by Carmen Caine
“I just did.” She choked on the words, twisting her fingers deeper into his hair. “I knew they were there for a reason and when I saw you couldn’t see them I feared it had something to do with you. Now, after hearing Wee Hughie-”
“Enough.” His mouth swooped down on hers, hard and silencing. He tightened his arms around her, almost as if he feared she’d vanish if he didn’t hold her so fiercely.
“I heard MacSporran and I’ll no’ have you with me tonight.” He slanted his mouth over hers again, this time parting her lips with his tongue and thrusting deep. He kissed her mercilessly, as if he couldn’t get enough of her. His tongue slid furiously over and around hers, plunging and withdrawing again and again until she went pliant in his arms and he broke the kiss.
He set her from him, his breath coming in hard, fast pants. “I’m away to the moors to join Bran and the lads.” He looked down at her, his eyes still dark with passion, almost blazing. “Now go back to the castle. I’ll no’ have you coming with me.”
“Why not?” She lifted her chin. After such a kiss, and the odd feeling that he meant it as their last, she wasn’t about to return to Dunroamin.
“Dinnae trouble yourself with why.” He cupped her face with his large hands, frowned down at her. “You’ll go because I said so.”
“Oh, yeah?” Cilla bristled. “That might have worked in the fourteenth century, but it won’t with me.” She folded her arms, stubborn. “Women do what they want these days.”
“What do you want?” His eyes blazed hotter and his burr went all buttery-deep, its smoothness downright dangerous.
Cilla blinked. “I…” Her voice hitched, the damn tingles he always gave her making it impossible to think.
“Come, sweet.” His gaze turned hotter, tracking slowly downward. “Tell me and I might oblige you – if you then head back inside.”
“That’s not fair.” Cilla bit her lip, already falling prey to his magic.
“It is if it keeps you safe.” He reached between them to inch up her skirt, sliding his hand up her thigh to cup and squeeze the panty-covered heat between her thighs.
“Tell me, lass.” He leaned close, licking, then nibbling her ear. His fingers began to move, stroking her intimately. “Your every desire fulfilled…”
“You’re trying to distract me.”
“Am I no’ then?” He lifted his head, looking at her.
“Of course, you are!” Cilla broke free, worry for him rising above the sensations he was stirring. “And I know why you want me gone. I saw your face when Wee Hughie started talking about Vikings. Your friend, Bran, was also upset.”
His smile fading, he touched one finger to her clit and circled. Once, twice, and again before he pulled back his hand and stepped away from her.
“I would throw off my plaid and toss you down onto it and nibble on that tasty little sweet spot until there is no tomorrow,” he vowed, his breath still harsh and his voice rough. “But now isnae the time or place and you need to leave.”
“Hah!” Cilla flipped back her hair, hiding how limb-limbed he’d just made her. “I’m staying right here until I know what’s going on.”
“‘Tis a man’s work.” He crossed his arms. “I’ll no’ have you about if things get wild.”
“Wild doesn’t scare me.”
“This kind of wild should.” He remained firm.
“Then tell me why you and Bran disappeared from the library.” She could do stubborn, too. “I’m not budging until I get the truth.”
He frowned and shoved a hand through his hair. “The truth, lass, is that thanks to Bran and the lads’ keen eyesight and, this e’en, Wee Hughie’s blethering, Bran and I have guessed what Mac’s Viking ghosties are after.”
Cilla stared at him.
Her heart started pounding, fast and furious.
In her mind, she again saw Gudrid and Sea-Strider standing in a corner, nodding and smiling when Wee Hughie started talking about Norse archeological sites.
“Oh my God!” She clapped a hand to her cheek. “There’s Celtic treasure buried in Uncle Mac’s peat fields!”
Hardwick nodded. “Aye, that could be the way of it.”
He glanced out over the moors, dark beneath drifting mist and low-hovering rain clouds.
“Some while ago Bran and the lads found a creel of tools hidden beneath an overhang in one of the peat bogs. They couldn’t locate the basket a second time, or perhaps cravens moved it. But” – the corner of his mouth curved up – “Bran used his ghostly power to conjure one of the tools to show me what they’d found.”
