The Immortal Highlander

Ten minutes later, Gabby pulled into the alley behind her house. Exhaling gustily, she slung her purse over her shoulder, grabbed her briefcase, her gym bag, a teetering stack of files that hadn’t fit in the briefcase because she needed a lot of work to get her through the weekend sane, then balanced her coffee on top of it all, wedging the plastic lid firmly beneath the underside of her chin to hold it all steady.

She made it all the way into the living room before losing control of the unwieldy load.

Files slipped one way, the briefcase the other, then the coffee went, tumbling from beneath her chin, bounced off an end table, knocked over a pile of books and magazines, and drenched it all with dark, iced liquid.

Cursing under her breath, she began snatching coffee-stained files from the floor.

And that was when she saw it.

Since the day she’d gotten home from Scotland, she’d been avoiding the turret library, refusing to go in, in no frame of mind to be able to even so much as glimpse the O’Callaghan Books of the Fae.

Not even noticing that all this time the Book of the Sin Siriche Du had been lying on the end table near the sofa.

It was now facedown in a puddle of coffee.

It was going to be ruined!

She pounced on it, snatched it from the thick, muddy spill of icy liquid, and frantically dabbed it off on the sofa, heedless of the mess she was making of the flowered upholstery.

Thumbed it open to assess the damage.

And as Fate—which Gabby was seriously beginning to believe was wont to masquerade as seemingly innocuous cups of coffee—would have it, the slender black tome parted to a page that hadn’t been there before.

His elegant, arrogant, slanted cursive. She read it once, twice, a third time, flinching as the words slammed into her.

I will never stay with another human woman and watch her die. Never.

And there it was.

Her answer had been there all along.

No, he didn’t die. He’d chosen not to come back.

An anguished cry built in her throat and she tried desperately to swallow it, but she’d been swallowing her feelings too long. Day after day she’d been denying the pain in her heart, managing to stay in a state of limbo by arguing the case to herself that so long as she accepted no outcome, there was nothing to grieve.

She could no longer pretend. He was gone. And he wasn’t coming back.

Tears stung her eyes, blinding her. Clutching the book to her chest, Gabby sank to the floor, sobbing.

Because she was a Sidhe-seer, because he knew the féth fiada didn’t work on her, and because he had an irresistible urge to spy on her unseen for a few moments before completing that for which he’d come, Adam popped into Gabrielle’s kitchen a dimensional sliver beyond her perception, the tiny bottle of elixir cupped loosely in his hand.

He inhaled. Ah, he’d missed this, the scent of her! A faint, utterly feminine scent of vanilla and heather and sunshine.

The house was dimly lit, and he moved through it, seeking her. She was here, he could feel her.

Ahead of him in the living room, a light was on.

He stepped into the doorway and there she was. Sitting cross-legged on the floor with her back to him. Beautiful as ever. Dressed in a trim-fitting, short-skirted black suit (by Danu, he’d missed those sweet legs!—especially wrapped around his waist), with sexy little heels on her feet. Jacket nipped in at the waist, accenting her hips and full breasts.

But she looked different. Frowning, he stepped into the room, circling to her side. Thinner—he didn’t like that at all. He liked his woman built like a woman. Liked the way she’d been before, soft and nicely rounded. Christ, how much time had passed? he wondered. He always lost track of it when he was immortal; time passed at a slower pace in the Fae realm than it did in the human one. Her hair was styled differently, too, but that, he decided, eyeing her, looked sexy as hell, though he couldn’t quite get a good look at it with her head down like that and all of it spilling around her face.

A soft, wet sniffling sound came from behind the silky curtain of hair.

He cocked his head, moving to stand before her, looking down.

Was she crying?

Just then she raised her head, and Adam sucked in a breath at his first glimpse of her face. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks tear-stained, and she looked so fragile and heartbroken that it pierced him to his very core.

Who had hurt his woman? What bastard had made her cry? He’d kill the SOB!

Then he realized that she was holding a book in her lap.

His book.

Had he made her cry?

As he watched, more tears spilled down her cheeks, dropping onto the soft black leather of the tome. She traced her fingers lightly over the cover. “Damn you, Adam Black,” she whispered.