Bree rubbed her belly and wondered how she’d explain all the craziness to her little girl or little boy when the time came. How would they tell the child that her—or his—father was over a century old? That one set of grandparents were even older, one of them perhaps a vampire hunter, and the other set was really a great-uncle and great-aunt who had pretended to be Bree’s real parents in order to protect her? She still had so much to learn about her real parents, Edward and Layla.
The best part was that Bree had gotten a sister out of the craziness. Shay. They had different mothers, but Edward was also Shay’s father. Bree had always wanted a sister, so much so that sometimes she’d pretended Emmy the panda was her sister.
A glint of metal along the bottom of the coffin caught Bree’s eye, pulling her from her musings. “There’s something under the coffin,” she said, partly to herself, partly to the cat as she peered into the hole. “I wonder if I have time to check it out before Faelan and Ronan get back from Albany.” They were at the castle meeting with the other warriors. Jamie had something urgent he needed to discuss. She thought the cat rolled its eyes, but it was probably her imagination. “Faelan will kill me if he catches me even messing with a grave in my condition. That’s what I get for marrying a Highland warrior from the nineteenth century.”
He still didn’t get the whole women’s lib thing. Modernizing him was turning out to be a slow process. She smiled, picturing his handsome scowl. Not that she wanted him totally modernized. His chivalrous, protective nature was a pain in the butt sometimes—actually, a lot of the time—but he was just so hot when he went all he-man on her.
The cat continued to watch her, not answering—not that she expected it to. But this cat wasn’t quite normal. He had shown up at Shay’s house in Virginia. No one knew where he’d come from, but he appeared intent on hanging around. He’d sort of adopted himself into the clan.
Why shouldn’t she check it out? She was an expert. This is what she did. She looked around to make sure Faelan hadn’t arrived, then started climbing down into the hole. “Hiss if you see my husband coming,” she said to the cat, who moved closer to the edge of the hole, watching her with what appeared to be a scowl.
“Don’t scowl at me. You’re the one who led me here.” It took some delicate maneuvering to get down. In the past, she would have jumped, or shimmied down like a kid, but she had to worry about jolts and jarring the baby inside her. She noticed the lid of the coffin was slightly ajar, as if someone had already tried to open it. Or get out. Everyone had heard stories about people being accidentally buried alive. They had been only stories to her until she’d seen a coffin in England with bloody claw marks inside the lid.
Shuddering just a little, but not enough to make her leave, she knelt on top of the coffin since there wasn’t enough space to reach the other side. Leaning, she grabbed for the shiny object. She heard a crack, and the lid shifted. “Drat.” She tried to see inside, but it was too dark. Stretching again, she dug until she’d freed the object. “Oh my.” It was a dagger. Still kneeling on the coffin, she cradled the dagger in her hands. It was covered in dirt. She used her shirt to wipe it clean, and her breath caught as the metal emerged. It was stunning. Old. Seventeenth or eighteenth century.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Blast. Bree looked up at Ronan, who was glaring at her. “I found a dagger.”
“I don’t care if you found the pope buried down there. Are you insane? Do you know what your husband is going to do to you if he sees you there?”
“Where is he?”
“Right behind me.”
“Thanks for the warning,” she muttered to the cat, and then she saw it was gone. She looked up at Ronan. “Help me climb out before Faelan gets here.”
“I don’t want to be here when he finds you. I’ll get blamed for another one of your fiascos.”
“Don’t you dare leave me in here.”
“You got yourself in.” He looked at the mud on her shirt. “Good God. Did you fall in?”
“No. Come on, help me. Getting out of here isn’t going to be as easy as it was getting in.”
With a scathing sigh, Ronan bent down and reached for her. Bree stuck the dagger into her waistband and took his hands. Ronan pulled her slowly out of the grave but didn’t let go even when she was on solid ground. He looked like he wanted to shake her, but his hands on her shoulders felt more like a caress. “You’re driving me crazy.” A look too similar to longing crossed his face, and even though she was madly in love with Faelan, she couldn’t deny the tingle she felt. Ronan was gorgeous, not to mention sexy as hell. He left a trail of broken hearts behind him, or so the other warriors said. Ronan begged to differ, but Bree was certain the trail was there whether or not he had anything to do with it. Women turned to mush whenever Ronan was around. He must be giving off mega-pheromones or something if even she wasn’t immune.
“I turn my back for a bloody minute, and you’ve got your damned hands all over my wife.”
Ronan rolled his eyes as Bree turned and looked at her husband, who was stomping toward them. His hair was loose, the way Bree liked it, and he was wearing his kilt. God, he was a sight.
“I was making sure she didn’t fall into this hole,” Ronan said.
“Hole? Damnation. We haven’t been back from Scotland a full day, and she’s already found a bloody hole.” Faelan’s jaw went slack. “That’s a grave. What’s it doing here?”
“Don’t ask me,” Bree said. “I didn’t put it there. I just found it. It could be a soldier from the Civil War.”
A look of guilt crossed Faelan’s face.
“Hell no,” Ronan said. “Don’t even go there.”
Bree wished she hadn’t mentioned the war. Faelan had been sent by Michael the Archangel to stop the ancient demon Druan from his part in stirring up the war, but something had gone wrong, and Faelan was the one locked in the time vault instead of Druan. Needless to say, Faelan hadn’t stopped the war. He’d slept through it and the century and a half that followed. Though the clan had stressed that it must have happened that way for a reason, Faelan still felt responsible for the failure.
“I don’t know why you keep doing this to yourself,” Ronan said. “For the last time, you couldn’t have stopped the whole bloody war. Nobody could have. It must have been some kind of test. To teach you a lesson, you thick-headed bastard.”
Ronan was one to talk about guilt. He still believed he was responsible for his brother Cam being captured and killed by vampires.
Faelan made a grunting sound that might have been agreement or a curse. Then he turned to Bree. “You’re not thinking about climbing down there and opening it, are you?”
Guilt trip averted. “Me?” she exclaimed, glancing at Ronan, who looked like Joan of Arc with muscles and a sex change. Faelan did tend to blame Ronan for Bree’s mishaps whenever he was around.
“You’re a magnet for holes and graves,” her doting husband said.
True, she found more than her share. Perhaps she should stop looking for them. Graves, not holes. She liked graves. The holes just seemed to find her.
Faelan gave Ronan a disgruntled look and moved closer, looking into the hole. “You shouldn’t even be out here,” he said to Bree. “I’m going to find some way to keep you from wandering.”
“Good luck,” Ronan muttered.
“I was just going outside for some fresh air,” Bree said, “and I saw the cat acting strange.”
“He’s always acting strange,” Faelan said.
He did come and go as he pleased, often tagging along with Shay or Bree when he wasn’t stuck with Matilda, who believed the cat warded off vampires. She was convinced it had killed the vampire that had gotten inside the secret passage of the clan’s castle in Scotland. The warriors thought she was insane until they saw the pile of dust. That left them with three possible explanations. None of which were logical. Either the cat killed the vampire, or Matilda’s bottle of water, which she had thrown at the vampire, had killed it. She believed the water was holy since it had been clutched to her breast in terror as she prayed. The last possibility was that the vampire had committed suicide to get away from Matilda. Bree’s money was on the cat.