“One of Wee Hughie’s Marshalltown Archaeology Trowels?” Cilla guessed.
“No’ his own, mind.” Hardwick’s smile broadened. “But a tool like his, aye. The word Marshalltown was inscribed on it, for sure.”
“So you think the ghosties are using their Viking disguises and the trowels to search for buried treasure in Uncle Mac’s peat fields?”
“I do.”
She understood now. “You’re worried that if you catch them, there’ll be a fight.”
“We will get them. And, aye, we’ll fight when we do. That’s no’ my concern.”
“Then what is?”
He leaned close, looking in her eye. “That you might swoon if you were present and looking on when Bran, the lads, and I went wild.”
“How wild?”
“Think naked, screaming men and swinging steel.”
Her eyes widened. “I didn’t think of that.”
“So I knew.” He flashed his most wicked smile. “If you’ve ne’er seen a Highland charge, it isn’t a sight for the faint of heart. Especially when we’re after the kind thieving scoundrels who’re too lily-livered to show their own faces and creep about disguised as Viking ghosties.”
“Still…” Her pulse was racing. She’d read about the ferocity of Highland charges in history books. How bold and daring they were, the men often throwing off their plaids as they raced to fight their foes.
“I think I might like to see naked, sword-swinging Highlanders-” She broke off, blinking.
She’d been talking to thin air.
Hardwick had disappeared, leaving only his sexy sandalwood scent behind.
She glanced about to be certain. There was no mistake. Nothing moved anywhere near her except drifts of Highland mist. He really was gone. Even his scent was beginning to fade, its diminishing a sure sign he’d zapped himself to the moors.
Cilla frowned.
Then she started tapping her chin. She needed exactly ten seconds to make a decision.
And when she started walking, it wasn’t in the direction of Dunroamin’s front door.
If Hardwick got mad, so be it.
Chapter Sixteen
“You’re certain it was this overhang?”
Hardwick peered at the cutaway ridge of blackest peat. No more than a four-foot-tall gash in the moorland, if it’d once held a creel of Marshalltown Archaeology Trowels, there wasn’t a sign of such a basket now. Looking equally innocent, a thick fringe of grass hung down over the cutaway area’s top edge.
He shot a glance at Bran, noting the stubborn set of his friend’s jaw.
“There are hundreds of such overhangs on these moors. Natural ones and those cut by Mac’s lads.” He folded his arms. “I say we keep searching. Now that we know what we’re after, there isn’t time-”
“It was this overhang.” Bran hooked his thumbs in his sword belt. “Could be I’m seeing something you don’t!” He rocked back on his heels, grinning. “A wee detail I noticed earlier. Slipped my mind till now, it did.”
Hardwick set his jaw, annoyed. But he did turn back to the peat overhang to give it a better stare.
“By thunder!” His brows snapped together. “There isn’t any bog cotton.”
“Just!” Bran thrust out an arm to indicate the delicate, white-topped heads of bog cotton dotting the moors as far as the eye could see. Tiny and shaped like candle flames, they dipped and bobbed in t
he wind, letting the peat fields look alive in a sea of dancing white.
Except above the overhang where they stood.
Hardwick’s frown deepened. The longer he stared at the thick, bog cotton-less grass covering the peat cut-away, the more odd the overhang looked.
He threw another glance at Bran, seeing that his friend agreed.
As did Bran’s fighting lads. Brawny, shaggy-maned Islesmen from Barra and few other Hebridean isles, they exchanged suspicious glances and drew closer, forming a tight ring around the black-glistening gash in the earth.
Swinging back towards the peat-cut, Hardwick whipped out his sword and used its tip to probe the grassy lip of the overhang. The fringe of grass shifted, a large chunk of loose earth and grasses tumbling onto his feet.
“Hah!” Bran yanked out his own blade, eyes flashing. “I knew there was something funny about that cut-away.”
Grinning broadly, he leapt onto the overhang, sinking to his knees in the soft, black earth. With gusto, he slid his blade along the rim of the overhang, easily lifting a good-sized clump of peaty grass.
