The man drew himself up and looked incredibly insulted. "Connor MacDougal," he said stiffly. "The MacDougal."
"Ah, Laird MacDougal," Thomas said, inclining his head just the slightest bit. "A pleasure."
"A pleasure would be opening ye up and pulling out yer innards whilst ye watched."
All right, so pleasantries were going to be wasted on this one. "You'd enjoy it, I'm sure, but I doubt I would. Is this your castle I've bought?"
"Aye," he said. But his eyes shifted.
Several of the men standing near him shifted as well. Ah, a liar. Thomas filed that away for future use.
"I thought the MacDougals were Highlanders," Thomas said easily. "I wouldn't think you would find your home so far south."
"He has it aright, my laird," one of the men near him began miserably.
"Shut up, Donald," Connor MacDougal snarled. He glared at Thomas. "The keep'll be mine in the end. Believe all ye like that ye'll stay here, but I swear I'll see that ye don't. If what's awaiting ye inside doesn't have the spine to rid us of ye, I will."
And with that, he vanished. Thomas had no idea if he was really gone or if he was still hanging around beyond Thomas's ability to see him.
Which was, oddly enough, an ability he'd never suspected he would have.
Thomas took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and walked up the path the remaining men left for him. He felt their eyes on him, but he ignored them. If they weren't blocking his way, that was enough for him. Whoever wanted to make trouble for him later could, when he'd had a chance to work out a good strategy for dealing with it.
That would come later. Now, as he made his way into the inner bailey, he focused all his mental energy on what potentially awaited him inside.
A grumpy, grandfatherly ghost who would need a little buttering up, a listening ear for endless stories of battle, and a guarantee that the keep wouldn't be changed too much? Or perhaps it was a man even more fierce than Connor MacDougal, and Thomas would spend the next year of his life constantly fighting for supremacy. There were myriad possibilities between those two polar opposites, so maybe there wasn't any use in speculating further. The bottom line was, he owned the castle now, and he intended to make it habitable. He would do his best to be cordial and pleasant, but he wasn't going to leave. The sooner the ghost inside realized that, the better off life would be for both of them.
He walked briskly across the courtyard, his purpose and determination energizing him. He'd already faced down one extremely unpleasant Scot. Another man of the same temperament wouldn't faze him.
He stepped over the threshold of the great hall, his loins girded for battle, his tongue practically tripping over all the things that were on the verge of coming out of his mouth.
He came to a sudden and very unexpected stop.
Well, the hall was definitely occupied. And it was occupied by a single person.
But that person definitely wasn't a man.
Thomas very rarely found himself without something to say. He could always come up with something clever or disarming or inoffensive. But right then, he found himself absolutely speechless.
The morning sunlight streamed down into the hall, thanks to the lack of a roof. It fell in soft strands of light onto the dirt and stones of the floor. He could even see the swirling motes dancing, thanks to the faint hint of breeze that blew through the crumbling hall, bringing with it a hint of fall.
That same sunlight fell softly upon a woman who stood in the center of the hall, unmoving, unspeaking. Her hair was dark, almost as dark as his, and it fell down past her shoulders in a riot of curls. Tall and slender, she was dressed in a simple peasant's gown of dusty purple that looked as if it had been dyed the color of heather.
He looked at her face and found himself rendered motionless. All he could do was gape at her and grope mentally for words to describe what he was seeing.
Lovely? Yes, she was, but in a wild, reckless way that probably would never have graced the cover of a fashion magazine. Beautiful? Perhaps, but in the same way an unyielding, unforgiving mountain was. He felt, looking at her, the same way he'd felt when he'd had his first up-close look at Everest. It had been overwhelmingly beautiful. And at the same time, it had scared the hell out of him.
This woman did the same.
She was ... haunting.
There was a stillness about her that immediately became his stillness. The longer he stared at her, the more he found he couldn't look away. She was simply stunning.
He felt stunned. He stood facing her and wondered, absently, if he would ever move again.
This was not at all what he'd expected, but somehow, he suspected this was why he had come.
She was looking at him, but she said no word, made no move to indicate that she was even going to say anything. Thomas wondered how it was you began a conversation with a woman who was, well, standing alone in the middle of a great hall dressed in something that was likely fairly fashionable several hundred years ago.
All his preconceived notions of how the next year of his life—hell, the rest of his life—was going to proceed went straight out the window. He'd planned on restoring his castle. He imagined that he would probably hike up whatever England had to offer, then maybe take a little time during the winter and head toward the Alps. He'd envisioned a final year of selfish living before settling down and beginning to look at a more mature way of life. He hadn't expected to find his castle occupied by the most arresting woman he'd ever laid eyes on, who was, from what he could tell, a ghost.
He strove manfully to gather his wits about him. The game had
