Spell of the Highlander (20 page)

For a man from the ninth century, he was a quick study. Upon entering the grocery store, he’d eyed a cart consideringly, glanced around at other customers, snatched it, and begun pushing up and down aisles, examining items, selecting various cans and tins, tossing them in.

Instant Suisse Mocha—woohooo! Jessi took two tins of it from the shelf as she sped by, caught up with him, and dumped them in the cart. She’d not missed the gas stove and pots he’d heisted, and was greatly looking forward to a cup of chocolaty coffee once they got back to their “camp.”

“Aren’t you the least little bit curious about him?” she pressed.

He grunted. “Now is not the time for new beginnings, lass.” He cast the words over his shoulder at her with a scowl. “I’ll make none.”

Though she tried to hide it, a flicker of hurt flashed across her face. No new
beginnings. She knew that.

And it shouldn’t bother her. It wasn’t as if
they were making a new beginning or anything like that.

They were just stuck with each other for a while.

He wanted sex from her, nothing more. And this morning, he’d not even wanted sex. She was merely his means of remaining free from Lucan until he could have his vengeance. And he was merely her means of staying alive.

He couldn’t have made his feelings any plainer, really. Since the airport, all she’d gotten in the way of a kiss had been a stupid peck on the forehead that a chicken could have done better.

But like an idiot, she’d begun reading more into things than was actually there. They were forced to share close quarters, there was danger, and it was just making everything feel more intense than it was. On top of it, the man was devastatingly sexy, powerful, smart, and magic, to boot. Who could blame a girl?

No new beginnings.

Damn it, it shouldn’t bother her!

But it did. She tried to turn away, but his hand flashed out and caught her by the chin.

“Let me go,” she snapped.

“Nay.” His grip was implacable on her jaw.

There was little point in fighting for control of her face; he could have hoisted her into the air with that one big hand on her jaw, if he’d wished.

He searched her gaze a long silent moment. “You truly doona ken it, do you? Excepting with you, Jessica. You, lass, are the exception to everything,” he said softly.

As if he’d not just knocked the breath out of her with those words and left her feeling weak-kneed, he released her chin, turned away, and began pushing the cart again.

Jessi stood in the aisle, gaping after him. Then she broke into a sprint and caught him again. Closing a hand on his forearm, she tugged him to a stop. “You mean, you’re not just stuck with me? You like me?” She wanted to kick herself the moment she blurted the stupid question.
Puh-thetic, Jessi,
she winced inwardly.
That was worse than the “I carried a watermelon” line from
Dirty Dancing.

His gaze was dark with some unfathomable emotion as he stared down at her. She stared, trying to determine what it was. It was an emotion she’d seen several times before, and at the oddest moments.

It was regret, she realized abruptly.

A subtle yet bottomless sorrow in those beautiful, darkly lashed eyes.

But what was he regretting, and why at this moment, as opposed to any other? It made no sense to her!

Suddenly he smiled, and the sadness was vanquished by whisky heat. “Aye, Jessica, I like you. And I’m not just stuck with you. You fit me here, woman.” He thumped his chest with his fist.

Then he shook her hand from his forearm and pushed off with the cart again. Jessi watched him move down the aisle, all sleek animal muscle and dark grace.

Wow. He wasn’t a man of many words, but when he used them, he certainly used the right ones. You fit me here. You are the exception to everything.

Crimeny.

It was how she’d always thought a relationship should be. People should fit each other: some days like sexy, strappy high-heeled shoes, other days like comfortable loafers—but always a good fit. And if you cared about someone, they should be the exception to everything; the number-one priority, the one who came before all others.

He was halfway down the aisle from her now, plucking a can from the shelf—her primal hunter/gatherer procuring food by modern means, she thought, with a soft snort of amusement. As she watched, he examined the can intently, read the ingredients, then returned it to the shelf and chose another, repeating his thorough study of it.

The contrast between his rough, tough-guy appearance and the domestic act he was performing did funny things to her head.

She had a sudden, breathtaking vision of a dark-haired little boy sitting in the seat of the cart, laughing up at Cian, grabbing at his swinging braids with chubby little fists, while his daddy inspected the ingredients on a jar of baby food. Her mind’s-eye picture of sexy, strong man with beautiful, helpless child made something soft and warm blossom behind her chest.

Just then, two women sashayed around the corner, toting baskets on their arms. They were about her age, model-slim and very pretty.

When they saw Cian, their eyes widened and they did double takes.

Her soft and warm feeling popped with the abruptness of a balloon bursting.