“Have a care!” Hardwick warned as Bran’s lads joined in, using dirk points to poke into the odd little mound. “If there’s an ancient church foundation or a kist of treasure buried here, it’s Mac’s and I’ll no’ see us doing damage to it.”
“Och! We’re but flexing our muscles until the ghosties show their faces!” Bran laughed. “‘Tis those cravens what’ll take a beating from our broadswords and axes! No’ the good Mac’s-”
Thump … screech….!
Bran froze as his sword blade shrilled along something long and hard, its contours just visible beneath the now-thin layer of peat.
“A wall!” He jumped back, waving his sword in triumph. “‘Tis just like up Shetland way - an old Celtic church filled with treasure!”
“‘Tis a bag of sticks.” Hardwick pulled the coarse linen sack out of the ground. “Nae, tools,” he corrected, upturning the bag so that a rain of dirt-crusted shovels and spades tumbled out. “No’ Marshalltown Archeology Trowels, but I’ll wager the dastards have been using these to dig up Mac’s peat.”
“So say we all.” One of the Barra men agreed, his words greeted with enthusiasm by his fellow Islesmen. “But where’s the treasure?”
Hardwick set his hands on his hips and scanned the hills. Light as a northern night sky was in summer, wisps of earlier rain clouds and slow drifting mist kept the contour of the moors soft and indistinct, the hills slashed with patches of deep, impenetrable shadow.
He stroked his chin, considering.
“Whate’er it is, it has to be hereabouts.” Bran rammed his blade into the earth, leaning heavily on the sword’s flashy jewel-topped hilt. “The fiends will want their tools close to hand.”
“Exactly.” Hardwick couldn’t agree more. “We just have to winkle it out.”
He turned, then looked back, meeting the eager gazes of Bran’s rough-looking Hebrideans.
“Somewhere out here there’s some sort of ruin.” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “An ancient church, a longhouse, a Viking grave, whate’er. I say we split up and search all the land within a hundred paces, eyes peeled for any grass-grown lump, bump, or hollow that looks odd.”
He didn’t say that he’d also be keeping an eye out for tall and shapely, golden beauty who could bewitch a man with one toss of her shining hair.
He couldn’t shake the notion that she’d followed him.
Just thinking of her brought hot stirrings beneath his kilt. Even now, he’d swear he still carried the taste of her on his tongue, could imagine the heady scent of her hot, wet arousal.
He frowned. Now wasn’t the time for lust. Nor the damnable dizziness that swept him each time such tempting images rose to torment him. A nuisance visited on him by the Dark One and a bleeding annoyance.
“Are we still for charging if the Viking ghosties put in an appearance?” The Barra man loomed before him, battle ax in hand.
Hardwick blinked, focusing. The waves of lust-dizziness, when they came, seemed to be taking longer to fade.
He knuckled his eyes. “The stalwart who first spots our foes shall whistle like a curlew.” He glanced round. “I trust all can?”
Bran snorted.
His Hebrideans looked offended.
Hardwick swept up his sword, knowing a show of bravura would fire their blood.
“Barra!” They shouted Bran’s war-cry, rattling swords or jabbing the air with long-bladed dirks.
“Then away with you!” Hardwick ran his own blade into its scabbard. “First curlew wheeple and we rally to charge!”
But hours later, after much tramping in circles and many more curses when an examined hump in the landscape proved to be just that - a hump – the men were still stamping about, their eyes yet keen but their spirits waning.
Ignoring his own worsening mood, Hardwick went down on one knee to inspect a suspicious gap in a hillock. He found himself peering into a foxhole. The wee creature hissed at him, teeth bared and hackles rising.
Hardwick pushed to his feet, swallowing his disappointment.
Who would’ve thought the night would unearth one small fox and not a trace of buried Celtic silver? No ravening Viking ghosties either. Though he’d bet his kilt they were near. He could taste their thievery on the air as sure as he carried Cilla’s sweet, hot scent on his tongue.
Pushing on, he looked out across the moors and past the dark bulk of Dunroamin to the rocky headlands of the coast and the wide sweep of the Kyle. The water glittered, glass smooth and still, the same deep blue of her eyes.
He stopped and sucked in a breath, certain something was tracking along in the mist beside him. A presence determined to parallel his long strides.
