Needed By The Highlander
A Scottish Time Travel Romance-Highlander Forever Book 5
Rebecca Preston
Illustrated by
Natasha Snow
Edited by
Elizabeth A Lance
Copyright © 2020 Rebecca Preston
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Natasha Snow
Edited by Elizabeth A Lance
Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
VIP Reader Club
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Preview of Highlander Found
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
About Rebecca Preston
Also by Rebecca Preston
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Chapter 1
Helen Washington stretched in the passenger seat of her deliberately nondescript old Ford, wincing a little at the tension that had built up in her neck. Stakeouts always had her feeling claustrophobic and bound up in her own body — and it wasn’t as though she could get out of the car and walk up and down the street to stretch her legs. Not if she wanted to avoid drawing attention to herself... and on the fifth day of a stakeout, that was absolutely essential.
It was late afternoon, and pretty warm out — she wasn’t wearing much beyond a T-shirt and her comfiest jeans, and even then the sun beating down on the roof of her car was causing sweat to bead on her forehead and dampen the underarms of her clothing. She pushed her shoulder-length brown hair out of her face and stretched her jaw, trying to chase the tension out of her body before it could turn into another migraine. That was the last thing she needed. This guy was a tricky customer — he seemed to have a sixth sense for when his ex-wife’s house was being watched, and though Helen had been working on this case for months, he’d always managed to elude her. If it wasn’t for the photos her client had snapped of the guy lurking in her backyard, Helen would have begun to suspect that the woman was imagining things.
But Sarah wasn’t. She was a high-profile lawyer, and her rather messy divorce hadn’t gone especially well with her or her husband. From the information Helen had (she’d spent a lot of the morning rereading the files out of sheer boredom) it seemed like Paul didn’t have a lot going on with his life outside of his marriage — so it made sense that after their divorce had been finalized, he’d taken to creeping around his ex-wife’s new house late at night, spying on her and leaving threatening messages on her answering machine whenever he saw anyone (especially men) going in or out of the place.
Helen had to admit, she understood his jealousy. It was a beautiful house that Sarah lived in, perched as it was on top of a sizable hill with a gorgeous view — and fair enough, too, with the amount of money she was making as an attorney. Most of her clients were reasonably well off. You didn’t hire a private investigator with Helen Washington’s pedigree unless money was no object… or you were pretty scared. And Sarah seemed scared. She was tough as nails in the courtroom, but when it came to her ex-husband — a bruiser of a man who was a full foot taller than her — she was less confident. Completely understandable. Sarah and Helen had their height and stature in common — both slim women, rather short (five foot two — though Sarah compensated with high heels) but athletic. For Sarah, it was five yoga classes a week that kept her fit — and sane, so she explained with a merry little laugh. It was a wonder she fit the classes in around her eighty-hour work week.
For Helen, it was self-defense classes that kept her in shape. A little less peaceful and Zen, perhaps… but a lot more useful in her line of work.
But in West Virginia, she knew better than to rely on her physical prowess to defend herself. You could be a black belt in every martial art on the planet — but it wouldn’t do you any good if you came up against a man with a gun. And in West Virginia, where gun laws were some of the least prohibitive in the country, it was reasonable to assume that any unsavory types were probably packing a weapon. That was a big part of what worried Sarah about the behavior of her ex-husband — not only was he behaving erratically, but she knew from their marriage that he was a gun aficionado. They’d had multiple gun safes in their old house, and his collection had numbered in the double digits… there was every chance that if he got angry or unhinged enough, that he could be coming after his ex-wife with a deadly weapon.
That was why she’d hired Helen Washington. Helen wasn’t your average private investigator. Most PI’s had their license and not much else… it wasn’t the most glamorous career on the planet, that was for sure. A lot of guys she’d met did it because they didn’t make the cut for the police force — it was a kind of freelance, privatized police work. For Helen, the motivation was a lot more complex. She hadn’t started her career as a private investigator, or as a cop. No, Helen had gone straight from high school — where a few very specialized recruiters had noticed her knack for problem-solving and data analysis — into training as a criminal analyst for the FBI.
