Beyond the Highland Myst

by Highlander 01-08

  People often told her she looked like a curvier version of the girl who’d played Virginia, the heroine in The 10th Kingdom, and she supposed she did—after Virginia had gotten her hair whacked off by the wolfman. After the gypsies had cursed her for setting their poor birds free. Jessi would have set the poor birds free too. Not that her hair looked like it had been whacked off or anything. She got it trimmed every six weeks down at the Beauty Training Academy, and they did a pretty good job for six bucks.

  She narrowed her eyes at her reflection. Breasts. They were undoubtedly her best feature. Some people got great nails and hair, some people got beautiful smiles or pretty eyes, some people got skinny little perfect beach-butts, those disgustingly ideal ones that actually stayed in bikini bottoms. She’d gotten good breasts. It wasn’t that they were so big. Frankly, she didn’t think they were. It was just that they were really round and really high and really perky, and she had a short neck (which was why she wore her hair short—the girls at the Beauty Academy said it made her neck look longer), and sometimes even she thought her breasts looked fake in certain tops, but they weren’t. They were real. Perhaps a bit too enthusiastically perky, but she figured she should enjoy that while she could, because she fully comprehended complex equations like gravity plus time.

  The reflection of the glowing red face of the clock on the bedside table suddenly drew her attention, blinking as the hour rolled over.

  4:00 A.M.

  She stared at it in the mirror, aghast, realizing that in three hours and twenty minutes, classes would begin for the day. On Thursdays, she taught four one-hundred-level anthropology courses.

  Or she’d used to. She certainly wouldn’t be teaching any today.

  She considered calling in sick, but decided it was wiser not to. When this was over, she’d figure out what kind of story to tell. She might be able to get away with claiming to have been forcibly abducted and fully exonerate herself. Which meant if she called in sick now, it would make her look like a liar later. I know it’s odd for a kidnapper to let his kidnappee call in sick, but he was an odd kidnapper. Right. That would go over like a ton of bricks.

  Exhaling gustily, she returned her attention to her laptop and plugged it into the hotel line. She’d decided to check her E-mail while he was showering, partly in a no-doubt-pointless bid for the comfort of routine, but also to keep her mind off sex, which, with him around, was like trying not to think about chocolate while sitting in a person-sized fondue pot of the dark, creamy stuff, surrounded by flowering cacao trees.

  Her inbox was filled with the usual: newsletters to which she subscribed to stay apprised of significant developments in her field; E-mails from students in the undergad classes she T.A.’d, filled with impressively creative excuses as to why they should be the exception to the rule, forgiven their: a) absenteeism; b) failure to appear for an exam; c) late paper. The entertaining and inventive pleas for leniency were followed by spam spam and more spam, and finally, the one she liked best—the Naked Man of the Week pictures from her cyberfriends at RBL Romantica.

  She made short work of her correspondence, shooting the newsletters to a suspend folder for later perusal, denying any and all excuses/pleas for extensions that didn’t involve a death in the family, reporting the spam, and perusing the Naked Man pictures appreciatively before setting one of them as her desktop background.

  She was about to log off when a new E-mail popped in. She scanned the sender’s ID.

  Myrddin@Drui.com.

  She didn’t know a Myrddin@Drui.com and had a phobia about viruses. If something happened to her laptop, a new one wasn’t in the budget. There was no topic in the subject line, which meant, according to her stringent guidelines, there was no place for it but the Trash folder.

  As she slid the pointer over it, she got an instant bone-deep chill. She whisked her fingers over the mouse pad, jerking the pointer away.

  Slid it back again. An immediate, painful, bitter chill licked up her hand.

  She shivered, jerked the pointer off.

  Oh, that was just too weird.

  She frowned, thinking about the way it had arrived. Had an E-mail ever just popped into her inbox when she’d been sitting idle on the inbox page?

  Not that she could remember. Sometimes when she was refreshing a page, or reentering the inbox, new ones showed up, but one had never popped in like that when she was just sitting static on the page.

