When a Scot Ties the Knot (Castles Ever After #3)(5)

This really, truly, could not be happening.

Captain Logan MacKenzie could not be alive. He could not be dead, either.

He didn’t exist.

To be sure, for nigh on a decade now, everyone had believed her to be first pining after, then mourning for, the man who was nothing but fiction.

Maddie had spent countless afternoons writing him letters—-missives that had actually just been pages of nonsense or sketches of moths and snails. She’d declined to attend parties and balls, citing her devotion to the Highland hero of her dreams—-but really because she’d preferred to stay home with a book.

Her godfather, the Earl of Lynforth, had even left her Lannair Castle in his will so that she might be nearer her beloved’s home. Quite thoughtful of the old dear.

And when the deceit began to weigh on her conscience, Maddie had given her Scottish officer a brave, honorable, and entirely fictional death. She’d worn black for a full year, then gray thereafter. Everyone believed her to be disconsolate, but black and gray suited her. They hid the smudges of ink and charcoal that came from her work.

Thanks to Captain MacKenzie, she had a home, an income, work she enjoyed—-and no pressure to move in London society. She’d never intended to deceive her family for so many years, but no one had been hurt. It all seemed to have worked for the best.

Until now.

Now something had gone terribly wrong.

Maddie turned her head by slow degrees, Miss Muffet fashion, forcing herself to look at the Highlander who’d sat down beside her. Her heart thumped in her chest.

If her Captain MacKenzie didn’t exist, who was this man? And what did he want from her?

“You aren’t real.” She briefly closed her eyes and pinched herself, hoping to waken from this horrid dream. “You. Aren’t. Real.”

Aunt Thea pressed a hand to her throat. With the other, she fanned herself vigorously. “Surely it must be a miracle. To think, we were told you were—-”

“Dead?” The officer’s gaze never left Maddie’s. A hint of irony sharpened his voice. “I’m not dead. Touch and see for yourself.”

Touch?

Oh, no. Touching him was out of the question. There would not be any touching.

But before Maddie knew what was happening, he’d caught her ungloved hand and drawn it inside his unbuttoned coat, pressing it to his chest.

And they were touching.

Intimately.

A stupid, instinctive thrill shot through her. She’d never held hands with any man. Never felt a man’s skin pressed against her own. Curiosity clamored louder than her objections.

His hand was large and strong. Roughened with calluses, marked with scars and powder burns. Those marks revealed his life to be one of battle and strife, just as surely as her pale, ink--stained fingers told hers to be a life of scribbling . . . and no adventure at all.

He flattened her palm against the well--worn lawn of his shirt. Beneath it, he was impressively solid. Warm.

Real.

“I’m no ghost, mo chridhe. Just a man. Flesh and bone.”

Mo chridhe.

He kept using those words. She wasn’t fluent in Gaelic, but over the years she’d gathered a few bits here and there. She knew mo chridhe meant “my heart.”

The words were a lover’s endearment, but there was no tenderness in his voice. Only a low, simmering anger. He spoke the words like a man who’d cut out his own heart long ago and left it buried in the cold, dark ground.

With their joined hands, he eased aside one lapel of his coat. The gesture revealed a corner of yellowed paper tucked inside his breast pocket. She recognized the handwriting on the envelope.

It was her own.

“I received your letters, lass. Every last one.”

God help her. He knew.

He knew she’d lied. He knew everything.

And he was here to make her pay.

“Aunt Thea,” she whispered, “I believe I’ll be needing that posset after all.”

So, Logan thought. This is the girl.

At last he had her in his grasp. Madeline Eloise Gracechurch. In her own words, the greatest ninny to ever draw breath in England.

The lass wasn’t in England now. And pale as she’d grown in the past few seconds, he suspected she might not be breathing, either.

He gave her hand a little squeeze, and she drew in a gasp. Color flooded her cheeks.

There, that was better.

To be truthful, Logan needed a moment to locate his own composure. She’d knocked the breath from him, too.

He’d spent a great deal of time wondering how she looked. Too much time over the years. Of course she’d sent him sketches of every blessed mushroom, moth, and blossom in existence—-but never any likenesses of herself.

By the gods, she was bonny. Far prettier than her letters had led him to imagine. Also smaller, more delicate.

“So . . .” she said, “this means . . . you . . . I . . . gack.”

Much less articulate, too.

Logan’s gaze slid to her aunt, who was somehow exactly as he’d always pictured her. Frail shoulders, busy eyes, saffron--yellow turban.

“Perhaps you’ll permit us a few minutes alone, Aunt Thea. May I call you Aunt Thea?”

“But . . . certainly you may.”

“No,” his betrothed moaned. “Please, don’t.”

Logan patted her slender shoulder. “There, there.”