Kilty Pack One

by Amy Vansant

  His head dipped to kiss a line down her chest toward her breasts. “Na, noo. Kin we dae it noo?”

  Something about his tone caught Catriona’s attention. His question included a whine of what sounded suspiciously like deep sincerity. It wasn’t a tone she heard often from herself or her closest friends, but somehow she’d identified the emotion. Perhaps she’d seen it on television.

  She stopped and took a moment to clear the lust dust from her brain. Reluctantly. Really, she wanted him to stop talking and keep using his lips for other things.

  He’d been so close…

  She pulled back, her hands on either side of his head as if she were dislodging a nursing infant.

  Surely, his lips away from her skin would help her concentrate.

  She slid her hands down his neck to rest on his shoulders.

  “Are you actually asking me to marry you?”

  Broch smiled, hazel eyes twinkling like a naughty imp’s. He playfully poked her tummy with his index finger. “Of course ah ah’m. Where kin we git merrit? Dae ye’ll need a day tae gather yer fowk?” He hooked a finger into the top of her jeans waistband and pulled her back towards him.

  She locked her elbows, bracing herself to keep from being tractor-beamed into his embrace. “Gather my folk? What, so we can all swap chickens?”

  Broch’s teeth, so brilliantly white and straight for a man born before modern dentistry, slipped into hiding as his grin disappeared. “Ye hae chickens? I’d prefer coos...”

  “What are coos? Pigeons?”

  “Na, coos. Ye ken.” He slapped a fist on either side of his head and thrust out his index fingers to simulate horns. “Coos. Maaae...”

  She laughed that his version of moo would sound like may. She never dreamed a child might fail one of those pull-toy The cow goes..? games as a child, but without question he’d be in the lowest percentile.

  “Ah. Cows,” she said.

  “Aye. Coos. Does Sean have coos?”

  Catriona rubbed her face with her hand. “There are so many problems with what you’re saying, I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “Lik?”

  “Lick the fact I’m not an even trade for a cow.”

  He shook his head. “Oh, na. Yer worth at least four.”

  “Ooh, why didn’t you say so earlier? I could have put it on my Tinder bio. Worth at least four cows. They’d have broken their fingers swiping right.”

  Broch scowled. “Ah dinnae ken—”

  She continued. “Second problem—Sean is my only family—with the exception of possibly Fiona and some psycho-dad who’s out to kill us both.”

  Broch sighed. “Sometimes ye just dinnae stop blethering—”

  “And while I’m sure Sean would overlook your lack of livestock, what with you being his son and all, that’s really not the part that’s bothering me here.”

  Broch shook his head. “Ah dinnae give him coos, he gives me coos.”

  Catriona gaped. “Wait. You get me and cows? He has to bribe you to take me?”

  Broch shrugged. “Wummin’ are expensive.”

  “Oh. My. God.” She laughed.

  The past was so messed up.

  He stared at her, scratching his head, his right pectoral muscle stretching and bouncing as he moved. She tried not to watch but it was so...

  No. Stay focused. The man isn’t even interested in you unless you come with livestock.

  She giggled to herself again, parking in front of him and putting her hands on her hips to keep from reaching out to feel what that muscle felt like when it flexed.

  “Okay. Let’s call it a draw. You can’t help where you’re from. I’ll drop it if you do.”

  “Drop whit?”

  “The marriage thing. We’ve known each other less than a month.”

  “Aye.”

  “That’s too fast.”

  “Howfur?”

  She spaced out the next string of words in a slow staccato beat, using her hand as a puppet to speak them. “I’ve known you for less than a month.”

  “Sae?”

  “So, I’m not going to commit to a lifetime with you without knowing you.”

  “Bit we were aboot tae—” He nodded toward the bedroom.

  “Get naked? You want to marry me so we can have sex?”

  He raised his hands, palms up, as if he were holding out two imaginary pies. “Na. Nae sae we kin. But...aye, then we kin.”