  Gingerly, she slid the pointer back over the topic line: NO SUBJECT. Grimacing at the immediate sensation that her hand had been plunged, dripping wet, into a Subzero freezer, she clicked on it hard and fast and yanked her fingers from the mouse pad.

  She pressed her palm shakily to her cheek. It was as cold as ice.

  Wide-eyed, she stared at the screen. The E-mail contained three short lines.

  Return the mirror immediately.

  Contact Myrddin@Drui.com for instructions.

  You have twenty-four hours.

  That was all it said. There was nothing else on the screen but for a line of nonsensical symbols and shapes at the very bottom.

  As she scanned them, a sudden shadow seemed to fall over the hotel room. The bedside clock dimmed, the overhead light in the little entrance foyer hummed, and the ivory walls took on a sickly yellowish hue.

  And as clearly as if a man were standing in the room with her, she heard a man’s deep, cultured baritone say:

  “Or you will die, Jessica St. James.”

  Whipping around, she scanned the room.

  There was no one there.

  Beyond the bathroom door, the shower still ran, and Cian MacKeltar still splashed.

  She sat perfectly still, brittle as glass, waiting to see if her disembodied guest had anything further to add.

  The moments ticked by.

  Her shoulders drooped and she stared morosely at her reflection.

  He’d called her Jessica St. James. Freaking everybody knew her name.

  Lucan removed his hand from the screen.

  She was gone. But for a moment there, he’d had her.

  Vibrant and young. By his measure, so very, very young.

  Beyond that—an enigma. Concealed by shadows he couldn’t penetrate. Who was this woman with Cian MacKeltar?

  Usually if he was able to secure a connection, he could deep-listen, probe, and get more than the general sense of her he’d gotten, which was why he’d attempted the contact to begin with. He’d wanted to see if there was anything he could learn about her and pass on to Eve so she could expedite matters.

  People were so concerned about viruses and identity theft, and so oblivious to the true risks of plugging themselves into the World Wide Web, wiring themselves to any and everything that might be out there, hungry, waiting. They worried about cons and killers, sexual molesters enticing their children. They had no notion how thoroughly they could be violated, probed, and coerced by a skilled practitioner of the Dark Arts across a phone line.

  Still, he’d not gotten far with this woman. The moment he’d pressed at Ms. St. James, he’d encountered some sort of barrier.

  Flipping open Roman’s file, which contained the dead assassin’s thorough evaluation of his targets, including photos, addresses—both real and cyber—vehicle registration, birth certificate, passport, lines of credit, available funds, and other pertinent facts, he studied Ms. St. James’s picture again.

  Her driver’s license supplied her vital stats. Twenty-four. Height: five feet six inches. Weight: 135 pounds. Eyes: green. Hair: black. Organ donor: no.

  She was a lovely woman.

  He had no doubt Cian MacKeltar wanted her. The Highlander would be as fascinated by her resistance to probing as was Lucan. He and the Highlander weren’t quite as different as the condescending bastard liked to believe.

  Closing the file, he punched in a series of numbers on his phone and conveyed a change in plans to Eve’s associate: The mirror was still the priority, but make every effort to bring Ms. St. James in alive.


  He’d enjoy cracking her open and studying her. He’d not been intrigued by a woman for a very long time.

  He would do it while the Keltar watched from his powerless perch high up on his study wall.

  “Oh, now that’s just not going to work,” Jessi said flatly when Cian stalked out of the bathroom. She hopped off the bed and moved to regard him from a safer vantage, over near the window. Sitting on a bed with that man in the room just didn’t seem wise. “You go back in there and get dressed,” she ordered.

  Funny thing was, she’d just been placing bets with herself about what condition the archaic Highlander would exit in: kilt-clad and modest, in a towel and semimodest, or in-your-face nude and on the predatory prowl.

  She’d decided on in-your-face nude. She owed herself five bucks.

  He placed his thigh sheath and jeweled blade on the writing desk, wearing two towels: one at his waist and the other wrapped turban-style around his head. It was barely better than nude. In fact, it only made her want to peel those offending towels away.

