Chapter Three

"J ust wait! Don't go!"

None of the men paid attention to her. Oliver watched them piling into their trucks, satisfied that he'd thoroughly scared the hell out of them.

"It's a just ghost," she told them in a hurried voice. "It can't hurt you."

Oliver scowled and switched the "on" button of one of the electric saws. It wasn't the extent of his ability to move physical objects, but it was close to it. Right now though, it was all he needed to get the men behind the wheels of two trucks, moving.

He smiled, thinking about how technology had its benefits, as they drove away despite Miss Montgomery's protests.

"What is wrong with you?' she demanded, turning to face him. "Are you insane? Those men were going to repair these crumbling walls!"

"You will leave the walls alone," he warned her for the last time.

"But they'll fall—"

"Let them fall!"

"How can you not care?" she demanded.

"Mayhap when this place is gone, I'll find some peace," he said, then disappeared without waiting for her response. He appeared a moment later on the battlement wall overlooking the sea and stared out at the same view he'd been seeing for too long. He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. If he could end this existence, he would. He didn't want anything restored. Let Graven fall into the sea. Let it fall.

He wasn't sure how long he stood there. What was time anyway? Ten minutes or two hours. It was all the same to him. Nothing ever changed.

"I knew you'd be here."

Except today, someone was here who could see and hear him. Someone who could find him when he chose to hide. Why had she come looking for him?

She was a Montgomery.

"Did the fact that I left your company not enter your head? Why did you come up here?" Did he mind that she looked for him?

"I…you just vanished."

"So?" he asked, sounding too tender to his own ears.

She came closer. He didn't move back. "My job…my dream has been to restore this place." Her voice fell across his ears and despite the rapturous delight of hearing it directed at him, her words were troublesome.

"I can't give that up," she finished.

He stood over her and stared into her eyes. "You came looking for me to tell me that?" He tossed her a mocking smile. "You are a Montgomery indeed."

"What? What's that supposed to mean?" Did her nostrils just flare like firebrands?

His earlier impression of her was wrong. She was beautiful and brave, challenging him like a lioness. "So what if I am?" she demanded.

"You're the reason I'm here."

"What? How am I the reason you're here?" she asked, then laughed. "You almost had me feeling sympathy for you, but you're really crazy."

"Her blood most likely runs through your veins."

"Sure," she mocked—but after an instant of stunned surprise, as if she knew he was correct.

Why wasn't she asking him to whose blood he was referring?

"So, am I to be punished for someone else's sin?" she put to him, her mocking smile, gone.

He nodded, looking into her eyes. "Yes. You're all I have."

She appeared to have stopped breathing. He wanted to draw closer to her.

"Do my words affect you so?" he asked softly.

Her gaze fastened to his as if she meant something other than what she answered. "No, they don't affect me. Why would they?"

He let her question fade into the sea mist. This was the chance he'd been waiting six hundred years for. He should be thinking about how he could kill her instead of wondering if she could truly feel sympathy for him.

"Can I ask you a question?"

He set his sharp gaze on her then nodded.

"Why do you believe that if Graven Fortress falls apart, you will finally have peace?"

"If it falls, I will cease to exist," he assured her. "I'm part of Graven and it's part of me."

"It's mine too," she told him.

"What do you mean by that?"

"It was left to me after my…my…um…genealogy was provided and it was proven that—" Her sentence was interrupted by a man stepping through the entryway.

"Miss Montgomery. There's a large parcel from the trust being delivered in the courtyard. Your signature is required."

"Oh, of course." She smiled and Oliver looked away. It took him a moment of fighting with himself about whether or not he thought a Montgomery was pleasing to his eye. The more he looked and examined her face, the more he thought it was a compelling masterpiece of dozens of wonderfully open emotions.

He wanted to pull her hair down again and watch it spill around her—and then strangle her with it. He couldn't forget. He wouldn't let himself forget.

When she left the battlements, he clenched his teeth in an effort not to move his feet to go after her. Why did he want to follow her? He couldn't truly hurt her. He couldn't frighten her. Curses, it seemed whatever he said to her only incited her anger. She wanted to restore the fortress, keep him going mayhap for another six hundred years. He groaned. He had to stop her. No matter what it took.

He thought about going to the courtyard and almost instantly appeared there. But Miss Montgomery wasn't there. With all the heartbeats roaming about, it took him another ten minutes to find her. She was in his library. He felt his anger rise. This had been his favorite room out of the seventy-three rooms in the fortress. Why did she choose his library in which to loiter?

And why was there a wooden crate in the middle of the floor?

She glanced up at him from her place on her knees before the box. The exhilaration of being seen after six hundred years overwhelmed him and he almost smiled at her before he caught himself.

"What are you doing in here and what is that box?"

She didn't answer him and he wondered if she couldn't hear him. He began to repeat himself when she shoved a small crowbar into the crate and pulled the top off. She peered inside and then reached in.

Oliver waited, bending to see the item she pulled out. He was unimpressed when she revealed another box. This one was exquisitely crafted in polished mahogany with brass hardware. She lifted out of the crate and stood to her feet with the suppleness of a cat to lay the box on the nearest table.

His will abandoned him as his gaze stole over her, taking in the shape of her long, lean legs encased in "blue jeans" that fell just above her ankles. The top half of her was clothed in a pink-colored wool sweater. He'd lived and haunted enough to learn the current terms for things that hadn't existed when he was alive.

"What is it?" he asked, doing his best to sound commanding.

She tore her gaze from the box to him. "Why do you wear only one gauntlet? Where's the other one?"

"What?" He dipped his gaze to his hands.

"Did you lose it?"

His gaze met hers again. "My wife tore it from my hand to escape me as I was falling to my death."

She paled and for a moment, he thought she might faint. Instinct urged him forward to stop her from falling.

He hated himself for trying to catch her and looking like a foolish dolt when his arms went through the air. She watched his attempt and smiled. She smiled! Did she pity him, or did she mock him? He didn't want her pity. It wouldn't bring him back. Nothing would bring him back. If she mocked him, he'd rid the fortress of every last man. And why was he following her around like a man desperately reaching for something he could never have—and didn't want? He chided himself for letting a woman affect him this way.

She broke eye contact with him and her color returned.

He gathered his wits. "Montgomery, what's in the box?"

Without a word, she opened a door on the side of the box and showed him what he wanted to know. When he saw it impaled and displayed in yet another box made of glass, he felt ill. It was his gauntlet, and her possession of it could only mean one thing.

"Eleanor Montgomery was your blood relative. That's why you possess what she took from me."

"Lord Harwich," she said in a gentler tone than what she'd used on him so far. "Montgomery women have been ostracized for centuries over her, though she was found innocent of being a murderer."

He curled his lips to keep from clenching his jaw. His attempt failed. "There is nothing alleged about it. She drugged me, and then, with the promise of pleasure on her lips, she led me to the battlements. Like a blind fool I followed her. Reason slipped from my grasp and when she requested I wear my chainmail and gauntlets, I granted her what she wished. What she wished was for me to sink faster. She had what she wanted, a title through her marriage to me, and everything I had. I had given her everything—and then she pushed me over the side. I reached for her and caught her gown in my hand. She pulled the gauntlet from my fingers to be free of me."

For a moment silence reigned between them. Then Miss Montgomery wiped her sleeve across her eyes. Were those tears glistening over her freckled cheeks?

"Did you ever consider that you're remembering it all wrong because you were drunk and that you fell over the wall by accident? Maybe your wife grabbed hold of this gauntlet to save you."

He couldn't believe what he was hearing. His blood boiled and he vanished before he summoned all his strength to lift her up and fling her out of the nearest window.