The Perfect Gift Read online

  It was purely her safety that drew him.

  But he hesitated, trapped in shadows and stillness. Opening that door would be an invasion of her sleep and privacy. It was late and he was in no fit mood for company.

  But beneath all Jared’s cool logic moved a greater force. The door latch twisted in his hands as he felt a sudden desperation to see her in the moonlight with her hair fanned out over the pillow.

  To watch her sleep; see her dream. Just once more.

  The door opened.

  His feet made no sound on the thick carpet. Moonlight slanted through the windows and dusted the bed where she slept, one hand tugging at the sheets. A fine chain glinted at her wrist, links of beaten silver—her own work, no doubt.

  In that endless moment while the house slept around him, Jared felt the orbit of his life pitch sharply. Something fell away from him as he watched her chest rise and fall slowly beneath the sheet, the image of all he had ever wanted and never hoped to find.

  Honesty he had never lacked. Wit, perhaps. Sanity even. But never honesty. He accepted the truth of that perilous moment when arguments were put behind him. He moved beyond all he had been and found a dreaming face before him, calm and beautiful beyond his imagining.

  He made no move to touch her as he watched the light brush her brow while the curtains drifted in a faint breeze. Odd. The windows were sealed and every door was locked. There was no reason for the gauzy panels to float out beside the French doors to her balcony.

  Frowning, he padded to the far wall. All the bolts were thrown, and every window was closed tight. The movement was probably from some tiny crack in the ceiling or a chip in one of the leaded glass panels. There had to be dozens of places where air could creep inside the ancient house.

  Moonlight touched his hand as he turned at the window. Jared almost felt its cold weight on his skin. For an instant the room spun and the details changed. Silk walls turned to stone. Plaster ceiling merged to solid oak beams.

  Impossible.

  Yet Jared knew only too well that nothing was impossible, that normal logic and everyday reality could twist in cruel distortions. His own visions had proved that far too often since his return from the horrors of a sealed box in Thailand.

  By cold, hard effort he shoved away the anger. Tonight was not for vague imaginings and restless wishing.

  Tonight was for the possible.

  He turned away, one hand to his brow. What he needed was a hot shower and a good night’s sleep. But first he needed to forget the woman on the bed, the woman whose beauty called to him until his breath caught and his whole body ached.

  He looked down, angry to see that his hand was shaking. What power did Maggie Kincade hold over him? Why in this night of all nights did her dreaming eyes call to him with promises of more joy than he could imagine?

  He fought to remember she was a client in danger. He told himself what he felt was merely the result of months of solitude and pain, followed by unrelieved celibacy.

  But the words didn’t work. Wanting filled him, climbing in his chest and blocking even the simple act of taking breath.

  I want you, he said silently to the figure on the bed. I want you more than I can imagine, more than is safe for either of us.

  His hands closed slowly. He drove his fists deep into his pockets and forced himself to look away, to turn back toward the door—and the sadness of his own room, where too many shadows lay in wait.

  Somewhere a clock chimed.

  He had to go.

  It was the moral thing to do. The proper thing to do. But the night was still, and her perfume sweet, and Jared did not move as the low chiming strokes filled the abbey halls.

  Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

  A few moments more, he thought. To stand so close and imagine being closer still.

  Linen rustled in the darkness. “Jared?” Blankets shifted and hit the floor.

  He froze at the husky rasp of fear and confusion in her sleepy voice. How would he explain that he only wanted her presence and the scent of her soft skin?

  “I was checking the doors.” To his irritation, Jared had to clear his throat. “Sorry if I woke you.”

  She sat up slowly, her eyes wide. Moonlight drifted over the sheer white cambric that hugged her shoulders. “I had the strangest dream. Something about a necklace—only it wasn’t a necklace. It became a crown of fire that burned all who touched it. There were voices and horses and someone else, but I don’t remember the face.” She took a shaky breath. “Was it a dream, or is this beautiful house driving me crazy?”

