Bound by Dreams

HE LAY in the high grass, shaking.

Shaken.

His speed was gone, his muscles jerky. Blood covered his ear and dripped into his eye. He remembered the metal blade and then the sudden slam of bullets. He hadn’t reacted fast enough, never suspecting an attack at Draycott’s very border.

No excuse for bad judgment. No excuse for stupidly letting down his guard. He had too much to hide to ever be stupid or careless.

He made a short, angry sound and stood slowly in the darkness, wincing at sharp pains in a dozen places.

Wind in his face. A thousand sounds from the forest around him. None of them were caused by men.

He shook off the grass and dirt and watched the moon’s fierce silver curve climb above the abbey’s roof.

Change, he thought.

His nails dug at the damp ground, muscles tensed. But his body refused. Every nerve fought the familiar command.

From the woods came the low cry of a bird. The night called him to run, to feel the moonlight on his bare skin. Change, he thought furiously. And still nothing happened.

He remembered a sharp stab at his shoulder. They had used some kind of needle during the struggle. The darkness blurred as he sank to his knees. With a fierce effort of will he clawed his way back over the stone fence, back onto abbey ground.

He had to change. All his will focused on the command, yet no muscle shifted. Weakness pulled at him. The ground swayed.

Death moved in his eyes and he smelled its bitter breath on his face.

Not yet, he swore, struggling over the grass. Instinct told him he had to keep moving, that the toxin coursing through his veins would affect a man far worse than the creature he was now.

Damn them.

With a growl of pain he leaped over the cool earth, forcing stiff muscles to full stride. His vision blurred with pain, but he kept moving.

He smelled her suddenly. Loping through the woods, he came to the boulder where she had sat in the moonlight only minutes before.

Minutes that felt like a cold eternity now.

Her tears still clung to the damp grass. The scent dug under his skin, spelling the essence of female, and his body responded with almost painful awareness. Searching the rock, he found more of her scent, captured in a fallen square of cloth. His hunger grew and he realized there was danger here, danger from the blind urge to leap the fence and stalk her faint tracks until he ran her to ground.

And then he would have her.

He turned to stare back toward the road, pulled in every nerve and muscle, drawn by unexplainable need. In that heartbeat pain became his friend, forcing his focus to the cuts and welts that throbbed fiercely.

Still groggy, he burst over the hill, driven by sudden anger.

And then the world tilted. Darkness swallowed him under its wings like the rest of its creatures of night.

CHAPTER TWO

THE SCOTSMAN OPENED his eyes slowly. His skin burned with the clarity of his dreams. He felt sated, still wearing the heat of a woman’s naked skin on his.

For long moments Calan MacKay savored the dream memories of sleek sex, of soft laughter and passion given and fiercely taken. Then pain swallowed the pleasure, spitting him out into cold reality.

Naked and bruised under a tree in the abbey’s high meadow.

He was bleeding at his shoulder and forehead, his arms streaked with mud. A harsh, metallic taste filled his mouth.

Drugged, he thought. The injection had knocked him out for the rest of the night, no simple matter given his strength and size. The attackers had been well prepared, damn them.

The sun was just clearing the treetops as he stood up, grimacing. All the night’s memories flooded back with sharp clarity.

He knew that Nicholas Draycott was expected home at eight, and Calan wanted to be ready for his old friend. First he had to recheck the grounds and study the footprints near the road. With luck he could find the used syringe, too. He was headed in search of his clothes when he saw a piece of white silk caught on a lavender plant.

Hers.

The scent was clear, even to his weakened human senses, a mix of cinnamon, sunshine and lavender. Calan wondered who she was and where she’d gone. What had left her full of such anger at the abbey?

He frowned as he closed his fist around the scrap of soft silk. The pull toward her was fierce, and for a man like him this attraction was dangerous.

But he needed answers, starting with why she had been attacked. He remembered how she’d returned from the woods, boldly firing to frighten off their attackers. Calan had been half blind, struggling against the numbing effect of the drug at the time. Without her diversion, his fight might have been far more harrowing.

What kind of woman would come back to save a wild creature?