  Catriona took a moment to piece together his logic. “Wait. Are you telling me you won’t have sex with me unless we’re married?”

  Broch stared at her, mouth in a grim line, his jawline flexing.

  She frowned. “Are you a virgin?”

  “Nae ah’m nae a virgin,” he hooted.

  She released a long ragged exhale and slapped a hand on his knee. “Whew. I thought maybe that was a thing with you people.”

  “My people?”

  “Time-traveling Highlanders. Nevermind. I get it. You’re kidding with me.”

  One of his eyebrows arched. “Whit?”

  “You’re kidding that we have to be married to...” She hooked a thumb toward the bedroom. “You know.”

  He rested his open palm on his chest. “Well...ah dinnae have tae be merrit. Bit ye—”

  “But I do? Because I’m a girl?”

  He shook his head, waving a palm in the air as if he were waxing the side of a car. “Nae, yer takin’ this all wrong. Ah’m sayin’ ah dinnae think yer a whore.”

  Catriona gasped, laughing, sending a drop of saliva down the wrong pipe. Placing a palm on the empty bar stool, she hung her head, trying to catch her breath. “Well, great. We agree on that. I don’t think I’m a whore either,” she croaked.

  “Yer nae.”

  “No. But for the record, no one uses that term anymore. It’s slut-shaming.”

  “Whit?”

  “You shouldn’t call girls whores.”

  He gaped. “Ah dinnae!”

  “Good.”

  Broch hooked his mouth to the side. “So...are ye sayin’ ye dinnae wantae tae marry me?”

  Catriona titled back her head and rocked it, her mouth hanging open. “I don’t know. I might. Maybe. Someday. But I need to...bring you into the twenty-first century, for one. And get to know you better. That process might include being together, to know we’re compatible.”

  “Howfur cuid we nae be compatible? Is it fur—” He waved his hand in front of his crotch.

  Catriona rolled her eyes. “No. Forget what Pete said to you.” She looked away and mumbled, “Though some day we might have to have a frank conversation about manscaping.”

  His gaze dropped to her mid-section. “Dae ye nae hae the richt bits?”

  She scowled. “My bits are just fine, thank you.”

  Catriona sighed. Leaning her tush against the back of her sofa, she eyed the bare-torso’d Highlander up and down, wondering how many women would melt at a slice of beefcake like him blathering on about sharing his kip. She was aching to crawl into his kip, truth be told. She had real feelings for him and he seemed to return those feelings. It was nothing short of crazy that those feelings were what now locked them in the chastity zone.

  She adored the big lunk, even if he did once eat a tube of toothpaste and nearly tore apart his refrigerator trying to figure out how the “great silver kist” kept things sae cauld. If she could build the perfect man from scratch and magically make him come to life, she still wouldn’t marry her sexy new Frankenstein monster after a month. In her experience, it took a good two years to know you were seeing the real person and not the idealized version created in your head.

  She once had a friend who’d married a man after a year and nine months of dating. They’d divorced in less than a year. Turned out he had some pretty weird fetishes he could only keep under wraps for a couple years. Two months after the wedding he’d rolled a fog machine into the bedroom and—

  “Cat?”

  Catriona snapped from her thoughts. There was
Broch, staring at her, waiting for an answer.

  Sexy beast.

  But hold on...

  “There’s a lot of fog in Scotland, isn’t there?”

  His lips parted. “Uh...aye?”

  See, there you go.

  They hadn’t even officially started dating yet. She still had the full two years to get through.

  She realized she’d lost the thread of their discussion and hung her head. “Look, I’m sorry. We need to get to know each other better before I can consider marriage. Honestly Broch, at this point the jury is still out on whether or not you’re a full-blown weirdo who can’t get over the last Renaissance festival. You’ve got Sean backing up your story, which goes a long way, but seriously, I can’t just marry a time-traveling Highlander or any other man a month after meeting him.”

  His expression tightened into a ball. “Whit’s a Renaissance festival?”

  “That’s what you took from that?”

