A Highlander for Christmas by Debbie Macomber, Christina Skye Page A

required.”
    “There’s no need.” Maggie stifled a yawn. “Sleep is number one on my list of priorities at the moment.” She pushed to her feet. “Tomorrow I might take you up on that offer, however.”
    She raised her hands, framing a bar of moonlight. There was something strangely personal about the silence that wound through the darkness now. Nothing moved in the woods, and even the air was still. Almost as if the house was waiting for her.
    The hair prickled at Maggie’s neck. For the space of a heartbeat she had the disorienting feeling that she had been here before, on a night when the moon slid low and darkness reigned at the dead of midwinter.
    In that cold moment of awareness, Maggie felt the shadows press close.
    Almost like memories.
    That’s completely idiotic , she thought angrily.
    Mist touched her face. Overhead a layer of clouds ran before the icy curve of the moon. When Jared picked up the suitcases, she followed, almost without conscious thought. They climbed slowly, crossing broad steps scattered with the first dead leaves of winter. As Jared pushed open the oak door, Maggie had the uncomfortable sensation that someone—or something—was watching them.
    ~ ~ ~
    Draycott Abbey lay still in the moonlight. Its stone towers and twisting chimneys rose dark as dreams atop the Sussex hills.
    From a small balcony, Jared stood watching a pair of swans crisscross the moat. He knew he should fall into bed and try for a few hours of sleep. The house was utterly quiet now, and the light in Maggie Kincade’s room had gone off hours ago.
    At the mere thought of her, his body tightened with awareness. He remembered the smell of her perfume in the car and her restless, broken breathing. Then her terror as she’d flung out her arms in sleep, nearly catapulting them into a ditch.
    He hadn’t accepted her answers in the car or her attempts at calm. She had looked sheet-white in the moonlight and shaken to the core.
    Her emotional well-being is hardly your problem , he told himself. But his awareness of her had grown more acute. The prickling sensitivity that had caught him by surprise in New York had become far worse. He could sense her presence and her mood across a noisy room in a way that was damned uncomfortable. Even a chance brush of their fingers left him sweaty, his pulse pounding.
    Since his return from Thailand he’d tried to control unwanted forays into other people’s thoughts. On the whole he had succeeded.
    But this was different. Nothing matched what he felt around Maggie Kincade.
    Ever since their departure from London, he had been asking himself why. Had he met her somewhere before, perhaps in a museum or a quiet shop when she’d visited England? Had that previous encounter triggered this damnable sense of familiarity he had about her?
    No. Had he met her before he would have remembered every detail, every gesture on that expressive face.
    His fingers closed over the chill rail of the wrought iron balcony. The why of it didn’t matter. All that mattered was this electric awareness that surfaced too often, slowing his responses and shattering his ability to assess threats. Jared knew just how dangerous that could be.
    He paced restlessly, watching a bar of moonlight brush the flagstones while his mind worked through details of the upgrade to be finished on Nicholas’s security systems. He couldn’t afford to be restless, and he definitely couldn’t afford to be careless.
    Jared had learned that lesson well at the ultra-secret SAS explosives school in Norfolk when a fellow soldier had been torn apart by the blast from a device that was supposedly disarmed and absolutely safe. He had learned another rule there, equally important: You only get one chance.
    Jared had blown his chance somewhere on a jungle hillside in Asia. He had died there with his blood slipping onto a cold cement floor. In the normal course of things, he would have stayed dead. And the price of his return was a skill that was