  As if reading her mind, he ducked his head and unwound the first towel, sponging the excess water from his dark mane. Righting himself, he tossed his hair back over his shoulders, metallic beads clinking. Tiny rivulets of water ran down over his magnificent tattooed chest, a thin channel of it slithered over that tattooed nipple. Muscles bunched and rippled in his tattooed biceps.

  She moistened her lips, wondering what on earth was wrong with her. She’d never had such an intense reaction to a man before.

  She had only to look at him to get all shaky-feeling inside. And it wasn’t as if she’d never dated a good-looking man before. She had. Kenny Dirisio had been a Grade-A-Italian-Stallion-Extraordinaire. Even brainy Ginger, who was every bit as focused and driven as she was, had said, “Jessi-chick, take my advice, drop a few courses this term and hop on that one. They don’t come along like that often.”

  But she hadn’t—hopped on him, that was. In fact, she’d volunteered to teach another seminar and they’d broken up over it, and now she knew why. While her brain had appreciated Kenny’s incredible looks, her body had just never quite kicked in. It never really had with any of the guys she’d dated.

  With Cian MacKeltar, however, despite the fact that her brain wanted nothing to do with him, her body wanted to do everything with him that was possible between a man and a woman. Her body had done more than kicked in; it was stoking up the oven for the baking of little MacKeltar buns.

  With a man that called a mirror “home.” This was not good.

  “Did you not send for food, Jessica?”

  Jessi blinked again, trying to refocus her thoughts. “Yes, but it won’t be here for a little while yet. Look, I’ve been thinking, what’s your plan, anyway?”

  “To bed you.”

  “No, I mean, your plan that might actually work.” She bared her teeth in a cool masquerade of a smile.

  “Ah, that plan. That would be to cross this room right now and kiss you until you start tearing off your clothing and begging me to f—”

  “No, that’s not the one I meant, either,” she said hastily.

  How in the world had he moved that fast?

  One instant he was across the room, the space of two beds separating them; the next, one big hand was cupping her chin, tipping her head back, the other hot and possessive on her waist. The man was lethally fast. Which boded well for protection—from everyone but him.

  He stared down at her with smoldering intensity. He lowered his mouth slowly, lazily, never breaking eye contact with her. Up close, he was beyond gorgeous. Those whisky eyes shimmered with golden depths and were framed by thick dark lashes. His skin was tawny-velvet, darkly stubbled. His lips were sensual, pink and firm, and curved in the hint of a smile.

  “Tell me not to kiss you, Jessica. Tell me right now. And best you make me believe you mean it,” he warned softly, a breath from her lips.

  “Don’t kiss me.” She wet her lips.

  “Try again,” he said flatly.

  “Don’t kiss me.” She swayed toward his body, a magnet to steel.

  “Try again,” he hissed. “And best ’ware, woman, ’tis your last chance.”

  Jessi took a deep breath. “Don’t.” Another deep breath. “Kiss me?”

  He laughed, a cocky, rich purr of a sound.

  Crimeny, she thought dismally, as he lowered his sexy dark head toward hers, even she’d heard the wrong punctuation there.

  * * *

  10

  Even though she knew it was coming, Jessi wasn’t prepared for Cian MacKeltar’s kiss. Nothing could have prepared her for the mind-blowing, sizzling intensity of it.

  This was no gentle brush of a kiss like the one he’d given her in the lobby. This was the real deal. Intense and demanding, it was every bit as raw and unapologetically carnal as it was seductive.

  Gripping a fistful of her short dark curls, the ninth-century Highlander slanted his mouth over hers. He cupped her cheek with one big hand and pressured the corner of her lips with his thumb, nudging them apart. The moment she yielded, he sealed his lips over hers, opening wider, deepening the kiss, taking complete possession of her mouth, obliterating any lingering protest she might have thought to make.

  It was a dominant kiss, an expert kiss, the kiss of a man who knew he was a man, liked being one, and knew exactly what he was doing. This was no college boy kissing her, no young grad student toeing the lukewarm line between desire and political correctness. This was a man who was one-hundred-percent okay with lust, who suffered no hesitation or inhibitions.

