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was beginning to rise from the pan. Oh God, the food was burning! Bella moved, warily, toward the stove. She was loath to go anywhere near the spot where he had been. She edged around it, and as she took the pan off the heat she realized why he had seemed familiar.
    Bella spun and stared at the wall above the bookshelf. The portrait was gone—Brian had seen to that—but she did not need to see it to know that the ghost—if that was what he was—resembled the Black Maclean. Not so elegant, perhaps, for the ghost’s clothing had been damp and untidy, but essentially the same. The odd thing was…his eyes. The pupils were large and dark. Wild, just as Bella imagined her own to have been. As if seeing her had been just as much of a shock to him as seeing him had been to her.
    Were ghosts frightened by human beings?
    The idea made her giggle hysterically, and she bit her lip.
    “Stop it,” she whimpered. “Just stop it.”
    The research she had done on present-day Loch Fasail said nothing about any sightings of Maclean’s ghost. Maybe the cottage was haunted? Bella knew that although Castle Drumaird had been built in the thirteenth century, her cottage was only a hundred years old. But it had been built with stone from the ruins. Perhaps stone could contain past memories; perhaps with the stone had come the ghost.
    The thought startled her into remembering something that happened earlier, when she had gone for her walk. As she was leaving the ruins for the path down the hill she had felt something odd. A cold tingle down her backbone. An awareness. A sense of something that shouldn’t be there.
    She’d forgotten about it. Brian being in the cottage when she arrived back had emptied everything else from her mind. But now she could not help but ask herself: Did Maclean follow me home?
    Had he walked a pace behind her, silent, unseen, those pale eyes fixed on her back, his breath a cold touch against her skin?
    I’m waiting for Maclean.
    “Oh my God.” Bella turned a full circle, checking the shadows again. The trouble with being a writer was her vivid imagination; she’d frightened herself. Maybe she should call Brian’s cell phone and ask him to—
    But Bella stopped right there. Brian was gone; it was over. Ghost or no ghost, she was staying. Her writing was going well and leaving would be a mistake, especially when she wasn’t even certain whether or not she had seen it. In fact, the more she tried to remember exactly what had happened, the more she doubted it was anything other than a…
    “Hallucination.”
    Yes, that’s all it was. She’d had that weird dream and her emotions had been in an upheaval with Brian leaving, and then she’d been writing about the Black Maclean. It was natural that she would imagine him appearing to her…. Well, it made a sort of sense. Ghostor no ghost, Bella wouldn’t phone Brian, not after what he had said and done. She knew she was better than that.
    The food was cooked. She tipped it out of the pan onto a plate and carried it over to the kitchen table and sat down. She and Brian had been eating in the other room. Brian had found a proper dining table from somewhere, and every night they’d lit candles and set out cutlery and crockery, just as he liked it. But tonight she refused to go through that charade. What was the point when she was by herself?
    If she was by herself.
    “Stop it!” Ghost or not, she was alone. Face it. Deal with it. Move on.
    Murmuring a song by Jewel under her breath, she opened one of her notebooks, propped it up beside her, and began to read about life as it was in the Maclean stronghold of Loch Fasail in the eighteenth century.
     
     
    Maclean focused his attention on the woman at the table. He hadn’t imagined it, he knew he hadn’t. She had seen him! Her eyes had widened, the brown of them completely surrounded by white, and she’d made a mewling sound like a kitten. Aye, she had seen something, and she had been looking directly at him