Patrick had been a boyfriend. Matt Gregor was…curses, he was far more confounding than Patrick Rooney had ever been. She’d never gotten all mush-minded and shivery when Pat had kissed her. Nor had she ever wanted to rip off Pat’s clothes and run her hands over every inch of his body. But that was exactly what she’d wanted to do to Matt up on the mountain—what she would like to do to him right now.

Good heavens, Winter thought with a start, kicking off the suddenly stifling blankets. She was lusting after Matheson Gregor. She frowned at the ceiling. Well, go figure. This chemistry thing was pretty powerful stuff.

Winter felt like one of those itty-bitty wood ticks that would lay dormant on a leaf for over eighteen months at a time, just waiting for a warm body to come brushing by. Well, hadn’t she been lying in wait for nearly twenty-five years? But when Matt Gregor had stepped into her gallery, she’d taken a good look at him and jumped off her leaf with every intention of going for a wonderful ride.

Winter smiled again as she remembered how Matt had stopped his truck at Gù Brath, walked her to her door, and with only a softly spoken good-bye and no goodnight kiss, left without looking back. He’d been restraining himself, Winter decided, her smile turning smug; nice guys did not take advantage of women they cared about after knowing them only one day.

Aye, Matt was a truly noble gentleman.

In a way, he reminded Winter of how her papa treated her mama. No matter how frustrated her father got with his wife, he never took advantage of his strength or size. Not that Grace didn’t push his buttons occasionally, sometimes just for the fun of it, Winter suspected.

Just like she was tempted to do with Matt.

Winter’s smile disappeared as her thoughts bounced to her parents, picturing them holed up in some cave on TarStone. Or more likely they’d sought shelter in the summit house and were cuddled up in front of the giant stone hearth.

But she still didn’t know why they’d suddenly decided to spend the night; she was only sure that something was wrong. It couldn’t have anything to do with Daar’s pine tree, she decided. Her papa wouldn’t mess with the magic, not when it was all that was keeping him from returning to his old time.

Winter had told Robbie about Father Daar’s latest crisis when he’d brought Megan home.

Robbie had scrubbed his face in frustration, let out a tired sigh, and promised to go see the old priest that night. He’d also told Winter not to worry about Greylen, that he’d find him tomorrow and let him know what was going on, and for her to simply go about her business as usual.

Robbie hadn’t liked the part of her story where she’d told him Matt had gone with her to take Daar home. He’d given Winter a ten-minute lecture about trusting men she knew nothing about, and she’

d listened and smiled and nodded in all the appropriate places. Finally realizing his lecture was falling on deaf ears, Robbie had stopped talking with a resigned snort and headed home to mount up and go see Father Daar.

Winter finally closed her eyes with a tired sigh, deciding it was time to let this enchanted day come to an end. It had begun before sunrise, and if she didn’t get some sleep, she was going to greet the next sunrise with a scowl.

And she didn’t want anything to ruin her wonderful mood. She had kissed the man of her dreams tonight, and she couldn’t wait to get another taste of Matheson Gregor’s own special magic.

Matt lay in the king-sized bed in his suite, completely naked and the covers thrown off him, listening to the wind-driven rain hitting the windows. His body still hadn’t cooled down, and little Miss Prickly MacKeage was responsible for his foul mood.

She’d come damn close to losing her virginity tonight, and it was the very fact that she was a virgin that had brought Matt to a screaming halt. Yes, he had realized the moment he’d kissed her in her driveway that Winter had never been with a man, not intimately, anyway. If she were experienced, they wouldn’t be lying in separate beds right now; he would have been all over her up on that bluff, and he wouldn’t have stopped until morning—storm or no storm.

That she had held out for so long, yet had come so damned close to giving him her most precious possession tonight, made Matt break out in a cold sweat all over again. He dismissed the notion that he had stopped out of concern for her feelings, knowing how horrified she’d be in the morning. He even dismissed his long-lost conscience in some rusted region of his mind, that taking her on the ground in the middle of the woods made him no better than a rutting bull moose.

Or bear, he thought with a self-debasing laugh.

A heartless son of a bear.

Well, hell. He had to get over this damnable notion that Winter MacKeage was anything more than a means to an end, because she wasn’t. He was here for one reason only, and once Winter helped him kill his brother, he didn’t give a rat’s ass if her mountain of magic blew itself to hell or not.

Nor did he care if he blew to hell with it.

Grace MacKeage sat a short distance away on a fallen log, watching the three men examine what was left of Daar’s precious pine tree. She moved her gaze up the thirty-some-odd feet of remaining trunk and branches and stopped at the bluntly cut top, which was bleeding thick fingers of pine pitch.

Robbie had climbed the trunk when they’d first arrived, calling down that it didn’t appear to have been cut with a chain saw, but with an old-fashioned crosscut saw.

His observation had only served to deepen the mystery. Why had someone bothered to climb thirty feet into the air to cut the tree? And where the hell was the top?

Grace looked down and studied her chewed fingernails, blocking out the hushed conversation between Grey and Daar and Robbie as they searched the woods for signs of what had happened while speculating on why it had happened. Her eyes felt too big for her head, swollen and itchy from a sleepless night of crying. What had started out as a pleasant picnic with Grey yesterday had quickly turned into a nightmare for Grace when her husband had told her about his visit with the old priest that morning.

Their beautiful, innocent, unsuspecting daughter, Grey had explained, was being asked not only to step into her destiny now, but to face an adversary the likes of which none of them could even imagine.

Cùram de Gairn, Grey had said, was likely here—in this time and on their mountain—seeking revenge for the death of his own tree of life. That, or he had some other agenda they couldn’t figure out. All Grey had emphasized was that Winter was their only hope of stopping the bastard.

The fate of the world, it seemed, rested on the delicate shoulders of a twenty-four-year-old child.

Oh, how Grace wished for her predictable science to be all that there was again. At one time her world had been filled with only numbers, equations, and dreams of traveling into space. But when she had met Greylen MacKeage, Grace had discovered that the true wonders weren’t out there, but right here on earth, as close as the mountain she’d grown up on. That was when her science had run headlong into the magic, and thirty-three years and seven daughters later, that magic was threatening not only her innocent baby, but the future of all of mankind.

A shadow fell over her, but Grace didn’t look up. Her husband lowered down on his haunches, lifting her chin so that she was staring into his deeply worried eyes. “Any idea, wife,” he asked softly,

“why the tree was cut so high up?”

She let out a shuddering breath and shook her head in his hand, tears stinging the backs of her eyes again.

“I need ye, Grace. I need ye to be strong right now for Winter. None of us can fight what we don’t understand. Please stop being a mama and be a scientist just long enough to help us figure out what