  It was exactly the kind of kiss, she realized dimly, for which she’d always been waiting. But until now, she’d not been able to define exactly what it was she’d been missing, what she’d been holding out for. She was struck by the sudden realization that the problem with her boyfriends was that they’d been just that—boyfriends, with the emphasis on “boy.”

  Cian MacKeltar was a man—and a formidable force to be reckoned with sexually. She was, quite simply, out of her league with him.

  She was struck by another sudden realization then: that she was going to be very, very lucky if she managed to walk out of that hotel room, at whatever point in the future they departed, the same way she’d walked in. A virgin, though she’d never admit it to any of her friends. Nobody was a virgin anymore, and peer pressure could get intense if people thought you were.

  Personally, she’d never thought it was anyone else’s business whether or not she was. Only her own, and whatever man she chose to share it with. Her mom might liberally encourage baby-having, but she’d also encouraged a healthy degree of self-respect. Pick carefully, girls, Lilly St. James had advised her daughters. There are a lot of duds out there. As her mom was currently between husbands number four and five, Jessi figured she should know.

  “Christ, lass, you taste sweet,” he purred.

  She shivered with pleasure as he sucked her lower lip into his mouth, nipped it, then closed his mouth hard over hers, plunging deep. He kissed like a man who hadn’t had the luxury in—oh, maybe a thousand years or so—exploiting it for all it was worth, savoring all the subtle, sensual variations. Luring one moment, assaulting the next, and it made her crazy. He kissed like he wanted to devour her, maybe crawl inside her skin. He kissed like he was fucking her mouth, this sinfully gorgeous Highlander with his hot wet tongue and his hard, tattooed body. He kissed so thoroughly and possessively that she wasn’t Jessi anymore, she was a woman and he was a man, and she existed because he was kissing her and if he stopped, she might stop being.

  She had no idea how they ended up on the floor.

  One moment she was in his arms, being kissed senseless—literally, apparently—and the next she was flat on her back beneath his still shower-damp, big, powerful body, her nipples so hard they were poking through both her bra and sweater against his bare chest, with the steely bar of his erection jammed against her stomach.

  And she wasn’t entirely certain,
but she didn’t think she was feeling a towel between them anymore. And holy cow, the man was huge.

  Dazedly, she wondered what in the world she thought she was doing—even as she buried her fingers in the wet tangle of his hair.

  More kisses, soft and slow, hot and hard. She was drowning in man, in the taste and scent and feel of him. Her hands slipped of their own accord down the thick column of his neck, over the muscled ridges of his shoulders.

  She barely noticed when he shifted position so that his legs were straddling hers, until he fit himself snugly in the vee of her thighs, and his thick ridge nudged the inseam of her jeans against her clitoris with delicious friction. She jerked at the raw intimacy of it.

  When he cupped a hand beneath her bottom, tilted her hips, and began a slow, erotic bump-and-grind that was as old as Mankind itself, a distant part of her mind began sounding a clamorous alarm. But with each slow, powerful thrust of his cock, that inner alarm grew fainter and fainter, as Jessi slipped irresistibly deeper beneath Cian MacKeltar’s seductive spell.

  When he rucked her sweater up to her ribs and began tracing a path from her bottom to her breasts, slowly, lingeringly, as if committing the subtle shape of each dip and turn to memory, she whimpered into his mouth, hungry to feel those big hands all over her bare body. Everywhere he was touching her, she felt as if a low-voltage electrical current was pulsing beneath her skin, jolting each nerve ending to delicious, tingling awareness. When he closed a hand over one of her breasts, heat shot straight down to her belly and lower still, and she dug her nails into his shoulders, arching hungrily up to meet his next thrust.

  He sucked in a shallow hiss of a breath, and suddenly he was working at the fly of her jeans, and then the air was cool on her bare skin as he pushed her jeans and panties down. That faint alarm was sounding again, more loudly, but he was kissing her so heatedly, so passionately and—