Tricks & Treats: A Romance Anthology (6 page)

Other Kate Robbins Titles

Scotland Enchanted

Timeless tales of love and enchantment in the Highlands.

A collection of three Scottish romance novellas by award winning, internationally bestselling author, Kate Robbins, featuring Ian Gillies.

Spirit Stones—RONE Award Winner for Anthology as part of Highland Winds 
 

Sheona MacLeod has a gift.

Connected to the spirit world, Sheona engages with souls long departed. When in the midst of a vicious battle, she is captured by her bitter enemy. Armed with only her gift, can she escape his clutches?

Malcolm MacDonald seeks change.

Exhausted from the ancient feud with the MacLeods, Malcolm sees no future for any of them until his enemy’s intoxicating daughter stirs a desire for peace that drives him to risk everything—except her.

Together, they can change destiny—if they dare.

One Knight Standing—RONE Finalist for Anthology as part of Highland Flames

All Catherine St. Clair understands about her family’s beloved Rosslyn Chapel is challenged by the gruesome death of the resident priest. The young warrior priest sent to replace him inspires forbidden thoughts she is sure will damn her soul.

Born the seventh son of a seventh son required battle training that did not prepare William Gillies for priesthood. Determined to carry out his duty, his destiny changes when he meets the enchanting and captivating Catherine, who forces him to question all he has learned.

Thrust together by desire and ancient secrets, Will and Catherine embark on a journey of discovery wrought with passion and adventure, revealing their true destiny.

The Lady’s Portrait

Gillian Beaton books a last minute flight to Scotland to escape the torment of a very persistent ex-boyfriend. Once there, she embarks on a journey of rediscovery and intrigue when she learns she is tied to a 500 year old curse.

When Gillian meets the captivating Ciaran MacLeod, she’s immediately attracted, but is she ready to trust again? Have her demons followed her to Scotland? The two set out to discover why she is connected to the curse and, in the process, ignite a passion challenged by their pasts. Can new love grow from old heartbreak?

Story Three

Grimm’s Awakening by Candace Osmond

“He doesn't die in the storm. He makes it safely home to her. Nothing else matters.”

The lady's words are so weak; they barely register over the crackle of wood burning in the hearth across the room. It's a cozy enough living room: varnished oak wall panels, shag carpet, with a lovely Inuit rug right in the center. The lady's bed has been down here a while. It has become a permanent fixture, the rest of the furniture and the general geometry of the room arranged to accommodate it like the casual forms and growths in a field that slowly shift and gather around a fallen tree.

She thinks she's alone. She's pretty sure her words will fall on deaf ears, like most of her prayers have over the years. But they're important to her. They might be all she has left.

“Just let him come back to her. Please let them be okay. Nothing else matters. Then I'll go gladly, I promise.”

***

Unseen, he watches. Unheard, he listens. Until the moment descends. The last moment of the lady's life, a preordained moment, but not preordained by him. He is summoned to fetch her, like a courier through the mist between her world and the next, and he obeys, the way he would have done during his career in his own brief life. He is known by many names, but no one alive today knows who he really is, who he once was.

The vast, slumberless in-between is where he resides. Where he belongs. In it he fuses memories from his past with his many remarkable encounters since, creating an imaginary world of endless wonders and fascinations and speculations. It is a place all his own, where no force can interfere. It is a place he calls home, even though he knows, deep down, something vital is missing. Something he had once and lost. There's solace in the in-between but no center. No magnetic north for a lost traveller.

But he is not lost. He has a purpose. A dark purpose, most would say, but that is a distinction made by the living. They have no conception of what lies beyond their mortal bounds. Nor should they have. A certain knowledge of life after death would diminish the preciousness of that earthly term. Better they not know it until their rendezvous with him. Better they take it all in for the first time, as pure discovery. The same way he discovered it.

Well, not quite.

Unlike this lady, no one came to fetch him when he died. No one greeted him, explained what was to happen, where he was meant to go, what he was meant to do. No. He received an invitation instead. A rare and special invitation. A calling, as he likes to describe it. It had something to do with the way he died, throwing himself in front of his captain like that, an act of self-sacrifice the powers-that-be valued highly. And he answered the dutiful calling like any good naval officer would: without question, in the affirmative.

He has never regretted accepting this assignment. The souls he's touched, the lives he's viewed: the best and worst of human nature has never failed to fascinate him. He's learned more about people through his calling than he ever would have during one long human lifetime, and still he learns. It's been his privilege to encounter so many people across the generations, and to guide them to their ultimate destinies.