He rubbed his burning shoulder, frowning. He did not take any gift lightly, and hers demanded a grave weight of repayment. He had no choice but to track the mystery woman down. At the very least he had to be certain she was safe.

In the distance a truck motor raced, and he drew back into the shadows of the trees, following a path to the small glade where he had left his clothes and belongings the night before. He had two hours to scan the road and the attack scene. From there he would pick up her trail, which should lead him to her car. At the least he would note the direction she had traveled. Then he’d put all the details in Nicholas’s hands.

One thing he knew without question. He would see her again. She had saved his life and he must offer her an equal service in repayment.

But Calan had a grim suspicion that he would see their attackers again, too.

This time he would be ready for them.

THE DUSTY OLD TRIUMPH ARRIVED twenty-two minutes early. The tall English driver looked distracted as he strode across the abbey’s cobblestone courtyard. Then his handsome face curved into a broad grin.

Calan was sitting on the abbey’s bottom step, waiting for Nicholas Draycott’s arrival. He had washed away all traces of mud and dried blood in the stream beyond the meadow and the long welts on his arm were now hidden beneath his jacket.

As Calan’s oldest and closest friend, Nicholas was aware of Calan’s chaotic boyhood and strange talents though Calan had never revealed all the details. Nicholas had respected that reserve, never prying further.

“Just look what the tide has washed in. Are you flotsam or jetsam?”

“According to maritime law, am I goods floating after a wreck versus goods intentionally thrown overboard? I don’t recall jumping from any nearby ships, so that must make me flotsam. Floating debris—probably from the wreckage of my life.” Calan smiled with a trace of bitterness. “As for you, rules of salvage are in effect. You must return me in the event of any official claim from contending parties.”

Nicholas shook his head. “You’re not going anywhere. It’s far too hard to track you down. You never leave contact numbers or an e-mail address. It’s as if you vanish from the face of the earth between visits.”

“Call me a throwback that way. When I’m gone, I’m gone. Since I usually end up in remote places, neither type of message would do much good anyway.” Calan stretched, eyeing the viscount. “For a bureaucrat and landowner you look remarkably fit.”

“I’ve been outside a good deal in the last month.” Something passed over Nicholas Draycott’s face, though he tried to cover it with a laugh and a handshake. “All that can wait. I’m afraid Marston is in London, but I can round up scones and some lapsang souchong tea for you.”

“You remember all my dark vices, I see.”

“Only the ones fit for mixed company.” Nicholas opened the front door and moved to punch in an alarm code. Then he turned, shooting his friend a knowing look. “There are other vices, as I recall. And given that lean, tanned look, I see that you’ve been keeping yourself extremely active in those exotic places you favor. Where was it this month? Tanzania? Kashmir?”

“Sri Lanka and Morocco, if you must know.” Calan looked at the sunny entrance and giant spiral staircase. The abbey was as beautiful as he remembered, rich with the smell of freshly cut flowers. Every inch of wood and marble gleamed with polish and care. “So Kacey isn’t with you?”

“No, the family is in London at the moment.” Once again, tension crossed Nicholas’s face. “Let’s go up to the library. I’ve got some new wiring plans I’d like you to look at, if you wouldn’t mind. While you do that, I’ll track down that food and tea.”

“Sounds like a fair trade to me. Marston’s scones were always worth a king’s ransom.” Calan kept his tone casual, but he was considering how best to bring up the attack of the prior night and the woman whose rich, seductive scent kept drifting through his thoughts.

“Something wrong?”

Calan realized that Nicholas had turned to stare at him. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I know you damned well by now, MacKay. Nothing troubles you or frightens you. Yet right now you’re distracted—and you don’t want me to know it.”

“I forget you were our government’s best field agent, with a reputation for missing no detail.”

“Don’t change the subject. What’s wrong? Not your…health, I hope?”

“I’m in excellent shape. As shapes come and go,” the Scotsman said drily. “As for the rest, I think I’ll have that tea first.”

“SO ARE YOU EVER going to stop?” Nicholas frowned at his friend over the silver tea set.