Affecting an air of casualness, he lifted a hand, meaning to flick his fingers and conjure a brimming cup of ale. This he’d toss back with pretended appreciation. Then he’d sleeve his lips and move on, seemingly unconcerned but with a ready hand resting on his sword hilt.
Unfortunately, the lingering effects of his lust-dizziness made the effort of conjure-flicking too great. He lowered his hand without trying.
He did think hard as to who might be following him.
The long-strided gait was too stealthy and masculine for it to be Cilla. And, praise the ancients, too sure-footed for one of the Dark One’s tottering gaggle of gap-toothed, flat-breasted hell hags.
He shuddered.
Then he threw his plaid back over his shoulder and struck off toward the spot where he judged his pursuant to be hiding. He’d gone but a few paces when the drifting mist parted and a tall, fair-haired Viking stepped from the gap to stare at him. No Viking ghostie, but a true ghost, the man wore mail and carried a huge colorfully decorated shield and a nine-foot spear.
Hardwick stopped cold.
Ghost he may be, but with the exception of Bran and his other ghostly friends, he’d never grown wholly accustomed to running across others who dwelt in their mysterious, ethereal realm. Perhaps he’d need another seven hundred years, but for now, such encounters always startled him.
The Viking didn’t share his reticence.
Striding closer, he raised his tall spear to point at a hillock to Hardwick’s right. Half hidden behind a copse of thick-growing birch and whin, it was an area Hardwick hadn’t yet explored.
In that moment a sharp bird call pierced the air. Hardwick whipped around to see Bran and his lads racing toward him. He flashed a glance to where the Viking had stood, but the man was gone.
The bird call came again.
Not the long, sweet trilling of a curlew, but the harsh, agitated squawks of a bonxie.
Auk, auk.
“Gregor!” Hardwick grinned and grabbed Bran’s arm when his friend drew to a panting halt in front of him. “He’s found something - look!”
Thrusting his sword tip toward the sky, Hardwick indicated the fierce-looking bird. Gregor sailed past high above them, his great wings spread w
ide.
“Come!” Hardwick started running. “Gregor’s the second soul who’s called a warning. Our ghosties are beyond yon hill!”
“Barra!” Bran yelled his slogan and pounded after Hardwick, waving his sword.
Auk, auk!
Gregor’s cries grew louder as the men burst into the birchwood. Some threw off their plaids as they stormed past trees and crashed through underbrush. All drew weapons and shouted their slogans. They glanced upward frequently, using the circling, swooping bird as their guide until other men’s voices – shouts and curses – blended with their own.
Bloodlust high and hearts pounding, they ran on, swinging steel and eager for the fight. But the sight that greeted them when they charged out of the wood set them to laughing.
“By all the wonders!” Bran rammed his blade into the earth, gaping.
Hardwick stared, too, but held fast to his sword.
The Islesmen, now naked to a man, stared in disbelief.
Their foes, guised indeed like store-bought Vikings, stood in the middle of an excavated longhouse, overflowing boxes and bulging sacks of silver artifacts littering the up-churned, peaty ground.
They huddled in a tight circle, clutching one arm over their heads and using the other to thrash the air above them.
The reason was plain to see.
“The bird is well trained, my friends,” Hardwick warned the thieves. He strode forward, grinning broadly when Gregor made a particularly splendid pass. “One word and he’ll be after more than just your heads.”
“Call him off!” An English voice rose from the huddle. “He’s already drawn blood!”
“If you think a bird’s talons are sharp” – Hardwick glanced at Bran’s Islesmen – “wait till you taste the bite of our steel.”
“Swords?” The man twisted to face Hardwick, taking care not to leave his head uncovered. “You can’t be serious. We’re unarmed. You can see our weapons there, in the pile by the trees. They’re made of wood or plastic. Toys, no more! We aren’t here for sword fights.”
Hardwick folded his arms. “Why you’re here is obvious. As for us” – the naked Islesmen drew near, forming a stern-faced circle around the ruined longhouse – “my friends and I relish a good and bluidy round of swording. Truth is, it’s been too many years since we’ve enjoyed one!”