He may comfort, he may console, but above all he must collect. He can never leave a rendezvous empty-handed, and he will never again encounter that soul once he has guided it to its place in the great beyond. He knows not what happens next. Nor should he. For he is neither alive nor a soul in the great beyond.

He is something else. His purpose defines him, as it always has.

The lady casts her heavy gaze across the Native American knick-knacks and the family photos on her mantel. She heaves a shuddery sigh, then her mind lurches into precious but fragmented recollections. Her moment approaches. She looks back over her life with pride.

Curious, he latches onto her feeling of pride, tries to remember what it was like when he'd scale the rigging of one of His Majesty's frigates, to finally overcome that fear of heights that now means nothing to him. Height is an abstraction. Just like distance. And time. There are so many abstractions that used to seem so important to him. His life had once hinged on them. So many emotions he used to try to tame in order to be a more effective officer in His Majesty's navy, emotions he's all but lost now. Old, dear acquaintances left behind, one by one, at the hindmost ports of a forever voyage.

He muses on navy life. On the drudgery of day-to-day tasks. On the proud highs and sickening lows of life at sea. He tries to recall his happy returns to home port, the sweet face waiting for him beneath the frilly parasol, the soft and sensual feel of her freckled skin against his brine-toughened hands and cheeks. He tries to picture her but he can't. He hasn't been able to for ages. She's lost to him like a glimpse of a paradise isle through the wayward spyglass of time. There's emptiness there, where she should be, where she once was, but so long as he has his purpose and his imaginary world, with its endless wonders and fascinations and speculations, that is all that matters.

As he reminisces, the rendezvous arrives. No voice summons him, but he feels the unmistakable tug of inevitability. It stirs him like the night wind across a starless sea. He is bidden, so he lets it guide him out into the world of the living. For so long he was excited to be summoned. Privileged. Helping a lifer cross over to the great beyond was the most important job ever invented.

Now? He is bidden, so he lets it pull him. Nothing but routine. All the while he's conscious of being neither one thing nor the other: not a lifer—unlike this lady, his term was cut short—nor a part of the great beyond. He has a privileged role to play, yes, but is this all there is for him?

Is this all there will ever be?

***

“He doesn't die in the storm. He makes it safely home to her. Nothing else matters.”

Samantha Byers, seventy-seven, has that unmistakable touch of destiny about her. He feels it the instant he manifests in her room. There's a blizzard raging outside her wooden home, but in her heart she's as calm as a timber lake in summer. He's met the type before, and it always intrigues him. Someone who's long ago accepted the truth about Fate: that it's nothing more than the sum total of outside influences over which a person has no control. A simple enough idea to understand. But for someone to accept it, to feel it in her bones, makes his job a lot easier.

She senses his presence before he makes himself known. Not uncommon, but she isn't disturbed like so many others. She gasps, gapes in amazement at the shadowy corner of her room where her lifelong collection of Alaskan adventure novels rests higgledy-piggledy on broken bookshelves stacked low on the carpet against the skirting board. She has a life of memories invested in those books, he knows: the stories are mostly set in or around Skagway and the Klondike, where she's lived since she was very little. Harsh winters, beautiful summers, remote but full of lore and legend.

Samantha pulls her blanket up to her chin and nestles back against her pillows, sitting upright on her bed. She's as thin as it's possible for a woman to be and still be alive. Surprise slowly turns to curiosity. Like most he comes to greet, she addresses him first. “Why him?” she asks.

“I never choose the form I take,” he replies.

“W-why not?”

“It has no bearing on why I'm here.”

She swallows, the reality starting to fully sink in. “I'm not dreaming, am I.”

“No, Samantha. This isn't a dream.”

She gazes across to the clock on the wall, sees that the hands aren't moving. Then she looks at him, shrugs one shoulder slowly, as though it takes a great deal of effort. “It's over, then? I've no time left?”

“Not long. You've been expecting me for some time.”

She nods.

“But you're not relieved I'm here.”

She shakes her head with a certainty and a pride that makes him like her even more.

“Despite the pain you've endured?”

“I wouldn't have missed a second of it,” she says. “Things happened the way they happened. Nothing I can do about that. My Renee's worth it all. Believe that. Anything you can throw at me, I can take. It's just...she's...” Her chin falls to her chest, the collarbone protruding like there's no flesh left to cushion it. Samantha Byers has never been a beauty, but men have always been drawn to her vivaciousness and energy, and she's been a fiercely loyal and protective wife, mother, and friend for most of her life.

