The Immortal Highlander

Undoubtedly, there was a reason she’d come to this building this evening.

And undoubtedly, there was something in that building that would lead him to her.

The luscious little Irish was going to be his savior.

She would help him find Circenn and communicate his plight. Circenn would sift dimensions and return him to the Fae Isle of Morar where the queen held her court. And Adam would persuade her that enough was enough already.

He knew Aoibheal wouldn’t be able to look him in the eyes and deny him. He merely had to get to her, see her, touch her, remind her how much she favored him and why.

Ah, yes, now that he’d found someone who could see him, he’d be his glorious immortal self again in no time at all.

In the meantime, pending Circenn’s return, he now had much with which to entertain himself. He was no longer in quite the same rush to be made immortal again. Not just yet. Not now that he suddenly had the opportunity to experience sex in human form. Fae glamour wasn’t nearly as sensitive as the body he currently inhabited, and—sensual to the core—he’d been doubly pissed off at Aoibheal for making him unable to explore its erotic capabilities. She could be such a bitch sometimes.

If a simple hard-on in human form could reduce him to a primitive state, what would burying himself inside a woman do? What would it feel like to come inside her?

There was no doubt in his mind that he would soon find out.

Never had the mortal woman lived and breathed who could say no to a bit of fairy tail.

Gabby didn’t take her foot from the accelerator until she’d squealed into the shadowy alley behind her house at 735 Monroe Street. Then she slammed on the brakes so hard she nearly gave herself whiplash.

She’d run every red light between Cincinnati and Newport, half-hoping a cop would pull her over (despite the warrant out for her arrest for unpaid parking tickets, as if she could afford to pay them once they’d doubled, with amnesty-day still four months away, and really, if the city would put sufficient parking downtown, a person wouldn’t be forced to invent parking spaces). Throw her in jail. Lock her away where maybe the thing wouldn’t be able to find her.

Most days she loved living in Kentucky, in her quaint historic neighborhood of old Victorians and Italianates, wrought-iron fences, climbing bougainvillaea and magnolia trees, a mere mile across the river from Ohio. It was convenient to work, to school, to the bars, to everything that mattered. But tonight it was much too close for comfort. Then again, Siberia would have felt too close for comfort at the moment.

Parking as close to her house as possible, she snatched up her purse, leapt from the car, raced up the steps, unlocked the back door with shaking hands, slammed it shut behind her, locked it, slid the dead bolt, then collapsed in a limp little heap on the floor.

She stared unseeingly around the dark kitchen, ears straining, listening intently for any hint that it had somehow managed to follow her. How she wished she had a garage! Her car was just sitting out there like a big dilapidated powder-blue X: Here hides Gabby O’Callaghan. A sitting duck. Quack, quack.

“Oh, God, what have I done?” she whispered, horrified.

Twenty-four years of hiding, of maintaining a flawless façade, undone in a single night.

Gram would be so disappointed.

She was so disappointed. She’d stood there gaping—no, ogling the thing. And she’d justified it by feeding herself the flimsy fib that she was only staring so she could accurately identify it in the O’Callaghan Books of the Fae, or describe it if it wasn’t already in there.

As if.

Do you find them attractive? Moira O’Callaghan had asked a fourteen-year-old Gabrielle over orange-ginger tea in the kitchen late one night, nearly ten years ago.

Gabby had blushed furiously, not wanting to betray the depth of her hopeless infatuation. While her high school friends dreamed of actors and rock stars and seniors with cars, she dreamed of a fairy prince that would come swooping into her life and carry her off to some exotic, beautiful land. One that would somehow transcend the innate cold-bloodedness of its kind, all for love of her.

Do you? Gram pressed sternly.

Ashamed, Gabby had nodded.

That’s what makes them so dangerous, Gabrielle. The Fae are no better than the Hunters they send after us. They are inhumanly seductive. “Inhuman” is the word you must remember. No souls. No hearts. Do not romanticize them.

She’d been guilty of it then. She’d not thought herself guilty of it still. With the passing of her teen years, she thought she’d laid many things to rest, including her foolish infatuation with a fantasy fairy prince.