Even with Nicholas, Calan’s habitual distance was firmly in place. That reserve never left him, even around his few friends.

Calan sank into a thick leather chair beside the open French doors. “By that, you mean I should stop dropping in on you with no notice? I apologize for the inconvenience,” he said stiffly.

“Rubbish. I’m delighted to see you, notice or not.” Nicholas turned to fill their teacups. “I’m talking about this damnable travel obsession you have. I’ve barely seen you in the last four years.” Nicholas Draycott put down his scone, untouched. His eyes narrowed. “You never stay here in England. You’re constantly on the move.”

Exactly. And he would stay that way, Calan thought. Right up to the day he died. Ancient clan prophecies could not be changed, though Nicholas knew nothing of that.

Calan gave a casual shrug. “I enjoy new languages and new people. I wasn’t aware that travel was a crime.” He inhaled the smoky scent of the dark tea and smiled. “I’d forgotten how much I miss England. I’d also forgotten how beautiful this old abbey of yours can be.”

Especially by moonlight, with the clouds drifting like silver froth and rose petals carried on the wind. Such a night could make a man forget every promise, every duty.

But Nicholas didn’t know about his earlier visit or the attack that followed, and Calan wasn’t giving him the details yet. First he wanted to know why someone would be staking out the road at the abbey’s edge.

And who the woman was.

“Don’t change the subject, Calan. It’s time you turned in your frequent flyer cards. Settle down. Open another six software design studios, or whatever it is you do to make such obscene amounts of money.”

“Satellite mapping technology,” Calan said. “And I would hardly call my fees obscene.”

“More than anyone needs. I know you give away a large part of it to charities. I also know about your dangerous sideline.”

“Windsurfing?” Calan tried to keep his tone cool and just a little flippant. He hadn’t expected his old friend to turn their first conversation in months into an interrogation of this sort.

“Hardly. I am referring to your land mine and ordnance disposal work.” Nicholas drummed his fingers on a gleaming Georgian side table. “I found out last week from a Red Cross colleague in Switzerland. He filled me in about your work in developing countries without the equipment or expertise to clear their old fields. In all these years you never mentioned it to me.”

He sounded especially irritated, Calan thought, as if this secrecy had betrayed their friendship. “It didn’t seem relevant.”

“You nearly get yourself killed every six months and it’s not relevant? I saw the file about your last job in Azerbaijan. The government had several small remote detection vehicles, but they couldn’t get across the rocky terrain, so you went instead. You managed to save four children who had wandered into the minefield, I heard.”

Calan tensed. He kept this part of life as quiet as possible, and secrecy was always a stipulation of his help. The last thing he needed was a horde of journalists badgering him for human-interest stories or inquiries about his unusual skill at detection. “Who told you, Nicholas? My ordnance work is meant to be private.”

“The man who told me is high enough for access to all personnel records. And in case you’ve forgotten, I’m your friend. I know that you need your privacy. I accept your choice to have no contact or involvement with your family. But I’m hardy a stranger raking up details for a tabloid story.”

Calan didn’t answer.

“Fine, I’ll go back further. I’m the friend who dug you out of the mud when you were eight after the upper-form boys buried you up to your waist at summer camp in Scotland. I’m the one who bandaged you up afterward. I recall giving you your first cigarette as a consolation.”

“It was a Gauloise. The thing tasted like straw and old pavement, absolutely awful. So was that whole summer in the Hebrides.” Calan stared at his teacup. “I haven’t forgotten a single detail, you see? You made certain that my scrawny Scottish backside was not further harassed that summer.”

“They called you an orphan and you didn’t deny it. Why didn’t you tell them the truth?”

“Because I prefer to keep my family private.” Calan smiled grimly. “And for the record, I do appreciate all the help you have given me over the years. My…adjustments haven’t always come easily, so I’m grateful for a place of safety and your sound advice.”

“I don’t want your gratitude. I want you to come home and stay home, damn it. Be normal. Be happy.” Nicholas cut off a sound of irritation. “Why can’t you just settle down and find a smart woman who loves you? Start a family before you forget what the concept means.”

“I think not.” Calan’s eyes hardened. “Wife, children and holidays in St. Tropez are not in my future.”

