“Aye, I remember. He carried ye upstairs to bed last night when ye fell asleep in your chair.” Kenzie chuckled. “And Pendaär is the cranky old priest who’s always the first to sit down at the table and the last one to leave, who keeps eyeing me as if he thinks I’m wanting to steal the whiskers right off his face.”
Megan laughed. “That’s Pendaär, though everyone calls him Father Daar around the moderns. He was a powerful wizard before he passed on the magic to Winter. He was the one who brought my father and uncles to this century nearly forty years ago. But Daar sort of… he often bungled his spells, and he ended up bringing three other MacKeage men here, as well as six MacBain warriors and all their warhorses.”
She turned to look at Kenzie. “The MacKeages and MacBains were at war at the time, but Michael and Papa declared peace years ago. The MacKeages settled here in Pine Creek when they purchased TarStone Mountain. They built Gù Brath, got the ski resort up and running, then decided to find wives to rebuild their clan.”
Kenzie shook his head. “But your poor father sired seven daughters instead.”
Megan shot him a scowl and faced forward again. “Another thing you’ll discover about the twenty-first century, Mr. Gregor, is that having a bunch of sons is no longer important. Thanks to modern technology, being female is more often a strength than a weakness. Women can do anything men can do.” She shot him a smirk over her shoulder. “And most times, we do it better.”
He tossed his head back in laughter, his handsome face bathed in the afternoon sun. Megan immediately faced forward again and started calling Gesader’s name.
“Ye mentioned you refer to the old priest as Father Daar around the moderns. What do you mean by moderns?” Kenzie asked when she paused.
“It’s how my father and uncles have always referred to the people here. Those who traveled through time are the old ones, and anyone of this century is a modern. What was it like, to travel through time?”
“Violent. Terrifying. Nothing I care to repeat.”
“Robbie’s wife, Catherine, accidentally traveled back with him once, and she said she never wants to do it again, either. She also said that when she landed in twelfth-century Scotland, she was naked.” Megan grinned.
“Is that why she and MacBain had to marry?”
“No. In fact, today men and women can even make love without having a wedding—not that it’s any of your business.”
“Are we still talking about Robbie and Catherine?” Kenzie asked softly. “Ye sure do get prickly at the mere mention of marriage, lass. Why is that? Did the father of your babe not ask ye to marry him?”
“That’s none of your business!”
“We’re related now, are we not? Does that not make you my business?”
“Your brother is married to my sister,” she countered. “That doesn’t exactly make us kissing cousins.”
Megan immediately slapped her hand over her mouth. Kissing cousins? Where in hell had that come from?
Kenzie laughed so hard she would have fallen off Goose but for his strong arm wrapped around her. “No,” he said through his laughter, “that doesn’t make us kissing cousins.” His arm around her tightened. “So where is the father of your babe?”
“Burning in hell, I hope,” she snapped.
“Tell me where he is, and I’ll to go fetch the bastard.”
“What for?” she sputtered, looking over her shoulder.
“To marry ye!”
Megan took a deep breath and faced forward again, reminding herself what century he was from. “I would never consider marrying a man who doesn’t love me.”
“Love has nothing to do with it, lass. The two of ye are having a bairn together, whether ye wish it or not.”
“I am quite capable of raising my child without him.”
“I don’t doubt ye are. But does your babe not deserve to know his father?”
“He or she will have dozens of uncles and male cousins. I have a whole family to help me here in Pine Creek. If Wayne Ferris ever grows a conscience and decides he wants to meet his son or daughter, I will deal with him then. In the meantime, I want nothing to do with the jerk.”
“Does he know about the babe?”
“Yes.”
Kenzie fell silent for a time, then softly said, “Our sister was abandoned by the father of her babe. Her name was Fiona, and she had no family to help her. Matt and I were off fighting wars, and our mother had died the year before. Fiona only had our father, and it’s my understanding he’d started to lose his mind by then.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died giving birth, and her babe died soon after.”
Megan hugged her rounded belly. “I’m so sorry. I guess that pretty much explains why you’re so concerned for me.” She gave him a reassuring smile. “But I really will be fine.”
Goose plodded onto a windswept ridge and the forest opened to a spectacular view of Pine Lake nine hundred feet below. Kenzie reined to a stop and dismounted, then helped her down.
“Aye, you’ll be fine. I will make sure of it,” he said. “Now, about Gesader,” he added, gently gripping her shoulders. “There…ah…there’s something I’m needing to explain to ye, lass, about your missing pet.”
Jack Stone rested his arms on the door of his cruiser to steady himself, and trained his binoculars on the north face of TarStone Mountain. He started his search at the narrow fingers of snow stretching from summit to base, ignoring the skiers as he looked for more substantial, four-legged movement. Satisfied the horse wasn’t traveling up the edge of the ski slopes or along the chairlift paths, Jack panned west over the dense spruce and pine trees, stopping at occasional openings in the forest long enough to determine each one was empty.
“Come on, sweetheart. Where’d you disappear to?” he said softly. “And who are you riding with?”
Jack continued working his way across the mountain, though he knew spotting his target in the rugged terrain was about as likely as finding a teenage runaway in New York City. But having beaten those very odds more than once, he continued his methodical search with the patience of a hunter unaccustomed to failure.
“Bingo,” he said, when the horse carrying two riders stepped onto a granite ridge halfway up the mountain ten minutes later. Jack tossed the field glasses on the seat of his cruiser, strode to the back of the blue and white SUV, opened the rear hatch, and grabbed his rifle case. He looked up and down the remote road, then lifted out the high-powered rifle that had not been issued with the handcuffs and badge when he had become head of Pine Creek’s new police force last week.
With a derisive snort, he slid open the bolt of the rifle. Some force. He was chief of exactly one deputy officer fresh out of the academy, and a grandmotherly clerk.
Pine Creek, along with the neighboring townships of Lost Gore and Frog Cove, had been growing in leaps and bounds, the town selectmen had explained to Jack during his interview. And though they had the county sheriff’s department and state police to back them up, the three small resort communities wanted their own arm of the law to call whenever someone thought it would be fun to swap personal possessions between citizens.
Honest to God, those were the very words the selectmen had used. Nothing had actually been stolen; a few gas grills, toys, holiday decorations, and mailboxes had merely been redistributed between houses, seasonal camps, and businesses. Jack had nearly offered to take the job for free, if a bunch of bored teenagers constituted Pine Creek’s hottest crime wave.
He walked to the front of his truck and leaned on the hood to look through the scope attached to the rifle barrel. He spotted the horse, riderless now, and then the two people standing beside it. Without taking his eye from the lens, he turned up the magnification until Megan MacKeage finally came into perfect focus.