THE PERFECT TEN (Boxed Set)

hovering behind her, she knew Duncan had shoulders and arms that could make any woman swoon. Her ghost’s legs were equally attractive if one was into heavily muscled thighs and long powerful calves. She sighed, an unprotected corner of her heart wishing he were flesh and blood.
    ~ # ~
    “Good riddance,” Duncan grumbled as the electricians scrambled into their launch and headed for Drasmoor. To escape their clamoring, he’d spent the better part of the day bored out of his mind on the keep’s parapet.
    Beth had evidently found the men equally disturbing since she’d spent the afternoon churning earth along the bailey’s east wall. Wondering what she was up to now, he entered the keep.
    “Where in hell did she find that? ” He frowned at the small portrait leaning against the solar’s hearth. He had ordered the ugly rendering burned before its pigments had dried.
    Beth had any number of better paintings to choose from if she wanted to brighten the room. Why on earth had she chosen his portrait?
    As artists went, his cousin would have made a fine butcher. The portrait only proved what Duncan had known all along. The youth’s only talent lay in wielding a sword. Yet, here the ugly portrait was again after six hundred years. His ferret heir would be the death of him, if he weren’t already dead.
    And where was she?
    He prowled the upper floors looking for her without success, and then descended to the hall. He didn’t find her in the great room, but saw that two of his favorite chairs were suddenly there. Apparently, she’d found the fop’s reclining throne as offensive as he had and banished it. He caressed the recently oiled rosewood falcons at rest on the chairs’ high backs.
      He’d brought the chairs to Blackstone from Normandy; one of the few prizes he’d been able to salvage after the battle of Rouin. The leather seats were now cracked and brittle, but ‘twas good to see them again in the great hall, nonetheless.
    Minutes later, he found Beth sitting before the cistern-fed water heater, filthy and looking dejected, a pile of spent matches at her side.
    He examined the firebox. She’d put in enough kindling, but she’d stacked the bricks of coal like a meticulous mason, eliminating any chance for a draft. She was down to her last match and muttering.
    She struck the match, watched the kindling flare, and then just as quickly snuff out. She kicked the firebox door closed.
    Tears welling in her eyes, she shouted, “I can’t live like this!” She stalked away. “I don’t care if I starve, I’m ordering a real water heater tomorrow.”
    Her kick caused her carefully laid coal to shift, and Duncan quickly fanned the dying embers. When the kindling ignited with a whoosh, he thumped the tank and caught her attention.
    Beth bent and examined the scarlet glow. She then straightened and looked about. Brushing way her tears, she tipped her chin and twitched her nose like a fox on the hunt. When she muttered, “Thank you. That was very nice of you,” his knees buckled.
    ~#~
     
    Waiting for her bathwater to heat, Beth curled in one of the deep falcon chairs and opened her greatest find of the day, the third volume of the Blackstone Diaries.
    The original diary, bound in wood and written on the frailest parchment she’d ever seen, had been written in Latin and in her ghost’s own hand. Had she been able to translate the fading broad script, she still would have hesitated, fearing she’d destroy the volume by simply turning the pages.
    The second volume, a translation written in 1640, was nearly as delicate. Scanning the first page she’d cursed. Only someone comfortable with Shakespeare could have readily understood it.
    She smiled opening the third volume. In legible English she read, The Diary of Duncan Angus MacDougall, translation by Miles Bolton MacDougall, 1860.
    She carefully opened this volume to the twelfth page. So far she’d learned Duncan, a knight who’d earned his spurs at the age of fourteen, had returned to Drasmoor after fighting in France to find his father and brothers dead along with half the clan, and himself now laird. He was awaiting the birth of his first child, angry about a neighboring clan’s recent raid on his kine—-which she took to mean cattle—and worried about another outbreak of the Black Death recently reported in Edinburgh.
    The mason guides, cajoles, and shouts. All, hands bleeding, labor day and night, yet I fear ‘tis not fast enough. Surely, if