“You want to die in a wretched little shack at the mouth of the Amazon or crossing a minefield in Africa? What kind of end is that?”

Last night’s rain had washed the air clean. Calan watched a bird circle slowly above the moat. Looking for food, no doubt. Nicholas made it a point to keep the abbey’s waters well stocked with trout.

Predators and prey, always circling. This was the natural order of life. One day you were a predator, and the next you were the prey. “Since I won’t be around to notice if I’m dead, how it happens hardly matters.”

“I’m serious, Calan.”

“So am I.” Calan stood up, carrying his teacup to the window. In the clear sunlight the abbey’s slopes were startlingly green. Roses framed the path with a riot of color. In the distance the moat gleamed like a freshly polished mirror, three swans caught on the bright surface. “It’s…an old kind of restlessness. You could call it a curse of my blood. I can never manage to stay anywhere for more than a few weeks.”

He had no real home. Definitely no family.

Restlessness was a friend when you trusted no one—not even yourself.

In every sense his family was dead to him, their memory no more than ashes tossed on barren soil. His past was closed, his future bound by ancient laws that Nicholas Draycott would neither understand nor condone.

Some things were best kept secret.

“You make it sound like a medieval legend, Calan, but I don’t believe in fate or curses. You have a beautiful house in Norfolk. You have work that can be done wherever you like and enough money so that you need never work again. Yet you keep pushing, always restless. What are you running away from?”

Calan didn’t turn around, but his back stiffened.

“It’s none of my business, of course. But I count you as my friend, so I refuse to let you throw your life away, forever rootless among strangers. So come home. Stay home this time.”

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think I care to discuss that.” Calan’s voice was polite, but there was an edge of warning in his words.

“And that means back off and keep my mouth shut?”

“I’d have put it more graciously. But…yes.” Calan put his teacup down on the table, wishing for something stronger.

Don’t look back.

Don’t think about how the sea feels, clawing at your feet in a northwest gale. Don’t think about the voices in the night, come to administer clan law to a boy too young to understand.

“What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Calan laughed shortly. “Simply the aftereffects of some tainted water in Azerbaijan.”

“You don’t look sick to me.” Nicholas leaned back and crossed his arms. “But since you’re determined to change the subject, so be it. You’ve come at an excellent time, as a matter of fact. It’s Kacey’s birthday in two weeks and I’ve just bought her a painting that may turn out to be a missing Whistler Nocturne.”

“You hardly need my help deciphering art, Nicholas. And why did you ask for my advice on your new wiring? Have you had any problems here?”

It was Nicholas’s turn to look uncomfortable. “The possibility always exists. Crime is everywhere. Civilization is going to hell all around us, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I’ve noticed.” Calan looked down at the scars on his hands, reminders of one grisly ordnance job in Serbia. It was hard to ignore the world’s problems when you walked through minefields on a regular basis. It was also hard to forget man’s capacity for villainy when you saw it up close, written in the faces of the victims.

“My wife believes that people are innately good. I wish I could feel the same. But the things I’ve seen make it hard to believe in goodness and innate human kindness.” Nicholas lifted a small photo in a silver frame. A grave woman with intense eyes and streaks of paint on her hands, Kacey Draycott was a recognized expert in nineteenth-century painting. Nicholas’s photo had caught her at her easel, holding a jeweler’s loupe to examine brush stroke and pigment layers of a suspect Whistler portrait. In a nearby photo, she stood holding a gardening spade, laughing with Prince Charles.

“She moves in good circles,” Calan murmured.

“I could barely tear her away that morning. The two of them were deep in a discussion about rose grafting and compost.”

“Your wife has an extraordinary ability to put anyone at ease.”

Nicholas carefully straightened the row of photos of his wife and their laughing daughter. His next words were spoken softly, almost to himself. “You try your best. You plan and you pray and you maneuver. But you never can keep them separate, can you?” He took a harsh breath. “On one side you have your work—your duty to your country. On the other you’ve got your family, and both of them deserve the very best you can give.” He traced his wife’s photograph, his eyes restless and worried. “But one will always affect the other. Whatever ties you to your family weakens you and makes you vulnerable to attack or influence. I, of all people, should know that.” His hand closed to a fist. “Now I’ve let myself be caught, trapped between duty and family. But I won’t have my family put at risk. I’ll walk away first.”

