Christina Skye - Draycott Everlasting: Christmas Knight Moonrise

Christmas Knight

PART ONE

The Wish

Fire at morning,

fire in rain.

PROLOGUE

Glenbrae House

Glenbrae, Scotland

Early summer

HOPE OHARA CLENCHED her fists to keep from trembling.

Scotland. Brooding and magical.

Green hills rippled before her, densely wooded above a pristine loch. Sunlight cast a glow over sharp slopes, chasing away wisps of early morning mist.

High hills full of legends and ghosts.

A tremor raced through her, swift and sharp. Suddenly Hope had the sense that something rare and momentous was about to happen, something meant only for her to see and share.

Sunlight shifted.

Mist swayed.

Since her eighteenth birthday her uncle had urged her to visit this green glen. Hope was sorry her visit had come only after his death. There had always been some delay or prior commitment. And then it had been too late.

Her eyes blurred for a moment as she remembered her uncles noisy laughter and interminable bad jokes. During a book research trip Dermot OHara had fallen in love with Glenbrae, assuring Hope that she would, too. How right he had been. She only wished he were here to share it with her now.

No regrets, girl. His booming voice seemed to sweep out of the shadows to comfort her. Get on with living.

When Hope saw the rugged tower house that loomed beyond the banks of the loch, her pulse tripped. Against all logic or explanation, each stone felt familiar. Just as before, she had the sudden sense that time was reaching out to her, offering all its mysteries.

If only she were brave enough to take them.

A beam of Highland sunshine peeked through the racing mist, burning over the tarnished letters on the front door.

Glenbrae House.

So beautiful. But why was it somehowfamiliar?

A chipped flagstone path ran past the first early roses, an explosion of pink, peach and fuchsia.

Below the thatched roof, sunbeams lit hundreds of fragile leaded-glass panels. It was like a dozen other old buildings Hope had seen since coming to Scotland two weeks before. All had been full of broody atmosphere tinged with magic.

But Glenbrae House was different. Personal, almost. She felt as if she were at home.

As if in a trance, Hope walked closer, feeling her heart race. The original house was thirteenth century, the estate agent now waiting in the car had explained, a traditional Scottish tower structure built for a local branch of the MacLeod clan. When the family fortunes had declined in the last century, a band of pre-Raphaelites had bought the property and turned the lower floors into painting studios.

They had felt the magic, too. Hope had seen some of their luminous illustrations of Glenbraes weathered gray walls exploding with summer roses. Warriors rode through the deep woods, and faeries seemed to peek from beneath green bowers.

Legends lay everywhere. Magic touched every shadow.

In silence the house called to her.

How could she resist?

She brushed back a vine and pushed open the front door, half expecting to see ghostly figures drift past her shoulder. But her footsteps echoed through the empty rooms. Only dusty motes danced over the scuffed wood floors.

Lonely, the house seemed to whisper. So lonely.

But it took little imagination for Hope to envision bolder days when hardened travelers in heavy kilts gathered by open fires that blazed in the great hall. Here battles were plotted and history planned. Even the smoke on the stones whispered to her, holding cherished fragments of Scotlands stormy past.

Ghosts, some would call them. But Hope had never feared ghosts. Since childhood she had walked with ghosts, and history had been her greatest love, along with the beautiful books that captured its legends. And right now she stood shivering, breathless, drowning in history.

Because every corner of Glenbrae House felt like home.

The house seemed to shift and whisper, breaking the silence. Perhaps because she had become accustomed to the sounds of loneliness at an early age, she found herself listening to those low whispers. The shadows did not scare her, nor did the grime she saw.

She had once been awkward and quiet. Even as a child she had been too grave to suit those her own age, and she still didnt fit in. While others her age were busy lining up stock options, mutual funds and a collection of summer homes, Hope was still wandering. Six months in the Aegean and a season in Milan. Even a year spent teaching basic English in a lonely mountain village in western China.

Always searching. Always looking for magic and the right place to put down roots.

Now there was no family to hold her. Mother, father, uncleHope had lost them one by one. She only occasionally remembered her mothers breathless laugh or her fathers slow smile. A boating accident had caught them during a summer storm on the Aegean the year that Hope turned thirteen.

She had been convinced she could not survive, but she had, largely through the unswerving optimism of her boisterous uncle. Dermot OHara had soon become father and mother, guardian and friend. He had made her laugh and he had taught her to dream.

And Hope dreamed now.

Of sunny rooms and Christmas carols on a snowy night. Of a house that would soon become a home.

Not that the job would be easy. Glenbrae House had stood empty for almost twenty years, and sunlight dappled the chipped, gouged floors. Marks of disrepair were everywhere.

In the great hall, high, cantilevered beams bore tracks of soot from centuries of peat smoke. But instead of grime, Hope saw hard-eyed warriors who warmed their hands by the roaring flames.

The great house whispered, teasing with ancient secrets. Outside, the wind rustled the hedges and shook the rose shrubs as springtime fragrance spilled through an open window, heady and rich.

Around the loch, wildflowers dotted the hills and danced in the sun. It would be hard work to bring the grounds back to their pristine beauty, but Hope had never been afraid of hard work.

Of other things, but not work.

She stared out the window at the shifting silver water of the loch, feeling Glenbraes beauty seep into her weary, wounded soul.

She had traveled long enough. Maybe here along the rocky banks of Loch Glenbrae in a fortified thirteenth-century stone tower house with eight-foot-thick walls and a roof that probably leaked, she could finally put down roots.

With her uncles death had come a small legacy and the promise of more in the future. Hope knew he would like nothing more than for her to be settled here between the peaceful green hills.

Above her head, a bar of sunlight swept the turret stair. Her breath caught as light brushed the dim outline of a painting worked over the plaster at the turn of the stairs. A warrior in flowing hauberk and chain mail glared down at her, pride and arrogance set in every angular feature.

A MacLeod, no doubt. A warrior by the look of him. A man of duty and granite honor.

With the changing light, he seemed to waver, an apparition from a Highland dawn.

Somehow, he, too, seemed familiar.

Hope told herself it was imagination, run amok after hours of travel over pitted roads. But the loch-gray eyes seemed to follow her movements, questioning her right to enter his shadowed domain.

She stood rooted to the spot, fighting the challenge of that keen gaze.

Even as her logic counseled her to flee, her heart stirred. She was crazy to be here, crazy to spin fantasies of belonging in a house at the edge of nowhere. The repairs alone would cost a fortune.

But Hope felt linked with this house, as if she were no longer free to leave the beautiful old halls so much in need of tender hands and loving repair.