As they made their way down the aisle toward her—the nerve of them!—they turned around three
more times to check out his butt.

His butt. Like it was public property or something.

Her hands fisted. A thundery little storm began to brew.

Unfortunately the women ruined the beginnings of a perfectly good brood by smiling at her and whispering in a sisterly, conspiratorial manner as they passed, “Heads-up, sweetie,
major eye-candy ahead. Check it out.”

As they moved into the next aisle, Jessi blew out a gusty sigh. They’d just
had to be nice.

Crossing her arms, she glared at Cian’s butt. Did it have to be so perfect? Couldn’t he have been a little shorter? Maybe he should cut his hair. No, she amended hastily, she loved his hair. It was sexy and silky, and she really wanted to see it without all those braids in once. Not to mention, feel it sweeping her bare skin.

Something in her tummy did a flip-flop. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling. It was a scary feeling. The dratted green-eyed monster had gotten her again. She felt downright possessive of him. Like he was
hers or something. What was happening to her?

Cian turned just then and glanced back at her. His eyes narrowed. His hot gaze swept her from head to toe. He wet his lower lip, caught the tip of his tongue between his teeth, and flashed her a wicked smile.

His expression could not have more clearly said, The moment I get through doing what must be done, I’m going to be all over you, woman.

She brightened. “Okay,” she said, nodding agreeably. It was looking like it might just turn out to be a banner day in Jessi St. James’s world, after all.

He tossed his dark head back and laughed, his gilded-scotch gaze glittering with lust and unconcealed masculine triumph.

He was still laughing when he disappeared.

19

Banner day, her ass.

No bones about it—she
hated that mirror.

It took Jessi nearly an hour to find her way back to the SUV.

Or rather, back to where the SUV had been in her other life—the one in which her possibilities for survival hadn’t looked quite so grim.

When they’d stormed from Tiedemann’s earlier, Cian had swiftly rearranged the mirror to his satisfaction, so their new “purchases” might not slip and slide in transit and damage it, then he’d turned and loped down the streets of Inverness at such a furious pace that it had been all she could do to keep up with him. She’d hardly glanced left or right, and hadn’t paid any attention to where they were going, nor had she even bothered trying to gather the breath to talk to him, until they’d finally stopped at the grocery store. Ergo, she’d not realized how far he’d taken her, evading his descendant, until she’d attempted to retrace her steps through the unfamiliar Scottish streets.

Then—because she’d been watching for the SUV, not the store—she’d actually sprinted past Tiedemann’s twice before realizing their stolen rental vehicle was no longer there.

“Shit, shit,
shit!”
she cried, staring at the empty space in front of the store.

She glanced farther down the street, thinking perhaps the SUV had inexplicably sprouted feet and moved itself while they’d been gone—stranger things had happened of late. Or maybe she’d just forgotten exactly where she’d parked it on the cobbled avenue.

Nope, not a single big, black, stolen SUV. On either side of the street.

How bad could one person’s luck get?

“Don’t answer that,” she snapped hastily, in a general upward direction. “That was a purely rhetorical question, not a show-me-proof one.” She was beginning to suffer the paranoid suspicion that the Universe was using her as the butt of a series of perverse jokes.

The whole time she’d been winding down street after street, she’d been damming a rising tidal wave of panic, assuring herself that everything was going to be just fine, that this was only a minor setback, that Cian had just been sucked back into the mirror earlier than either of them had expected, and once she got back to the SUV, she’d drive them back to their camp and they’d try again tomorrow, with greater success.

Which wasn’t to say that she hadn’t been pissed when he’d vanished. She had. She’d left her purse inside her backpack in the SUV, figuring she wouldn’t need it because Cian could Voice her whatever she wanted, and her forty-two dollars and seventeen cents certainly wasn’t going to go very far.

Then, when he’d so abruptly disappeared, she’d stood in the grocery with a cart full of lovely snacks, her stomach growling hungrily, and realized that she was going to have to leave all that scrumptious food, because she didn’t have even a few dollars stuffed in a pocket somewhere, and couldn’t buy so much as a measly candy bar to get
her through for a while.

She’d been so hungry that she’d actually considered shoplifting. It had not been a stab of conscience that had prevented her from embarking on a larcenous spree—hunger was a brutally compelling motive—but fear of being caught, because
then what would happen to Cian?

With that worry foremost in her mind, stomach protesting her every retreating step, she’d left the grocery and dashed off to find him.

Only to find this—a great big, empty parking space.

Where was he?

She slumped down onto the curb and perched on the edge of it, propping her elbows on her knees, her chin on her fists.

