My Heart Stood Still by Lynn Kurland (best book club books of all time .TXT) 📕

in its original language and keep most of the words straight in his head.

He wondered how Margaret Smith would have done at the same task.

Interesting.

"You said it was urgent," Alex said with a disarming smile. "So, spill it."

"My mother is a MacLeod," Thomas said, hoping to win a few brownie points.

"The saints preserve us, we're surrounded by them," Margaret muttered.

Alex smiled at her, then turned back to Thomas. "Then you're family. What do you need?"

"You won't believe this—"

"Ah, but we likely will," Margaret said.

Alex laughed. "She's right. We'll believe just about anything."

Thomas took a deep breath. "All right, this is the deal. A couple of years ago, I bought a castle."

"In Scotland?" Alex asked.

"On the border. But that's not the thing about it. I finally went over about a month ago to check it out." He paused and hoped they wouldn't think he'd lost his mind. Just how was it one went about telling complete strangers that one owned a castle full of ghosts? Well, maybe the direct approach was the best. He smiled weakly. "It's haunted."

Margaret sighed. "I'm unsurprised."

"The thing is," Thomas said, "it's not so much the fact that it's haunted. It's who it's haunted by."

"All right," Alex said, "I'm biting. Who's it haunted by?"

"By a woman who is the great-granddaughter of Jesse MacLeod, who had a father named James, who doesn't have a death date." He paused for effect. "Ring any bells?"

There was absolute silence in the room for several moments. Alex opened his mouth to speak, then apparently swallowed the wrong way because he began to choke. Margaret slapped him forcefully on the back until he held up his hand for her to stop.

"Great story," Alex wheezed. "Couldn't be more interested. Really."

"I understand your brother-in-law is named James MacLeod."

Alex seemed to be beyond the point of coherent speech. That alone was enough to convince Thomas he'd struck gold. He moved in for the killing blow.

"Is he a ghost?"

Alex seemed to have great difficulty swallowing. Margaret had practically beaten him to a pulp before he managed to tell her to stop between coughs. Margaret looked at Thomas.

"Jamie's no ghost," she said, sounding very sure about it.

"No," Alex managed. "He's definitely very alive."

Well, that was a dead end. So much for the theory of James being a ghost. Not that his being a ghost would have helped much anyway, but Thomas had held out a hope that somehow beyond reason and logic, James would have had some kind of help to offer him.

"If your brother-in-law's not a ghost," Thomas said slowly, "then what's the secret of his castle? Everyone at my place who knows anything says there's a secret associated with the keep."

Oddly enough, both Alex and Margaret had gone completely still.

Well, that was something.

"The secret isn't that he's a ghost?"

Alex and Margaret looked like two people who didn't dare look at each other for fear of what they would give away.

"I am family," Thomas reminded them.

They did exchange a glance at that. Then Alex looked at him.

"Why do you want to know?" he asked carefully.

"Do you know the secret?"

"I know lots of secrets," Alex said easily. "Why don't you tell me your problem, and I'll see if I have a secret to fix it."

"Fair enough," Thomas agreed. "This is the problem. I met the woman who haunts my keep, and we fell in love. I was thinking that maybe the secret of her ancestral keep—which, by the way, she won't tell me—might be something that would help us, well, survive." He came to an abrupt halt and realized how utterly stupid he sounded. What kind of secret was going to fix what needed to be fixed? He was mortal; she was not.

There was no fixing that.

"Forget it," he said, shaking his head. "I don't know why I even asked."

He sat there and looked out their window with its fabulous view and felt more discouraged than he had in his entire life. That feeling wouldn't last, of course. He would get back to England and get Iolanthe somewhere she couldn't escape, then they would talk. It would all work out.

But for now he was incredibly bummed, and he had every intention of wallowing in it.

"You know what would be handy," Thomas said.

"What?" Margaret asked gently.

"If I could stop it. Stop her death."

There was silence in the room for quite some time. Thomas watched the sun's reflection disappear from skyscraper windows. Dusk fell. Stars no doubt came out, but he couldn't see them from where he sat.

Alex cleared his throat. "It just so happens," he said slowly, "that we might be able to help you with that."

Thomas blinked. "You might? How?"

"It just so happens," Alex said, "that the secret of the keep is... time travel."

Thomas looked at him, blinked several times in silence, then laughed. He threw back his head and laughed long and hard. He looked at Margaret and Alex, expecting them to share the sickest joke he'd ever heard.

But they weren't laughing.

"You aren't kidding," Thomas said, his smile fading abruptly.

Margaret rubbed her hands together briskly. "Let us be about this business. No time to waste." She pinned Thomas to the spot with a piercing glance. "Do you know when she died?"

He tried to nod but found suddenly that his neck wasn't working very well.

She looked at Alex triumphantly. "He could go back before."

Alex shook his head. "If Jamie's theory of time-traveling is to be believed, her time in her century would have to be over. She'd have to be near death. As wonderful as I'm sure she would still be at the end of her life, I doubt Thomas would want to pull her forward when she was sixty-something."

"She was murdered," Thomas managed. "She was only twenty-four at the time."

"Perfect!" Margaret exclaimed. "He can go back before she was murdered and rescue her."

Alex paused, then shook his head. "Even if he could—and I'm not saying that it would work, because you know how fickle those gates are—even if he could, who's to say he'd arrive at the