“What is it, Samantha?”

It hits him, how little mind he's paid to her daughter, Renee, easily the most important person in Samantha's life since her husband, Theodore, died several winters ago. But how has he overlooked her? It usually comes so naturally to him, without effort, a person's entire life, loves, regrets, and other formative experiences transferred to his understanding like the myriad strokes of a great painting rendered complete upon his arrival at the rendezvous. He normally knows everything he needs to know about a person before this conversation takes place.

On this occasion, however, he has somehow missed a vital ingredient of this woman's life. It puzzles him. Gnaws at his sense of protocol.

“My little girl's upstairs, fretting like I haven't seen since she was this high.” Samantha holds her bony hand out as high as the bed post. “Little does she know what I'm about to do to her.”

“She's fretting for you?”

She nods. “But that's not the only reason she's so upset. The storm hit hard this morning. Came from out of nowhere, right around the time her boyfriend was flying in. There's been no word from him.” She wipes her damp eyes with the edge of her blanket. “So what do I call you?”

“Hmm?”

“Your name. Title. Whatever you go by. What should I call you?”

“Oh. Bellamy. Call me Bellamy.”

She stares hard at him, as though she can't quite make such an innocuous name fit such a forbidden thing as death. But damn it, she has a good reason to be perplexed. What's his excuse? At any other rendezvous, he'd have known everything in advance. Every detail. Especially such a stressful event as this. A lifer's loved one potentially facing two bereavements in one day. That was vital information he needed to know in order to fulfil his task, to help the lifer move on from all mortal concerns. But this poor woman is distracted, even from her own death, by what her daughter is going through.

And if she hadn't told him, he'd never have known! Unthinkable.

“Okay, Bellamy. There's something I need to ask you. It's important.”

“By all means.”

“It's about Renee...”

He tries to picture the young woman upstairs, by tapping into Samantha's own memories. Ordinarily it's like leafing through scenes and characters from a story book, an instantaneous, effortless look into the lifer's past, into any memory that might help him better understand the soul he is to assist. But this time he draws a blank. It's a blockage in his insight. Renee is not there, no matter how hard he tries to picture her. There are impressions of her, strong emotions, but where Samantha's daughter should be he keeps seeing a different girl, one he knows doesn't belong in this lifer's past.

She wears a gown from another century. Carries a frilly parasol that keeps the burning sun from her sweet, freckled face. It's a face he's seen before, a face he should know well but can't quite place. She reminds him of the girl he left behind once, far across the ocean, in the mists of time.

Visualizing her so vividly like this stirs an old, forgotten longing deep inside him. For a fleeting moment he is no longer just an abstraction, a soother of others' souls; he has one of his own, and it is still moored to a mortal port he knew once. He loved her once. What if a part of him still does, even after all this time? A million deaths between them and hers is still the one life he regrets missing? What if he hadn't thrown himself in front of his captain that day? What if he'd made it home and gone on to live a long life, married her, the girl whose name is on the tip of his tongue. The girl whose face he will never forget again, but which nonetheless doesn't belong here, now, at this rendezvous.

“Did you hear what I just said?” Samantha waves at him. “Anybody home? Bellamy?”

“I'm sorry. What were you saying?”

Her vexed look wounds him a little. It tells him how badly he's bungled this rendezvous so far, something he's never done before. It has always been so instinctive, so natural: the right thing to say has come to him as easily as breathing does to a lifer. But he is distracted. Alone. Something is blocking his insight.

“I said I have a favor to ask,” she reiterates. “It's about Renee.”

“What about Renee?”

“I was wondering...and it would mean the world to me...” She sighs, glances up at the ceiling, then back to Bellamy. “Could I maybe stick around a while longer? Just until I know for certain what's happened to Tom.”

“Here's the thing, Samantha...”

“Oh, I know it's final. I know I'm done. I know it. But even if I'm not in my body any more, could I, you know, maybe stay a while? Make sure my baby girl's going to be okay. I've never gambled in my life, but if I were to make a wager, just one wager, it would be for my Renee and her Tom. He hasn't died in this storm, you know. He made it safely off that oil rig and the helicopter flew ahead of the strongest winds, and any time now her phone's going to ring and it'll be Tom telling her not to worry because he made it to the mainland and he's on his way here now. The helicopter's communications were knocked out, that's all, and nothing in the next sixty years is going to keep them apart further than half a tank of gas. When I hear that phone ring, and see her thank the Good Lord, then my time will be over. I won't need anything else. I won't ask for anything else. I swear.”