  He stared at her, waiting for an answer.

  She sighed. “It’s like a big party where everyone dresses up like they’re from the past. Like jugglers and kings and queens and...you. They ride horses and joust and eat giant turkey legs.”

  Broch’s expression, which had been blossoming with every new Renaissance character she shared, suddenly collapsed again.

  “Ye said all the horses were eaten by the dragons.”

  Catriona winced. She’d forgotten she told him the dragon movie poster downstairs was real, and that dragons had eaten all the horses in the world.

  Sometimes it was a little too easy to mess with him.

  Her fib was supposed to explain why people used golf carts, and not horses, to get around the studio lot, but she realized now it had been mostly for her own amusement.

  A passing thought, that Broch might not be so fond of her in two years, crossed her mind.

  I am a terrible person.

  She bit her lip. “Um...I might have exaggerated our lack of horses and number of living dragons.”

  Broch brushed away her confession. “Kin we gae?”

  “Where?”

  “To a Renaissance festival.”

  She shrugged. “Oh. Sure. You won’t even need a costume.”

  Broch nodded, pleased with this new development. He slipped from the stool and she found herself in her usual position, staring at the sinews in his neck, sexy wisps of dark hair curling from his chest to tickle the edges of his throat’s v-notch.

  “Weel. Ah’m aff tae git mah shower noo.”

  As he turned, Catriona reached out to touch his arm.

  “About the, uh, kip thing. It doesn’t mean I’m not...” She found it hard to say the words. She’d never told anyone she was in love with them before. She wasn’t even sure she was in love with him, but her feelings were...something like love, weren’t they?

  Maybe just let him go for now. He couldn’t get far. He didn’t know how to drive, and dragons ate all the horses...

  She laughed.

  “Whit’s sae funny?” he asked, seeming to grow cross.

  Her discomfort had made her loopy. “I’m sorry, I—”

  Broch gently grasped her arms and stared into her eyes.

  “Ah love ye,” he said.

  She stared back at him. Speechless.

  Damn.

  He made that look easy.

  When she didn’t respond, he continued. “Ah want to marry ye. When ye feel the identical way, ye let me ken.”

  Broch released her and walked to the door.

  Catriona watched him go, the urge to chase after him building in her body until her feet moved forward as if they had minds of their own.

  “Broch. Wait. Stop. This is just some crazy confusion between our—” She couldn’t find the words. “—our time periods.”

  Broch paused at the door and glanced back at her, appearing disappointed, wounded and strangely confident, all at the same time. It reminded her of the look movie heroes flashed their heroines before running into the storm to almost certain death.

  He’s only going to get a shower, but still…

  Broch left and closed the door behind him.

  Catriona sighed.

  Chapter Eleven

  The phone rang as Sean stepped from his shower. Cursing, he strode to his kitchen, dripping and damning the phone for its control over him.

  The caller I.D. told him it was Luther. That didn’t bode well. Luther hated cell phones almost as much as he did, and wouldn’t call unless there was an emergency.

  Bracing himself, Sean answered and listened as his partner shared the horrifying details of Timmy Grey’s frenzied attack. The big man assured him Catriona and Broch had handled things as best as could be hoped, and that he was personally doing what he could to keep the details from the media.

  “Drugs?”

  Luther grunted. “Don’t see how not, but I didn’t find any.”

  “Had the police already searched?”

  “No.”

  Sean sighed. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  He hung up the phone and finished toweling himself dry. He’d hoped to take the day off, maybe putter around the house, but it appeared lazing by the pool wasn’t in his stars.

  Sean hadn’t been in the car five minutes before the Parasol President Aaron Rothstein’s assistant Kiki called to tell him action-star Colin Layne had been arrested.

  “How? Where?” he asked.

  “In public, right after hitting a homerun at a charity baseball game for kids. Police swarmed the field.”

  Sean groaned. He could picture how the rest went. The children’s parents’ phones popped from their purses and pockets. Movies of the arrest were filmed and would already be posted online.