It had been a horrific and exhausting few years. She’d been completely out of her depth and overwhelmed — there was so much pressure on her to succeed, and not just from the FBI. For her family, the idea of their daughter holding down such a prestigious — and well-paying — job was absolutely huge. The Washingtons had never been well-off. Her father Gary was a mechanic, and her mother May had worked odd jobs for a long time to make ends meet… but a cancer diagnosis when Helen was still in high school had put an end to that. Their home life, never particularly financially stable, had become a storm of medical bills and stress, with their father taking on as much work as he could to keep food on the table and a
roof over their heads. It was some respite that they owned their home, a creaky old four-bedroom that had been in dire need of renovation since the 1950s — but still, with four children to feed, Helen had been feeling the pressure to get her independence and start helping to support her family since she was a child.
So when this offer of a steady government job fell into her lap, it was a no-brainer. She had to take it. And so, her twenties had been claimed by a storm of paperwork and red tape. She learned quickly that work at the Bureau wasn’t just about how good you were at investigation… that was only the tip of the iceberg. After a certain point, progressing in your career — getting the kinds of pay raises that would help keep your family out of the poor house, for example — necessitated playing the kinds of political games that had never come easily to Helen. She’d done her best, for her mother’s sake — medical bills were medical bills, and cancer had no interest in whether or not you could afford to keep fighting it — but the job had burned her out from the inside, leaving her an empty husk by the time she turned thirty. There was no work-life balance at all, no way of having a life outside the Bureau. What was the point of having such a prestigious job if she had nobody to brag to about it? No friends, no social life, absolutely no romantic prospects beyond a couple of half-secret crushes on coworkers that had never gone anywhere.
Then, when Helen was thirty, her mother finally lost her battle to cancer. After the funeral, somehow, she never quite felt the same at work. Without her mother’s health to work for, without the safety and security of her family depending on her (all her younger siblings had moved out by this time and gotten on with their lives) she had realized, in a rush, that she was wasting her life as a cog in a machine that was more than willing to chew her up and spit her out. She wanted more to show for her life than just a hollow series of bureaucratic accomplishments. She wanted to be back in the world, helping real people… free of all the red tape, able to make a real difference.
So, frightened but resolute, at thirty, Helen Washington had handed in her notice and started a whole new life.
Getting a license to work as a private investigator had been easy as pie, especially after all the rigmarole she’d gotten accustomed to back at the Bureau. It had made sense, as a career shift… for all that her father fretted about it being dangerous and unreliable. She had a suspicion he was feeling a little lost. With her mother gone, and all of her siblings moved out, he was at something of a loose end. Though he was old enough to retire, he was still working at the mechanic shop he’d been at since he was a teenager, his careful hands servicing new models of car every year. At least with a little of the financial weight lifted with her mother’s passing (what an awful way to think about death) he was able to put money aside to get the old house patched up. Her brother Davey came home most weekends to help out — they’d given the old place a fresh coat of paint and were working on renovating the kitchen to bring it into the twenty-first century. He needed a project, it seemed… and it was nice for him to spend some time with his son. Grief was funny like that — it would drive you to isolate yourself, but what you really needed was people around you.
A prickle of guilt ran through her as she thought about her father. It had been a while since she’d seen him — a few weeks at least, which wasn’t like her. Well, it was still afternoon. By all accounts, this ex-husband rarely came to lurk around Sarah’s door while it was still light out. She could afford to risk a phone call. She checked the time. On a Saturday afternoon, her father was unlikely to be working at the shop, but it was anyone’s guess as to whether he’d have his phone close at hand enough to answer. Most times she called her father it had been her mother who had answered. Now, it would just go to voicemail.
But this time, he picked up, and Helen smiled, pleased to hear his voice.
“How’re you doing, sunshine? Cracked any cases lately? Any dames giving you grief?”
She couldn’t help but laugh at that. Her father got all of his understanding of what she did for a living from hardboiled detective novels of the 1940s. He wasn’t alone in that thought. Since she’d quit her demanding FBI job, she’d had more time to socialize… but everyone she told about what she did drew the same conclusion, that she sat in a trench coat in some dimly lit office, smoking like a train and pontificating on the gritty nature of the universe.
