Beyond the Highland Mist (48 page)

the highlander’s touch

Lisa awoke abruptly, uncertain of where she was or what had awakened her. Then she heard men’s voices in the hallway outside the office.

Galvanized into action, Lisa leaped to her feet and shot a panicked glance at her watch. It was 5:20
A.M.
—she would lose her job! Instinctively she dropped to the floor and took a nasty blow to her temple on the corner of the desk in the process. Wincing, she crawled under the desk as she heard a key in the lock, followed by Steinmann’s voice: “It’s impossible to get decent help. Worthless maid didn’t even lock up. All she had to do was press the button. Even a child could do it.”

Lisa curled into a silent ball as the men entered the office.

“Here it is.” Steinmann’s spotlessly buffed shoes stopped inches from her knees.

“What amazing detail. It’s beautiful.” The second voice was hushed.

“Isn’t it?” Steinmann agreed.

“Wait a minute, Steinmann. Where did you say this chest was found?”

“Beneath a crush of rock near a riverbank in Scotland.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. How did it remain untouched by the elements? Ebony is obdurate wood, but it isn’t impervious to decay. This chest is in mint condition. Has it been dated yet?”

“No, but my source in Edinburgh swore by it. Can you open it, Taylor?” Steinmann said.

There was a rustle of noise. A softly murmured “Let’s see … How do you work, you lovely little mystery?”

Lisa battled an urge to pop out from under the desk, curiosity nearly overriding her common sense and instinct for self-preservation.

There was a long pause. “Well? What is it?” Steinmann asked.

“I have no idea,” Taylor said slowly. “I’ve neither translated tales of it nor seen sketches in my research. It doesn’t look quite medieval, does it? It almost looks … why … futuristic,” he said uneasily. “Frankly, I’m baffled.”

“Perhaps you aren’t as much of an expert as you would have me believe, Taylor.”

“No one knows more about the Gaels and Picts than I do,” he replied stiffly. “But some artifacts simply aren’t mentioned in any records. I assure you, I will find the answers.”

“And you’ll have it examined?” Steinmann said.

“I’ll take it with me now—”

“No. I’ll call you when we’re ready to release it.”

There was a pause, then: “You plan to invite someone else to examine it, don’t you?” Taylor said. “You question my ability.”

“I simply need to get it cataloged, photographed, and logged into our files.”

“And logged into someone else’s collection?” Taylor said tightly.

“Put it back, Taylor.” Steinmann closed his fingers around Taylor’s wrist, lowering the flask back to the cloth. He slipped the tongs from Taylor’s hand, closed the chest, and placed the tongs beside it.

“Fine,” Taylor snapped. “But when you discover no one else knows what it is, you’ll be calling me. You can’t move an artifact that can’t be identified. I’m the only one who can track this thing down, and you know it.”

Steinmann laughed. “I’ll see you out.”

“I can find my own way.”

“But I’ll rest easier knowing I’ve escorted you,” Steinmann said softly. “It wouldn’t do to leave such a passionate antiquity worshiper as yourself wandering the museum on his own.”

The shoes retreated with muffled steps across the carpet. The click of a key in the lock jarred Lisa into action.
Damn and double-damn!
Normally when she left, she depressed the button latch on the door—no lowly maid was entrusted with keys. Steinmann had bypassed the button latch and actually used a key to lock the dead bolt. She jerked upright and banged her head against the underside of the desk. “Ow!” she exclaimed softly. As she clutched the edge and drew herself upright, she paused to look at the chest.

Fascinated, she touched the cool wood. Beautifully engraved, the black wood gleamed in the low light. Bold letters were seared into the top in angry, slanted strokes. What did the chest contain that had perplexed two sophisticated purveyors of antiquities? Despite the fact that she was locked in Steinmann’s office and had no doubt that he would return in moments, she was consumed by curiosity.
Futuristic?
Gingerly, she ran her fingers over the chest, seeking the square pressure latch they’d mentioned, then paused. The strange letters on the lid seemed almost to … pulse. A shiver of foreboding raced up her spine.

Silly goose—open it! It can’t hurt you.
They
touched it.

