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

to delve too deeply into why he felt such sudden compulsion to dig around for his roots. He suspected it was perhaps the same reason he'd built his house: so he'd have something to leave behind him, something that showed evidence of his passing.

He shook aside his thoughts; they didn't serve him. Fresh air, a little remodeling, and possibly finding a few cousins he didn't know about was what he needed. So it wasn't glamorous. He'd had enough of glamour. He'd also had enough of pushing himself past the limits of his physical endurance, swimming with the sharks in Manhattan's business pools, and negotiating the minefield of a social life where the women were more concerned about the size and quantity of his assets than they were about him. Fixing up a castle. What could be more pleasant for a fall project?

Just the same, he reached out, took the castle picture, and turned it so it faced the fridge. No sense in rattling his nerves unnecessarily.

He opened the French doors off his kitchen and walked out onto his deck. He stared out over the ocean and felt the endless ebb and flow of the waves begin to ease the tension from him. Maybe he was crazy to leave his house. The castle was completely landlocked. He felt sorry for the people who'd lived in it over the years. Although he'd grown up in the Midwest, he'd always loved vacations on the beach. When the chance to buy land on the coast of Maine had come his way, he'd leaped at it without hesitation. As sappy as it might have sounded, the home behind him had become the home of his heart.

He grasped the railing and let out his breath slowly. He would stay in England for a year and get whatever was in his system out of it. Then he would come home and make a conscious effort to date the right kind of women. Hearth and home were sounding better all the time. But first the castle.

He hesitated. If he was seeing mouse ears in his den, what would he see in an eight-hundred-year-old pile of stones?

He went inside to look for a sponge to clean up his carpet before he could give that any more thought.

Chapter 2

THE BOAR'S HEAD INN, ENGLAND

 

Ambrose MacLeod stood at the end of the drive and looked up at the inn nestled so cozily against a small hill. The house had been built during the Tudor era and boasted the original leaded glass windows and timbered beams. Ancient vines of wisteria and rose clung to the sides of the house with admirable tenacity. The shadows of twilight lay softly upon the grand variety of late-summer flowers that covered every available bit of earth in the gardens, and a soft rain blanketed it all. Ambrose closed his eyes and sniffed deeply. He wished, with a brief flash of regret, that he actually could have enjoyed the fragrance.

The problem being, of course, his no-longer-mortal nose. He was a ghost, after all.

Ah, but with that ghostly status had come many other advantages, and he wasn't a man to discount whatever blessings came his way. After all, he'd led a rich life. One didn't count among his accomplishments being the laird of a powerful clan, a statesman of the most diplomatic proportions, and a wily sixteenth-century lad as well without having lived hard and well.

And now such a long afterlife to look forward to, with all the matches there were to be made! It was almost enough to induce him to indulge in a little capering about, but there was no telling who might see that. He did, after all, have his dignity to maintain.

So he continued on his way up the path and ducked in out of the rain by walking through the front door. The receiving desk was currently empty, but that wasn't unexpected. The handful of boarders who had arrived that morning were all settled, and no one else was expected that evening. With one more to come on the morrow, no doubt the staff was recovering with a good rest.

Ambrose strode to the desk and looked it over critically. There was naught out of place, and, look as he might, he could think of no fault possessed by the woman who manned the post. Even so, he would have preferred to have had the inn run only by family. It was, after all, owned by his American granddaughter (several generations removed, of course), Megan. Though she came north as often as possible, her husband's business interests were in London, and 'twas there that her duty lay. That left the inn in the care of hired help, but there was nothing to be done about it. Ambrose was never shy about instructing the staff, which often left them looking for new workers, but that, he supposed, was simply what Megan would have called the cost of doing business.

Ambrose walked through the door into the dining room only to come face-to-face with several of the inn's occupants telling tall tales. He paused and listened with great interest.

"Haunted," a young woman said in hushed tones. She shivered. "That castle up the way is haunted. It was, like, spooky. You know?"

"Dude," her male companion agreed with a vigorous nod. "One minute the flowers in the garden were there, the next— poof! Gone. I tell ya, dude, it was spooky!"

"I already said that," the girl said, frowning at her companion.

"I was just agreeing with ya, babe."

Ambrose shuddered at the unabashed slaughter of the Mother Tongue. He looked at the couple's audience, three older mortals whom Ambrose knew belonged to a rather radical preservation society. They wouldn't be using the warm, lilting tones of his beloved Highlands, but at least he might count on them for a few crisp consonants and a bit of proper grammar.

"Anything else?" one of the three asked. He was a thin, rodentlike man whose nose twitched eagerly, as if he scented a particularly tasty