She couldn’t believe that Lucan could have found them so quickly.

If he had, wouldn’t she be dead? Or at least under attack right now? She glanced hastily, warily around.

No one was staring at her or moving toward her in a menacing manner.

Which left only two other possibilities that she could think of: 1) a thief had stolen their stolen auto, which—in addition to pushing the limits of the absurd—sucked because, for the life of her, she couldn’t see a way she was going to be able to track down a thief by herself, nor could she report a stolen vehicle stolen to the police, because the police
were dread possibility number two; 2) the police had spotted it and impounded it and Jessi St. James was now wanted for Grand Theft Auto (thanks to half a dozen pieces of identification in her purse) in addition to being wanted for theft of the
mirror and probably all the stuff Cian had Voiced from Tiedemann’s, and possibly Murder One (though she was really hoping deletion of the hotel records had gotten her out of that), as well as Just Plain Dead by one evil sorcerer.

She’d never been wanted for so many things in her life.

And not a single one of them any good.

Dageus grimaced as he tugged the Dark Glass from the back of the SUV.

Though he had no desire to make contact with it (mostly because he had
every
desire to make contact with it), he wanted it in the castle proper, the most heavily warded portion of the estate. ’Twould be safest there, and he hoped mayhap those wards would diminish the pull it was exerting on him.

There were no protection spells laid around the vast, detached garage behind the castle, where he’d parked the purloined SUV. ’Twas too new of a building, and one of which he’d not overseen the construction. He intended to properly ward it soon, for he hoped to make much use of it. He was developing quite a liking for modern modes of transportation. They were far easier on a man’s privates than a horse betwixt the thighs.

He was already sorry he’d left his Hummer down in Inverness. The muscle-packed
H1 Alpha
was the first vehicle he’d purchased since he’d been living in the twenty-first century, and ’twas a truly magnificent machine. A man could go virtually anywhere in the rugged Highlands in it. He’d gotten attached to it in the manner a lad did his first fine stallion. He hoped his barbaric ancestor was a responsible driver.

“Arrogant Neanderthal,” Dageus muttered, standing the mirror up on end, at arm’s length, and taking a good look at it.

He inhaled a sharp, fascinated breath.

The legendary Dark Glass. In
his hands.

Astonishing. He traced his fingers lightly over the cool silvery surface, then across the runes chiseled deep into the golden frame.

Not even the thirteen within him, who’d lived side by side with the Tuatha Dé many millennia ago, knew the language with which the frame was adorned.

It was said that the Seelie and Unseelie Hallows had been spoken into existence by the sheer magic of the Tuatha Dé tongue. The sacred relics had been spelled into being by words and song—and not in the tongue of Adam Black and his contemporaries—but in a far more ancient language that had been spoken eons past, long before the Tuatha Dé had come to this world. A language allegedly forgotten by all but the most ancient among them.

A chill was inching up his arms.

’Twas not an entirely unpleasant sensation.

In fact, ’twas strangely invigorating. Made him feel positively powerful. Not good. Not good at all.

Scowling, he turned, hurrying with it from the garage. The moment he stepped from the cool, windowless interior into the brilliant sunshine, he felt better, stronger.

Still, he wasn’t about to dally with the infernal thing in his hands.

Tucking the glass beneath his arm with the silvery side facing him so as not to
blind anyone who might be looking his way, he walked around the castle and began heading across the front lawn.

“YOU BLOODY FUCKING IDIOT!” the mirror roared. “HAVE YOU ANY IDEA WHAT YOU’VE GONE AND DONE?”

Dageus was so startled by the bizarreness of the Dark Glass roaring at him that he did what most men would have done.

He dropped it.

Drustan lay flat on his back, his arm around his wife, breathing hard. ’Twas high noon and he was still in bed. Which wasn’t to say he was a lazy man and hadn’t yet been up that morn. He’d been up. And up. With his lovely wee Gwendolyn in his arms, he was nigh always up.

“God, that was amazing,” his wife said fervently just then, curling closer into his side, one of her small, dainty hands caressing his lightly stubbled jaw.

He had a sudden urge to leap from the bed and proudly pound his chest with his fists. He settled instead for turning his head, kissing her palm, and saying with studied casualness, “Mean you the third or the fourth time, lass?”

She laughed. “
All times. As it has been since our first time, Drustan. You’re always amazing.”

