Kiss of the Highlander

“Truly eternally?” Besseta pressed. “He will ne’er awaken?”

“I told you, old woman,” Rushka said impatiently, “the man will slumber, frozen, utterly untouched by time, ne’er to awaken, unless both human blood and sunshine commingle upon the spell etched upon his chest.”

“Blood and sunshine would wake him? That must never happen!” Besseta exclaimed, panicking all over again.

“It won’t. You have my word. Not where we plan to hide his body. Sunlight will ne’er reach him in the underground caverns near Loch Ness. None will e’er find him. None know of the place but us.”

“You must hide him very deep,” Besseta pressed. “Seal him in. He must never be found!”

“I said you have my word,” Rushka said sharply.

When the gypsies, wagon in tow, disappeared into the forest, Besseta sank to her knees in the clearing, and murmured a prayer of thanks to whatever deity might be listening.

Any idle feelings of guilt were far outweighed by relief, and she consoled herself with the thought that she hadn’t really hurt him.

He was, as she had promised Nevin, unharmed.

Essentially.

HIGHLANDS OF SCOTLAND

September 19, Present Day

1

Gwen Cassidy needed a man.

Desperately.

Failing that, she’d settle for a cigarette. God, I hate my life, she thought. I don’t even know who I am anymore.

Glancing around the crowded interior of the tour bus, Gwen took a deep breath and rubbed the nicotine patch under her arm. After this fiasco, she deserved a cigarette, didn’t she? Except, even if she managed to escape the horrid bus and find a pack, she was afraid she might expire from nicotine overdose if she smoked one. The patch made her feel shaky and ill.

Perhaps before quitting she should have waited until she’d found her cherry picker, she mused. It wasn’t as if she was drawing them like flies to honey in her current mood. Her virginity was hardly presented in its best light when she kept snarling at every man she met.

She leaned back against the cracked seat, wincing when the bus hit a pothole and caused the wiry coils of the seat to dig into her shoulder blade. Even the smooth, mysterious, slate-gray surface of Loch Ness beyond the rattling window that wouldn’t stay closed when it rained—and wouldn’t stay open otherwise—failed to intrigue her.

“Gwen, are you feeling all right?” Bert Hardy asked kindly from across the aisle.

Gwen peered at Bert through her Jennifer Aniston fringed bangs, expensively beveled to attract her own Brad Pitt. Right now, they simply tickled her nose and annoyed her. Bert had proudly informed her, when they’d begun the tour a week ago, that he was seventy-three and sex had never been better (this said while patting the hand of his newlywed, plump, and blushing bride, Beatrice). Gwen had smiled politely and congratulated them and, since that mild show of interest, had become the doting couple’s favorite “young American lassie.”

“I’m fine, Bert,” she assured him, wondering where he’d found the lemon polyester shirt and the golf-turf-green trousers that clashed painfully with his white leather dress shoes and tartan socks. Completing the rainbow ensemble, a red wool cardigan was neatly buttoned about his paunch.

“You don’t look so well, there, dearie,” Beatrice fretted, adjusting a wide-brimmed straw hat atop her soft silvery-blue curls. “A little green about the gills.”

“It’s just the bumpy ride, Beatrice.”

“Well, we’re nearly to the village, and you must have a bite to eat with us before we go sightseeing,” Bert said firmly. “We can go see that house, you know, the one where that sorcerer Aleister Crowley used to live. They say it’s haunted,” he confided, wiggling bushy white brows.

Gwen nodded apathetically. She knew it was futile to protest, because although she suspected Beatrice might have taken pity on her, Bert was determined to ensure that she had “fun.” It had taken her only a few days to figure out that she should never have embarked upon this ridiculous quest.

But back home in Sante Fe, New Mexico, as she’d peered out the window of her cubicle at the Allstate Insurance Company, arguing with yet another injured insured who’d managed to amass an astounding $9,827 worth of chiropractic bills from an accident that had caused a mere $127 in damage to his rear bumper, the idea of being in Scotland—or anywhere else, for that matter—had been irresistible.

So she’d let a travel agent convince her that a fourteen-day tour through the romantic Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland was just what she needed, at the bargain price of $999. The price was acceptable; the mere thought of doing something so impulsive was terrifying, and precisely what she needed to shake up her life.