A Christmas Spirit by Cindy Miles Page B

.
    Paige wondered if it were true.
    Inside the small stone-walled store, with dark wooden rafters overhead, a fire burned in a whitewashed hearth, making the intimate store warm and toasty. The scent of freshly brewed coffee and pastries filled the air, and Paige walked to the counter where three others stood in line. As she waited, she glanced around, noticing the other patrons standing at various bookshelves, browsing the selections.
    Then, she saw him. Almost as if she were watching an old projector film, she moved toward a man standing at a bookshelf, book in hand. Paige couldn’t take her eyes off him, and unable to stop herself, she moved closer. Wearing a gray woolen coat that hung to just below his knees, he had long, dark hair pulled back at the nape, with a small braid on either temple. Big, muscular, with a strong jaw and dark brows, he was an impossibly gorgeous man. His head was down, reading the pages of a book he’d just picked up.
    From her angle, the man looked so much like Gabriel, he could have easily been his twin.
    “Gabriel?” She thought she’d said it silently, but apparently not. And she didn’t realize how close she’d gotten until he looked up at her, and she got a good look at his face, full-on.
    Her eyes widened, and she covered her mouth.
    “Lass?” the man said, setting the book down and grabbing her arm gently. “Are you ill? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”
    Mortified, Paige’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry. You look just like someone I knew.” She pulled out of his grasp and turned, heading out of the store.
    Moments later, as she headed down the street, her arm was once again grasped. Paige turned, looked up, and stared at Gabriel’s look-alike. His dark brows were drawn over the most brilliant, intense pair of silvery eyes she’d ever seen. Different in color than Gabriel’s, yet eerily the same.
    “What name did you call me?” he said quietly. His unique eyes searched hers, and he didn’t loosen his grip on her elbow.
    Paige stared up at him, confused. “Gabriel. Look, I’m sorry. I was mistaken.”
    The man released her arm, but didn’t walk away. “Nay, lass,” he said, his voice deep, accent heavy, just like Gabriel’s. “My name is Ethan Munro. How do you know this other lad, Gabriel?”
    Paige blinked. Could it be possible that Ethan was a descendant of Gabriel? They had to be—they looked like twin brothers. Although Gabriel looked older. Not in years, but in centuries . . .
    “We look just alike, aye?” he said.
    He was grinning .
    Paige stared up at the man’s intense gray eyes. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
    The man’s smile stretched across his painfully handsome face. “Try me.” He inclined his head toward the path by the river.
    With a sigh, Paige agreed and walked with Ethan Munro down the path by the River Ness. She barely had to say anything at all. Just agree. She left out the part about how she’d somehow fallen in love with a spirit, and in only a few days. But she told him everything else, right down to her broken nose.
    He seemed to know an awful lot about her ghost.
    And then he told her the most fascinating tale she’d ever heard, save the very one she’d just experienced. And had she not experienced it with Gabriel, she’d never have believed a word that Ethan had said.
    Apparently, he and his kinsmen had been enchanted for more than seven hundred years before Ethan’s wife, American mystery novelist Amelia Landry, had leased their haunted tower house for the summer. She’d helped them solve an old mystery—the very one that had enchanted them in the first place. They had been made to live as a spirit, with no substance, for most of the day, and then gain substance at twilight. Weird .
    The man she was staring at, probably gaping at, was nearly as old as Gabriel, he said. “So, you’re not only Gabriel’s descendant, but you’re from the fourteenth century?” She shook her head and