Well, they weren’t completely wrong there. She had a few fairly gritty opinions on the world she’d come to know, both through her work with the FBI as a criminal analyst, and from her freelance work as a private investigator. Mostly, it was that people weren’t especially trustworthy, on the whole. She’d caught far too many cheating spouses, too many office workers with unfortunate embezzling habits, too many bitter ex-spouses to have too much faith in humanity in general. Maybe that was why she hadn’t made many friends since she’d left the Bureau. It was hard to get close to someone when you knew first-hand what they could be capable of — what they might be hiding, just beneath the surface…
“I’m on a stakeout, Dad.”
“Ooh. Mob bosses? The Mafia? The criminal underground of Huntington?”
She laughed. “Huntington’s criminal underground is a bit above my pay grade at the moment, Dad. It’s just some jerk ex-husband who’s stalking his ex-wife.”
“Oh. Well. That sounds a bit safer than mob bosses, at least. It’s your sister!” she heard him calling to someone in the background, and grinned. Just as she’d suspected — Davey was there, working on the house. It was good of her little brother to spend so much time with their dad. He’d really stepped up since their mother had passed away, for all that he was dealing with plenty of his own demons. He’d been drinking since he was a teenager — like most kids in Huntington, the legal drinking age was more of a guideline than a law — but it had only turned into a real problem when their mother had started to get really sick. He was doing a lot better these days, since he’d quit and started going to meetings regularly, but their mother’s death had put a lot of pressure on his sobriety. It was likely that Davey needed these DIY weekends as much as their father did.
“How’s the kitchen coming along?”
“Great! We’ve torn out those old cabinets, but we managed to keep the siding that your mother painted. We’re just figuring out where to install it on the new ones.”
“That’s good. Those old cabinets were basically sawdust central.”
They kept chatting — but then something caught Helen’s eye.
“Dad?” she said quietly, her eyes fixed on the other side of the street. “I’ve got to go. I’ve just seen the guy I’m waiting for sneaking into his ex-wife’s garden.”
Chapter 2
She knew she had to move quickly. She hung up the phone with her dad, her other hand already on the lightweight but powerful digital camera she used for this work. It uploaded the photos she took automatically to the cloud — even if she was spotted by a target who proceeded to destroy her camera to avoid their secrets getting out, copies would be stored safely for her to draw on later. There was the ex-husband in question, shooting guilty looks up and down the street as he reached up to take hold of the top of the house’s side gate. She snapped a few photos of him as he ascended the gate… but pictures of him climbing the gate wouldn’t do the trick on their own. She wanted more.
And she had to admit — a part of her was a little worried about the woman inside the house. Paul was a big guy, for all that he’d clearly started to go to seed a little in that way that men in their 40s had when they didn’t take care of themselves. He looked scruffy, unshaven… she’d be willing to bet he hadn’t showered in a few days at least, and the clothes he was wearing were dirty and rumpled. Had he been sleeping in his car, perhaps? She’d tried and failed to get hold of an updated address for him — it was possible he hadn’t bothered getting a new place at all. It wouldn’t be unusual — a lot of ex-husbands lived with blind faith that the women who had kicked them out would come back to them eventually. The entit
lement was unreal.
But despite his disheveled appearance, Paul was still a formidable guy. And a man with very little to lose was all the more likely to lash out and hurt people. Helen waited until he’d climbed the fence, watching as he awkwardly dropped down out of sight behind the gate… then she pulled out the set of keys that Sarah had given her for the purposes of the stakeout and quietly opened the door of her car. Though she was stiff from the long stakeout, she was still able to move silently across the street — martial arts training had given her a considerable amount of grace, even when she was stiff. Ideally, she’d get a few more photos of the guy violating his restraining order, and ideally frighten him away from Sarah in the process.
The gate swung open once she’d unlocked it, but the man was nowhere to be seen. Frowning, she moved down the side of the house, feeling her heartbeat beginning to pick up with the thrill of the chase. Where had he gone? Helen hesitated at the corner and snuck a quick glance around the corner. Sure enough — there was Paul, standing between the pool and the back door to the house. Helen bit her lip. He was staring at the locked back door, and the expression on his face was definitely troubling.
Needed By The Highlander: A Scottish Time Travel Romance (Highlander Forever Book 5) Page 1
