clothes, at the jewels winking in his scabbard, at the cut of his hair and the shape and cast of his features. A long, silent moment passed before the drumming began in my head. This couldn’t happen. It wasn’t possible. What was I, Christina Murray, a twentieth-century woman, doing in a room with a man who’d been dead nearly five hundred years?
He looked concerned, as if something about me troubled him, and when he spoke, his words froze the blood in my veins.
“Not all the tears in Christendom will bring her back, Jeannie. Andrew needs you, and there is the new bairn to consider.”
A surge of emotion swept through me at the sound of his voice. That lilting accented speech, the way he rolled his r’s, and the barest lift of his voice at the end of a syllable had disappeared from Scottish dialect centuries ago. That, more than anything else, convinced me that the impossible had happened. One of us had transcended the barrier of time.
I looked around at a Traquair I’d only seen in my mind. There were hanging tapestries, high-backed chairs, and embroidered pillows, torches smoking in their sconces on blackened walls, rush-strewn floors and above the mantel, the door-length portrait of Jeanne Maxwell that I’d seen, only this time it wasn’t five centuries old. It looked newly painted, the colors brilliant and vivid, the woman breathtakingly alive against the radiant splendor of a Scottish spring.
“Jeanne.” The timbre of his voice was low and terrifyingly intimate. I shivered. Reality splintered around me like a blast of icy air. It was as if I’d come out of a warm movie theater into the cold rain of a New England November. This man was John Maxwell, earl of Traquair, and he believed, without a doubt, that I was his wife.
I watched in fascinated horror as he pushed away from the mantel and walked toward me. Each controlled, deliberate step brought him closer to the settle where I sat. My mouth tasted like steel wool, and my hands shook with fear. I looked up, sick with the knowledge that any moment I would be exposed as an impostor. He would know the moment he touched me. Jeanne and I might look alike, but that was all.
A man who had lived with a woman, shared her bed, and given her children would know much more than the shape of her features or the color of her hair and eyes. He would know the feel of her lips under his. He would know her laughter and the familiar weight of her body in sleep. He would know every mark and line, every mole and curve, that made her who she was and infinitely unique from every other woman who walked the face of the earth.
Without speaking, he looked down at me for a long time. Then, with no hint or warning, he scooped me up in his arms and strode out the door and down the hall. I held my breath, afraid to speak, fearing the telltale evidence of my accent would damn me immediately, wondering how I could possibly explain the truth. I’m terribly sorry, Lord Maxwell, but I’m not your wife. I just look like her. Actually I’m Christina Murray, one of her descendents, which makes me yours, too. I was born in the year 1956. Of course, that didn’t explain where Jeanne Maxwell was and why I was here, taking her place in the sixteenth century. Somehow I didn’t think this determined young man who managed my weight as easily as if I were a five-pound bag of coffee would believe me.
I recognized the hallway immediately. There were no runners on the wooden floors and it was much darker without modern lighting, but the lovely carved doors inlaid with brass and the wooden floors were unmistakable. John Maxwell was taking me to bed.
He kicked the door open with his boot and closed it behind us the same way. Carrying me to the enormous curtained bed, he dropped me into its middle. Before I had time to react, he lowered his body on top of mine and pressed his mouth against my throat. I tensed, every muscle stiffening against the onslaught of his searching lips.
“Don’t fight me, Jeannie,” he begged, his breathing harsh against my ear. “Holy God! I’m not a monk. Let it go, love. Let it go and come back to me.”
It was too much. Whether he believed me or not, I had to tell him. “I’m not—”