  Sean hadn’t seen that one coming. No one in the police department had given him a heads up or requested a little pocket change for the information.

  “Please tell me he wasn’t hurting the children.”

  “No. They found a dead woman under his house.”

  “What?”

  Sean released the air from his lungs as if he’d been punched in the solar plexus. His mind flipped through every detail he’d ever cataloged about Colin Layne, but nothing about the facts added up to literal lady-killer. Certainly nothing as evil and careless as hiding a body beneath his own house. He didn’t know all the studio’s assets intimately, but he knew Colin fairly well. He’d looked into him when he thought Catriona had caught the actor’s eye. Nothing felt right about this accusation.

  Sean realized his mind had been drifting and apologized.

  “Where do we stand now?”

  Kiki sighed as if she were tired of informing people what steps had been taken to keep their actors from being convicted of murder.

  “He’s arrested. Investigators are on the scene. Studio’s lawyers have been dispatched. Aaron wants you to head to Colin’s house and see what you can find out there. You need to get ahead of this thing,” she said, aping her boss.

  “I’m on it.”

  “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

  He smiled. “Not your fault, Kiki.”

  Sean hated to break his promise to Luther, but Timmy Grey’s drama had ended. There was little left for him to do there. He needed to hear the results of Timmy’s tox-screen before they planned their next steps, and in the meantime, Catriona and Luther could handle things.

  Sean changed direction and drove directly to Colin’s house in Calabasas. The police had the high-end neighborhood buttoned-down like a sail canvas during a storm, but Sean knew enough of the officers to gain access.

  Twenty years on the job had its advantages.

  Rolling to a stop a block and a half from Colin’s house, Sean couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen so many cops in once place. He suspected more than a few officers had responded after hearing who lived there.

  Sean pulled his wallet from his back pocket to retrieve a wad of hundred dollar bills from the billfold. He slipped the cash into his front po
cket and tossed his wallet back into the Jaguar.

  Scanning the scene, he spotted a uniformed officer he recognized standing at the perimeter of the home. A recent transfer from a less glamorous precinct, Sean remembered the young man being eager to please. The patches of red dirt on his uniform implied he’d been under the house.

  Good place to start.

  “Hey Dennis,” Sean said, raising a hand to wave.

  Dennis’s gaze swiveled in his direction. The young man grinned and wiped his palm on his pants to greet Sean with a firm handshake. “Hey Sean. Crazy stuff going on here. You’ve got your work cut out with this one.”

  “What happened?”

  “Neighbor reported a smell coming from the house. My partner and I got the call—stench just about knocked us over when we walked up there. I tracked it to the crawlspace and shone a light under there, but couldn’t see much. Figured it was a dead animal, but something about it...” He shook his head as if trying to cast away the memory before continuing. “It didn’t feel right not to check it out.”

  “Dead bodies have a smell you don’t forget,” muttered Sean.

  Dennis nodded. “I know that now.” He motioned to his filthy uniform. “We rock-paper-scissor’d it and you can see who lost. I crawled under there and found the girl.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “I didn’t spend much time playing detective. It was clear she was beyond saving though, I can tell you that.”

  “How long has she—?” He motioned to the house.

  “I heard them say maybe a week.”

  “Could she have crawled under there herself?”

  He shrugged. “She wasn’t tied up, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Any idea who she is?”

  “A Cari Clark.”

  Sean winced, recognizing the name of the missing actress Luther had told him about. The one dating Colin Layne. “How’d you identify her so fast?”

  “Techs found her purse.”

  “Techs under there now?”

  “Yeah, they should be wrapping up.” He glanced behind him and Sean followed his gaze to see two men in baggy technician coveralls pushing a body-bag-laden gurney towards an ambulance. The ambulance sat in dim solemnity. No flashing lights or speedy driving would save this girl.

  Sean patted Dennis on the arm by way of thanks and handed him a business card and a hundred dollar bill with the other hand.