“Walk away from what?”

“A promise I made to someone in the government.”

“And this problem involves danger?”

“Yes. I’m already regretting my promise. No good deed remains unpunished,” he said coldly. “Then last week I thought someone was following me. When I ran the plates with a friend, he said the car had been reported stolen.”

“I’d call that a bad sign. Anything else?”

“A few weeks ago a man was in town asking questions about the abbey and my family. He claimed to be an old friend trying to locate me. At first I put him down as a tabloid journalist cruising for a story. Now I’m thinking he was about a darker game. So I’m going to beef up all our security. I’ve already hired protection for my family. As of tonight, I’ll be traveling with a bodyguard.”

“You’re doing the right thing to be careful. So you’re talking about a complete overhaul, gatehouse to rose garden?”

“Exactly. I haven’t told Kacey any details yet, just that she needs to be especially careful now. She’s been in London every weekend due to this new Whistler painting that has surfaced. Then it’s our daughter’s birthday at the end of the month. They’re staying at a friend’s town house in London now, and I’ll see they remain there until I’m certain of their safety.”

Calan didn’t like anything about this news. Kidnapping was an ugly business. The attack last night appeared to be planned by men who hoped to snare a member of Nicholas’s family. “You’re right to take any suspicion of a threat seriously. Of course I’ll do whatever I can to help. I’ve been toying with a new program that automatically monitors circuit stability. It will provide alerts when your response is impeded anywhere in your system.”

“English would be good.” Nicholas raised an eyebrow. “Not all of us are electronics geniuses, I’m afraid.”

Calan shrugged. “It’s still in the beta stage, but it would signal you if anyone tampers with your system. When do you want me to start?”

“What about right now? If you’re free for a few days.”

Free as the wind. Free as an ocean swell headed for a rocky beach.

“I’m at your disposal, Nicky. I’ll need a day to find a few things in my workroom in Norfolk—”

“Give me a list. I’ll fetch them myself.” The viscount frowned. “There’s something else you should know about that promise I regret making.” Vibrations shook the old mullioned windows. Nicholas turned, gesturing as a powerful motor thundered up the abbey’s long driveway. “Good Lord, not now. Does the man never rest?”

Calan glanced over the viscount’s shoulder at the black SUV pulling toward them. “Do you know the driver, Nicky? Because I need to tell you about last night—”

The SUV fishtailed abruptly to a halt and a tall man jumped down. Ramrod straight, he studied the front grounds of the abbey and then set a small metal box on the gravel. He pulled out a cell phone and began to talk loudly.

“A friend of yours?”

“Brigadier Martingale, head of the Prime Minister’s security detail. Believe me, the man is no friend. He promised me another week, blast it.” The viscount ran a hand across his forehead. “Look, Calan, I’ve got to talk to him. If you don’t mind, I’d rather keep your involvement here our secret. The man trusts no one and will want to know every detail about you. I prefer that he remain entirely out of the loop on what we’re doing.”

“What exactly are we doing? I’m simply here visiting you as a friend, catching up on business trends and family gossip. No harm in that.” Calan’s face was guileless.

“I’ll stick to that story, too. But better to avoid the discussion entirely. I’ve only three weeks left anyway.”

“Now you’ve lost me, Nicky. Three weeks for what?”

Nicolas watched the big man in the dark uniform circle the front of the house, take a small camera from his pocket and photograph the ground-level doors and windows.

“To set up enhanced security here at the abbey. In three weeks a meeting will take place here and everything around it may become a war zone,” the viscount said grimly. “I can’t say more now, but I can use all your help, Calan. Look around. Dig in all the abbey’s dark corners. See that nothing has been left here without my knowledge and no one has put any surveillance devices in place. You might want to start at our main power source, down at the stables. While you do that, I’ll go deal with the pain-in-the-ass brigadier.”