  Jared didn’t move, afraid to turn and see her pale skin and the dark hair tumbled around her shoulders. Imagining was hard enough, but seeing her would undo all his careful control.

  “The abbey is a place for odd dreams.” Somehow he made his voice firm, level. “Nicholas says it’s a trick of the shadows, something that gives even the most practical visitor a dose of wild imagination. It can shake a person badly.”

  “It hasn’t shaken you.”

  He shrugged. “I was prepared.”

  “Why don’t you look at me?” Maggie’s voice was a thread of sound.

  Turn? Face all the things he couldn’t have? No, this was the better way. Cool, calm distance and never forgetting this was business. He was a man without a future. The cold vision of his death had made that clear enough. Time and again he had watched his body fall in a pool of blood beside a lichen-covered boulder and a tree with a broken limb, and Jared had learned young not to doubt the truth of such visions, a gift of his Celtic blood.

  He had neither expected the gift nor wanted its terrible weight. Though the power ran long in the MacNeill line, it surfaced ever in the firstborn son, said to be the heritage of a woman who watched all her kin the beneath a Viking’s ax. As the berserk invader laughed, she had called down a curse on all her enemies and a cry that no MacNeill should again ever be taken unaware by betrayal. By her prayer the gift was given, always falling to the firstborn male, who was to guard the safety of the line and the drafty stone walls that brooded above a great loch.

  But tradition had been broken. After the death of Jared’s brother, the gift had moved, falling to a soldier unsuspecting and unprepared where he crouched in a stifling box in an Asian jungle. Had he been home while his brother needed him, would the future have changed? Could Jared have stilled his brother’s hand in suicide? Would Grahaeme still stride those high hills, his laughter shaking falcons from their nestings above the gray seas?

  Jared closed his eyes, forcing away a leaden wave of guilt. “What if could drive a man mad more surely than sin, and Jared was already too close to madness.

  And to sin.

  Linen whispered. Cambric stirred. He sensed her perfume moving in the still air.

  “Look at me, Jared. I won’t melt. I certainly won’t break.”

  But I might, he thought, his shoulders rigid. Or I might do something neither of us could forgive while so much is still unsettled. “Go back to sleep,” he said harshly. “I won’t disturb you again.”

  He heard her sudden, sharp breath only inches behind him. He stiffened as her hand settled on his arm.

  She was worried, uncertain. He read every nuance of her mind, opened to him in a wash of painful clarity. She wanted to understand. She wanted to comfort him. She wanted—

  He closed his eyes at the image of exactly what Maggie wanted to do in that big white bed while their hands met and their skin moved in slick, silent rhythm across the linen sheets. Heat and surrender. Need and yielding.

  Jared cursed softly.

  But it was no good closing his eyes and pretending he hadn’t felt the hot edge of her desire. She herself might sense it only vaguely, but to him the image was painfully clear.

  She wanted his hands on her skin. She wanted his body, a warm weight above her. She wanted his laughter and his breathless groan while he brought himself hilt-deep inside her.

  “You don’t know what you’re asking, Maggie.”


  Her hand didn’t move against his arm. “I’m asking to see your face, Jared. I’m asking for…answers.”

  “I told you once that answers take a toll. Usually they make things worse.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  What did he believe? Jared closed his eyes, tried not to notice how her fingers felt against his skin. He tried not to wonder how it would feel if her hand slid to his chest—and then lower. “Whatever you feel is wrong,” he said roughly. “Whatever you want is…dangerous.”

  “Beauty always has a price,” she said, her voice husky at his ear. “My father taught me that before I was old enough to hold my own soldering iron.”

  He almost smiled at that. Any other woman would be talking about clothes or houses or career plans, but Maggie spoke reverently about soldering irons. Singular and fierce, she was a woman who would forever fill the lonely corners of a man’s heart, if he was wise enough to let her.

  Jared froze. How had he come to think of forever? He of all people knew there was no future in such dreams. Not for the last surviving MacNeill of Loch Maree.

