Kiss of the Highlander

Oh, God, he meant to take her to his castle. He really was over the top. “I’m not going to those stones with you,” she said as calmly as she could under the circumstances. “Let me take you to a doctor. Trust me.”

“Trust me,” he said, as he pulled her to her feet beside him. “I need you, Gwen. I need your help.”

“And I’m trying to give it to you—”

“But you doona understand.”

“I know you’re sick!”

He shook his dark head, and in the late-afternoon light his silver eyes were clear, level, and intelligent. No crazed glimmer lurked there, only concern and determination. “Nay. I am well and in no way touched as you are thinking. You will simply have to see for yourself.”

“I’m not coming with you,” she said firmly. “I have other things to do.”

“You must forgo them. The Keltar takes precedence, and in time you will understand. Now, I ask you a last time, do you come with me of your own free will?”

“Not a chance in hell, barbarian.”

When he wrapped his hand about her wrist, she realized that while they were arguing he’d removed a chain of sorts from somewhere on his body. When he closed the metal links about her wrist and bound her to him, she opened her mouth to scream, but he clamped a powerful hand over her mouth.

“Then you come with me of my will alone. So be it.”

5

Nearly five hundred years, Drustan brooded. How could that be? He felt as if only yestreen he’d gone riding in the heather-filled Highland meadows of his home. His mind reeled from shock, and try though he might to deny it, he knew it was true. He knew it with a gnostic bone-deep knowing that was unquestionable. Her time felt different, the natural rhythm of the elements was frenetic, fractured. Her world was not a healthy one.

Centuries had passed, and he had no idea how it had happened. Probing his memory had yielded no additional facts. Five centuries of slumber seemed to have muted his memory, dimmed the events that had occurred just prior to his abduction. All he knew was that he’d been lured into some sort of ambush in which a number of people had participated. There had been armed men. There had been chanting and fragrant smoke, which reeked of witchcraft or Druidry. He’d obviously been drugged, but then what? Enchanted by a sleep spell? And if he’d been spelled, by whom? Still more important, why? The why of it would tell him if his entire clan had been targeted.

An icy finger of dread brushed his spine as he considered the possibility that they’d been attacked for the lore they protected.

Had someone finally believed the rumors and come seeking proof?

The Keltar males were Druids, as their ancestors had been for millennia. But what few knew was that they were not simple Druids, struggling with mostly incomplete lore since the loss of so much of it in the fateful war millennia ago. The Keltars possessed all the lore and were the sole guardians of the standing stones.

If after he’d been abducted, his father, Silvan, had been killed by his abductors, the sacred lore would be lost forever, and the knowledge they protected—to be used only when the world had dire need—vanquished utterly.

He glanced at Gwen. If she hadn’t awakened him, he might well have slumbered for eternity! He murmured a silent prayer of thanks.

Pondering his situation, he realized that for now the how and why of his abduction were irrelevant. He would find no answers in her time. What mattered was action: He’d been blessed enough to have been awakened and had both the chance and the power to correct things. Yet to do so, he must be at Ban Drochaid by midnight on Mabon.

He glanced at her again, but she refused to look at him. Dusk had long since fallen, and they’d made good time, putting many miles between them and the horrifying, noisy village. In the moonlight her smooth skin shimmered with the warm richness of pearl. He indulged himself, envisioning her nude, which wasn’t hard to do when she wore so little. She was all woman and brought out the most primitive man in him, a fierce need to possess and mate. Her nipples were clearly visible beneath her thin shirt, and he ached to suckle them in his mouth. She was a fiery wee lass with a spine of steel and curves that would lure even his devout priest Nevin’s gaze. He’d gotten hard the moment he’d opened his eyes and looked at her and had been uncomfortably erect since. One flirtatious glance from her would return him to a painful state, but he didn’t worry overmuch that she might cast him such a look. She hadn’t spoken to him in hours, not since he’d refused for the hundredth time to release her. Not since he’d told her he would toss her over his shoulder and carry her if he had to.