitting in the small plane beside him now. He did know one thing for certain. He was never, ever, telling anyone—not even the woman he married—about his journey through time.
All of them had agreed to keep their pasts a secret. People today did not believe in magic, the Scots had quickly discovered. And those who did were usually thought of as strange—or insane.
Grey and his men were considered strange enough as it was for keeping so much to themselves; they didn’t need to give the moderns another reason to walk silently past them, whispering behind their hands.
Now, though, Grey’s immediate worry was the aging DeHaviland plane he was riding in, as it rose into the air with a whine of protest, the tail sinking as the last wheel pulled free of the ground. Grey fought to keep his stomach out of his boots. Ninety miles as the crow flew. Forty-five minutes of terror, and then, so help him God, he was never sitting his ass in another airplane again.
So, this is where you had to come to find a perfect specimen of manhood—the deep woods. She’d been too young when she had left Maine to appreciate what had been right under her nose. Grace decided that if she were ever going to ignore the intellectual side of her brain and go with her ancient feminine instincts, the man sitting beside her was exactly the type of male she would want to regress with.
Greylen MacKeage was ruggedly handsome, darkly compelling, and uncommonly large. He had to stand nearly six and a half feet tall, his broad shoulders took up most of the cabin space, and his hands looked as if they could have crushed her own hand without the least bit of effort.
She had considered that possibility when she had hesitantly shaken his hand, only to be surprised by the gentleness of his grip. But not nearly as surprised as she’d been by the sudden whisper of electricity she’
d felt tingle all the way up her arm into the center of her chest. As a matter of fact, her whole body still tingled with feminine awareness.
Greylen MacKeage was much more than just a good-looking man. Something about him bothered her.
Something Grace couldn’t explain, for the simple reason that she had never felt anything like it before. It was as if her dormant hormones had suddenly awakened after a long sleep and were now swimming all through her body like heat-charged electrons looking for action. She was beginning to suspect—and beginning to dread—that she was experiencing the first awakenings of desire.
This was not good.
Because this was not the time. Or the place. She didn’t want to be this strongly attracted to a man like Greylen MacKeage. It didn’t make any sense. He looked like a throwback to a much less civilized era, like a man who would rely on primitive instinct to survive, who would use might, not words, to make his point, and who would bowl over anyone or anything that got in his way. Yet she liked the smell of him, the strength he radiated, the steadfast look in his evergreen eyes. He was a man she would want on her side in a crisis. She especially liked the way he comported himself.