“I love you, woman,” he said fiercely, recalling their first time. ’Twas a night he’d never forget, not a detail of it: not the crimson kitten thong he’d believed a fancy hair
ribbon when he’d glimpsed it in her pack—until she’d slipped her shorts down that night, showing him what it was really meant for. Not the intense way they’d made love right there in God’s great wide-open, beneath a star-drenched sky, in the center of the standing stones of
Ban Drochaid
. Nor the way she’d later stood, so true of heart and trusting, as he’d cast her back in time.

Gwen Cassidy was his soul mate, they were bound in the ancient Druid way, forever and beyond, and every moment of life with her was priceless. She’d enriched his world in so many ways, not the least of which had been the recent gift of two beautiful dark-haired twin daughters who, at scarce five months of age, were already showing rather startling signs of intelligence. And why shouldn’t they, he thought proudly, betwixt his Druid gifts and his wee Gwendolyn’s brilliant physicist’s mind?

On the topic of their babes . . .

“Think you we should—”

“Yes,” she agreed instantly. “I’m missing them too.”

He smiled. Though they’d been wed for little over a year, they knew each other’s mind and heart as well as their own. And although they had the best of care for their daughters with two live-in nannies, they were reluctant to be parted from their bairn for long. Unless they were tooping, of course.
Then they tended to forget the whole world.

When she peeled herself from his side and moved toward the shower, he rose to join her.

But as he passed the tall windows of their bedchamber, a flicker of motion beyond them caught his eye. He paused, glancing out.

His brother was standing out on the lawn, gazing down at the grass.

Drustan’s smile deepened.

They’d been through a time of it when Dageus had turned dark. It had been hellish there for a while, but his brother was once again free and, by Amergin, life was rich and sweet and full! His da Silvan and their next-mother Nell would be delighted to know how well their sons fared in the modern day.

He had all he’d ever wanted: a cherished wife, a burgeoning clan, his brother wed and blissfully happy, and the prospect of a long, simple, good life in his beloved Highlands.

Och, there’d been a bit of a ruckus last month when one of the Tuatha Dé, Adam Black, had appeared, but things had swiftly settled back into an easy cadence, and he was looking forward to a long time of—

He blinked.

Dageus was conversing with a mirror.

Standing in the middle of the front lawn, holding it gingerly by the sides, and speaking heatedly to it.

Drustan rubbed his jaw, perplexed.

Why was his brother talking to a mirror? Was it some strange twenty-first-century way of mulling things over, of—literally—consulting with oneself?

Come to think of it, he mused, where had the mirror come from?

It hadn’t been there moments ago. It was taller than his brother. Wider too. ’Twas hardly as if Dageus might have been concealing it in a pocket or beneath a fold in his kilt, not that he was wearing a kilt. They’d both adopted modern modes of dress and were slowly adapting to new ways.

Drustan leaned against the windowpane. Nay, not only was the looking glass quite awkwardly large, it flashed brilliant gold and silver in the sun. How could he have overlooked it earlier?

Mayhap, he decided, it had been lying on the ground, and Dageus had picked it up. And mayhap he was merely saying something along the lines of “Oh, my, how peculiar, where did you come from?”

Drustan’s silvery eyes narrowed. But why would a mirror be lying about on the front lawn? They had gardeners. Surely one of them would have noticed such a thing and relegated it elsewhere. How had it gotten there? Perchance dropped from the sky?

He was getting a bad feeling about this.

“Are you coming, love?” Gwendolyn called.

He heard the sound of the shower spray change as she stepped beneath it. In his mind’s eye, he could see her; water sluicing down her beautiful body, glistening wetly on her smooth, pale skin. He adored modern plumbing, couldn’t get enough of his wife when she was soapy and slippery and feeling frisky.

Below him, Dageus was now shaking a fist and shouting at the mirror.

Drustan closed his eyes.

After a long moment, he opened them again and cast a longing glance in the direction of the running shower and his gloriously naked, wet wife.

Then a glare out the window.

He exhaled gustily. “I doona think so, love. I’m sorry,” he called, “but ’twould seem Dageus is, for some unfathomable reason, having a heated discourse with a looking glass out on our front lawn.”

“Dageus is doing
what with a heated horse and a looking glass?” Gwen exclaimed from the shower.

“Discourse, sweet, discourse,” he called back.

“Huh?”

He sighed again. Then, “He’s talking to a mirror,” he called much more loudly. “I must go discover why.”

“Talking to a—oh! On the front lawn? Dageus? Really? Wait for me, Drustan! I’ll just be a minute,” she yelled back. “This sounds positively
fascinating!”

Drustan shook his head.
Fascinating, his woman said. She had the oddest perspective on things sometimes.