  But something made him turn. He lost his logic at the sight of the moonlight captured in her hair, falling like silver powder on her cheeks. “Beautiful,” he whispered.

  “No.” Her hand opened and her fingers twined through his. “But what we make between us could be.” When he didn’t answer, she gave him a crooked smile. “I could use a bit of help here, Commander. I’m not in the habit of propositioning stoic men who look as if I’ve shocked or disgusted them.”

  “Neither shocked nor disgusted.” Already his body was hardening, all too aware of how close she stood and how little she wore beneath that sheer white slide of cambric. He closed his eyes. “Go back to sleep, Maggie.”

  “Is that truly what you want, Jared?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I want. It never has. There is duty. There is honor and repaying old debts. Nothing else counts in the end.”

  In the end. In an end that was far too close.

  Her palm curved over his jaw. “You’re wrong about that.”

  Jared felt the heat of her skin and the slide of her fingers. He was drawn to her as to no other woman, linked in a way that felt as old as memory or time itself. In that moment of shimmering contact, he stared deep into her soul.

  There he saw perfect forms of platinum and polished amber, all waiting to be completed. He felt the joy she would bring to each creation with her passion.

  Too close, he thought, already bending her body closer. She shivered, restless, uncertain, and then completely fearless as his hands slid into her hair.

  The fine cambric inched from her shoulder, revealing creamy skin and the curve of one full breast. She whispered his name, the sound blending with the moonlight, rich with all the magic she had yet to realize she possessed.

  Jared didn’t want to see into her heart. He couldn’t bear to know all that she was offering him. Grimly, he fought for distance and sanity. “Maggie, listen to me.”

  “I don’t want to listen. I don’t want to talk,” she said huskily.

  “You have to.” He pulled her to the bed and made her sit. With great focus he smoothed the cambric up, covering the shadowed curves that beckoned still. “Before you touch me again, I need to explain something.”

  “Your past doesn’t matter, Jared. Not to me.” Her shoulders were squared, defiance burning in her eyes. “Nothing you can say will shock me or drive me away.”

  “Maggie, don’t make this any harder.”

  “I’ll make it as hard as I can. I don’t believe a word that officer said. You’d never set a bomb to take someone’s life. No one who knew you would suggest such a thing.” She crossed her arms, patient and implacable.

  “I didn’t set the bomb. But after that, things changed. I worked harder and longer. I followed every case and took on the jobs no one else wanted.” His hands hardened. “Narcotics among them.”

  “Work was a distraction. It’s perfectly understandable.”

  “Not a distraction, an obsession. In six months I had more arrests than men twice my age. It was like a sickness, the need to control and cleanse the filth I saw everywhere around me.”

  “I understand.”

  “You don’t. You can’t. It’s a different universe, Maggie. There are places in Asia where girls of twenty are dead of old age or twisted beyond recognition.”

  Maggie didn’t look away. All he saw in her face was her concern and sympathy. Suddenly Jared needed to shock her, to show her exactly how far apart their lives were. “I was posted to Thailand, to work with an American Drug Enforcement team. Drug lords, crooked cops, nothing shook me. I was relentless, incorruptible, and completely off my head. I fit in perfectly with the cowboys I was assigned to.”

  “You had good reason to be bitter after what you’d seen. And the things you did were to protect, not to harm,” she argued fiercely. “How can that be wrong?”

  “Sweet God, if only it were so easy. When you push as hard as I did, people always die. Protection was the last thing on my mind.” He turned away. “Only getting even counted. Maybe it’s just as well that I was stopped when I was.”

  Jared leaned against the wood bedpost, fighting his way through the blood and shrapnel of dark memories.

  “Tell me, Jared.”

  He drew a harsh breath. Tell her?

  “Please.”

