Page 33 of Calling All Angels
She stared out at the endless blue sea beyond the cliffs and the road that cut across the moor. A solitary car—the only sign that they had not left the real world behind them—was making its way toward an impressive looking, centuries-old estate atop the enormous cliffs that spilled into the sea, two miles away.
Connor stood beside her, knee deep in those purple flowers, staring, too. He looked like he belonged here, in this very picture of what she’d always imagined Scotland to be.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, her voice tinged with awe.
“Aye, it is.”
“This place, it was your home.” It wasn’t a question. She already knew the answer somehow.
He pointed to that great estate in the distance. “It stands yet. I grew up here roaming these very moors.” He slid a look at her. “Can ye recall it?”
She shook her head. “No. I’ve never been to Scotland before.”
He tugged her toward the hill behind them and an ancient ruin, blackened by time and weather, half-covered in mossy green vines that still stood watch over the valley.
“Wow,” she breathed, finding words inadequate at the sight of it.
“’Tis Narwick Castle. Or it was once. Here since the Vikings ruled this land.”
They hiked for a few minutes before reaching the fallen stones, half-standing walls and stairways leading to the sky. Together they climbed stones that ended on a wind-scoured battlement wall of gray stone. It felt magical to be standing where warriors must have stood hundreds and hundreds of years ago. On this very spot. Whole lives played out here for a season, then faded away like the heather blooms must every year with the snow.
A prickle of déjà vu niggled at her as she turned to look at Connor, sitting atop a stone wall, staring at her. His handsome face etched with Scottish sunlight, his dark hair whipping across his forehead with the sexiest carelessness. Had she stood in this very spot before? Like this? With him?
Impossible.
But was it?
“No,” he said, answering her unasked question. “I kissed ye here. For the first time. When ye were Violet.”
She blinked at him, unable to put together words.
“It was here I loved ye. Gave myself to ye. And you to me. Here on these very stones.” He scratched off a vine from the stone revealing initials carved there.
VG+CM
“Violet Gray and Connor Montrose,” he said.
Emma’s lips parted as the sensation of déjà vu grew stronger. She could almost see the look in Connor’s eyes, rising above her, his hair falling across his cheek as he drove into her. The twist and plunge of desire awakened in her belly. The remembered feelings inside her chest were tiny explosions of joy.
But that was another woman’s joy. Not hers. “That wasn’t me.”
“It was,” he said. “You know it was. You and I, Emma, our souls have circled one another for a thousand years. Maybe more. Why, I canna know, but I mean to resolve things now, this time to move on.”
Some inexplicable sense of loss came with those words. Could he be any clearer than that? He wanted to be done with her, even now. Wanted to be shed of whatever connection they’d formed in this in-between. For reasons still too unclear for her to understand, that broke her a little.
“D’ye see that moor, down there, near the cliffs?”
She looked to where he was pointing, to the giant rocks teetering on the edge of cliffs that were skyscraper tall. She nodded.
“I died there. Right there beside that bald rock.”
Surprise and dread mixed inside her. “I suppose you’re going to tell me how.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to know because he had some sort of accusatory look in his eye pointing it out. “And that your Violet, in some way, had something to do with it. Am I right?”
“We were to be married. The banns had already been read at the kirk. Only my death or yours would’a stopped it. I had just inherited my father’s estate after my older brother, Edgar, was killed in a riding accident. I’d been named duke at my father’s death a month earlier. Though it was my honor to carry on my father’s name, carryin’ his title wasna my choice, mind ye. I’d never set my sights on that. But my younger brother, Arthur, coveted that title. Wanted it for himself. He and I had never seen eye to eye on much, but he was my only livin’ brother. I loved him.”
Emma picked a stem of heather growing from a crack in the wall and ran the flowers between her fingers, imagining those two young men, pitted against one another in the name of wealth and title.
“I had a sister, too. Her name was Rowena. She was the youngest. Plain and small, with no experience with men. She was just seventeen when a wealthy British knob named Landon Sykes ruined her with scandal. He bragged of it in my hearing and Arthur’s, sayin’ she’d willingly gone to his bed. Rowena’s reputation was destroyed. Her future would be ended right there without an answer.”