Resolved, she isolated the square and depressed it with her thumb. The lid swung upward with the faint popping sound she’d heard earlier. A flask lay inside, surrounded by dusty tatters of ancient fabric. The flask was fashioned of a silver metal and seemed to shimmer, as if the contents were energized. She cast a nervous glance at the door. She knew she had to get out of the office before Steinmann returned, yet she felt strangely transfixed by the flask. Her eyes drifted from door to flask and back again, but the flask beckoned. It said,
Touch me
, in the same tone all the artifacts in the museum spoke to Lisa.
Touch me while no guards are about, and I will tell you of my history and my legends. I am knowledge….

Lisa’s fingertips curled around the flask.

The world shifted on its axis beneath her feet. She stumbled, and suddenly she …

Couldn’t …

Stop …

Falling …

kiss of the highlander

She’d fallen on a body. One that, considering she hadn’t disturbed it, must be dead.
Or
, she worried,
perhaps I killed it when I fell.

When she managed to stop screaming, she found that she’d pushed herself up and was straddling it, her palms braced on its chest. Not its chest, she realized, but
his
chest. The motionless figure beneath her was undeniably male.

Sinfully
male.

She snatched her hands away and sucked in a shocked breath.

However he’d managed to get here, if he was dead, his demise had been quite recent. He was in perfect condition and—her hands crept back to his chest—warm. He had the
sculpted physique of a professional football player, with wide shoulders, pumped biceps and pecs, and washboard abs. His hips beneath her were lean and powerful. Strange symbols were tattooed across his bare chest.

She took slow, deep breaths to ease the sudden tightness in her chest. Leaning cautiously forward, she peered at a face that was savagely beautiful. His was the type of dominant male virility women dreamed about in dark, erotic fantasies but knew didn’t
really
exist. Black lashes swept his golden skin, beneath arched brows and a silky fall of long, black hair. His jaw was dusted with a blue-black shadow beard; his lips were pink and firm and sensually full. She brushed her finger against them, then felt mildly perverse, so she pretended she was just checking to see if he was alive and shook him, but he didn’t respond. Cupping his nose with her hand, she was relieved to feel a soft puff of breath.
He isn’t dead, thank God.
It made her feel better about finding him so attractive. Palm flush to his chest, she was further reassured by his strong heartbeat. Although it wasn’t beating very often, at least it was. He must be deeply unconscious, perhaps in a coma, she decided. Whichever it was, he couldn’t help her.

Her gaze darted back up to the hole. Even if she managed to wake him and then stood on his shoulders, she still wouldn’t be near the lip of the hole. Sunshine streamed over her face, mocking her with a freedom that was so near, yet so impossibly far, and she shivered again. “Just what am I supposed to do now?” she muttered.

Despite the fact that he was unconscious and of no use, her gaze swept back down. He exuded such vitality that his condition baffled her. She couldn’t decide if she was upset that he was unconscious, or relieved. With his looks he was surely a womanizer, just the kind of man she steered away from by instinct. Having grown up surrounded by scientists,
she had no experience with men of his ilk. On the rare occasions she’d glimpsed a man like him sauntering out of Gold’s Gym, she’d gawked surreptitiously, grateful that she was safely in her car. So much testosterone made her nervous. It couldn’t possibly be healthy.

Cherry picker extraordinaire.
The thought caught her off guard. Mortified, she berated herself, because he was injured and there she was, sitting on him, thinking lascivious thoughts. She pondered the possibility that she’d developed some kind of hormonal imbalance, perhaps a surfeit of perky little eggs.

She eyed the designs on the man’s chest more closely, wondering if one of them concealed a wound. The strange symbols, unlike any tattoos she’d ever seen, were smeared with blood from the abrasions on her palms.

Gwen leaned back a few inches so a ray of sunshine spilled across his chest. As she studied him, a curious thing happened: the brightly colored designs blurred before her eyes, growing indistinct, as if they were fading, leaving only streaks of her blood to mar his muscled chest. But that wasn’t possible….

Gwen blinked as, undeniably, several symbols disappeared entirely. In a matter of moments all of them were gone, vanished as if they’d never existed.

Perplexed, she glanced up at his face and sucked in an astonished breath.

His eyes were open and he was watching her. He had remarkable eyes that glittered like shards of silver and ice, sleepy eyes that banked a touch of amusement and unmistakable masculine interest. He stretched his body beneath hers with the self-indulgent grace of a cat prolonging the pleasure of awakening, and she suspected that although he was rousing physically, his mental acuity was not fully engaged. His pupils were large and dark, as if he’d recently had his eyes dilated for an exam or taken some drug.