  He watched moonlight on the moat and felt like a stranger lost in a different, noisy place. “You can buy anything in Asia, drugs, guns, servants, it’s only a matter of finding the price. I stumbled on this particular market by chance when I got lost after an investigation. But they didn’t deal in pirated software or rubies smuggled in from Burma. They dealt in babies, Maggie.” His forehead pressed against the sharp wood as he remembered the stench, the crying. “For one hundred baht you could buy a healthy infant. Four dollars got your pick. The price fell if you bought in quantity, of course. But there was no need for looking because being cute or healthy didn’t really matter. It wasn’t part of the plan.” He drew a harsh breath, even now reluctant to put those razorlike memories into words.

  “I’m here, Jared. Tell me the rest.”

  He heard the din of insects beating at oil lanterns. He smelled the pungent blend of cooking oil, fish, and human fear. The night market was all around him, as real as it had been six years before. “It didn’t matter how they looked. They never even had names, you see, because they were simply a means of concealment for the high-grade powder that would earn millions on a city street in Europe or America. It was brilliant, actually.” His voice shook, every word drawn out by sheer physical force. “It was the perfect way to slip through customs. After all, who’s going to take a second glance at a sleepy baby beneath a blanket. Except of course by that time, they weren’t sleeping, they were dead.”

  His hands were locked around the post now. He could barely breathe with the choking memories. Thirty tiny forms. Lifeless. A means to conceal the white powder.

  “They used babies to hide their drugs?” Maggie’s voice was a wisp of sound as she stared at Jared’s rigid back.

  “For almost two years. The night I found them was the first bit of bad luck they’d had. I saw to it that they had a lot more.”

  Maggie wondered what kind of mind could plan such horror. Surely there had to be a special part of hell reserved for men like that. “So you hurt them. I’d say you had every right.”

  “They became my new obsession. From market to market, day or night, I was always too close. They weren’t used to police who didn’t play by their rules. When all the attention started hurting the bottom line, they decided I was an annoyance they could do without.”

  She touched his locked hands, covering them with her own. “They hurt you?”

  “They tried,” he said mechanically. “Twice they nearly cut me down in backstreet ambushes. But that’s the bloody thing about dying—when you don’t care a damn, it never happens.”
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br />   Maggie’s breath hissed free. She couldn’t stand to think of him bleeding and alone in the filth of a noisy alley. “Thank God,” she whispered, her hands sliding around his waist. At least she understood the pain in his eyes now.

  “But you’re wrong. They did get me. It just took them a while longer. And I played right into their trap.”

  Maggie closed her eyes, afraid to hear—more afraid not to hear. She had suspected he carried deep, hidden scars, but she had no idea they would be like this. Her hands locked about his rigid body. “Tell me.”

  “I disrupted their major buying event. We ran the mothers off, then torched the building. No one was hurt, but their operation lost face. A lot of people were angry at the arrogant foreigner who didn’t play by any rules. I suppose I was coming to feel I was invincible. In two years I’d only been hit once, and that was just a flesh wound.”

  “I’m sorry,” Maggie said softly.

  “Oh, don’t be sorry yet. You haven’t heard the best.” He stood stiffly against her hands, but she didn’t pull away. “I found out where their next market was to take place, their biggest yet. I should have wondered when I found all the details so easily. Of course that was part of the plan. I was to be the guest of honor.” He spoke slowly, and Maggie knew he was back in the horror, part of a nightscape of greed and unimaginable evil.

  “We were up north near the Burma border, in real frontier territory. There were already dozens of women waiting when we rumbled in from the jungle.” He shook his head slowly. “They’d been told their babies—girls, all of them—were going to be adopted by rich Americans and taken off to the land of golden streets. Who were we to spoil their fantasy?”

  “You saved their children,” Maggie said fiercely. “If they had known the truth, they would have thanked you.”

  “Maybe. No one likes to see their dreams trampled. We soon had a riot on our hands, with a hundred screaming mothers who refused to go away without their adoption receipt—absolutely phony—and their precious one hundred baht. That’s when the local police showed up. Of course that was part of the plan too,” he said coldly. “We had no business disturbing their territory when a big heroin processing lab was barely ten kilometers away. The local police were only too happy to lead us to it.”