Oh, God, he’s conscious and I’m straddling him!
She could imagine what he was thinking and could hardly blame him for it. She was as intimately positioned as a woman astride her lover, knees on either side of his hips, her palms flat against his rock-hard stomach.

She tensed and tried to scramble off him, but his hands clamped around her thighs and pinned her there. He didn’t speak, merely secured and regarded her, his eyes dropping to linger appreciatively on her breasts. When he slid his hands up her bare thighs, she seriously regretted having put on her short-shorts this morning. A slip of a lilac thong was all that was beneath them, and his fingers were toying with the hem of her shorts, perilously close to slipping inside….

the dark highlander

Some days Dageus felt as ancient as the evil within him.

As he hailed a cab to take him to The Cloisters to pick up a copy of one of the last tomes in New York that he needed to check, he didn’t notice the fascinated glances women walking down the sidewalk turned his way. Didn’t realize that, even in a metropolis that teemed with diversity, he stood out. It was nothing he said or did; to all appearances he was but another wealthy, sinfully gorgeous man. It was simply the essence of the man. The way he moved. His every gesture exuded power, something dark and … forbidden. He was sexual in a way that made women think of deeply repressed fantasies therapists and feminists alike would cringe to hear tell of.

But he realized none of that. His thoughts were far away,
still mulling over the nonsense penned in the Book of Leinster.

Och, what he wouldn’t give for his da’s library.

In lieu of it, he’d been systematically obtaining what manuscripts still existed, exhausting his present possibilities before pursuing riskier ones. Risky, like setting foot on the isles of his ancestors again, a thing fast seeming inevitable.

Thinking of risk, he made a mental note to return some of the volumes he’d “borrowed” from private collections when bribes had failed. It wouldn’t do to have them lying about too long.

He glanced up at the clock above the bank. Twelve forty-five. The cocurator of The Cloisters had assured him he would have the text delivered first thing that morn, but it hadn’t arrived and Dageus was weary of waiting.

He needed information,
accurate
information about the Keltar’s ancient benefactors, the Tuatha Dé Danaan, those “gods and not gods,” as the Book of the Dun Cow called them. They were the ones who had originally imprisoned the dark Druids in the in-between, hence it followed that there was a way to reimprison them.

It was imperative he find that way.

As he eased into the cab—a torturous fit for a man of his height and breadth—his attention was caught by a lass who was stepping from a car at the curb in front of them.

She was different, and it was that difference that drew his eye. She had none of the city’s polish and was all the lovelier for it. Refreshingly tousled, delightfully free of the artifice with which modern women enhanced their faces, she was a vision.

“Wait,” he growled at the driver, watching her hungrily.

His every sense heightened painfully. His hands fisted as desire, never sated, flooded him.

Somewhere in her ancestry the lass had Scots blood. It
was there in the curly waves of copper-and-blond hair that tumbled about a delicate face with a surprisingly strong jaw. It was there in the peaches-and-cream complexion and the huge aquamarine eyes—eyes that still regarded the world with wonder, he noticed with a faintly mocking smile. It was there in a fire that simmered just beneath the surface of her flawless skin. Wee, lusciously plump where it counted, with a trim waist and shapely legs hugged by a snug skirt, the lass was an exiled Highlander’s dream.

He wet his lips and stared, making a noise deep in his throat that was more animal than human.

When she leaned back in through the open window of the car to say something to the driver, the back of her skirt rode up a few inches. He inhaled sharply, envisioning himself behind her. His entire body went tight with lust.

Christ, she was lovely. Lush curves that could make a dead man stir.

She leaned forward a smidgen, showing more of that sweet curve of the back of her thigh.

His mouth went ferociously dry.

No’ for me
, he warned himself, gritting his teeth and shifting to lessen the pressure on his suddenly painfully hard cock. He took only experienced lasses to his bed. Lasses far older in both mind and body. Not reeking, as she did, of innocence. Of bright dreams and a bonny future.

Sleek and worldly, with jaded palates and cynical hearts—they were the ones a man could tumble and leave with a bauble in the morn, no worse for the wear.

She
was the kind a man kept.

“Go,” he murmured to the driver, forcing his gaze away.