Kiss of the Highlander (15 page)

Her eyes widened further when she felt him stiffen inside her. “Again?”

“Are you too tender?” he asked gently.

She arched a brow. “I told you, I’m tougher than you think,” she said, running the tip of her pink tongue over her lower lip.

He groaned and caught it between his lips. “Then, aye, lass, and again and again,” he said, as he began to glide back and forth inside her. “We MacKeltars were bred for stamina.”

And since he knew she was the disbelieving type, a woman disinclined to accept anything but firm proof, he proceeded to give her hard evidence of his claim, telling her with his body all the words he so longed to say.

S
EPTEMBER
21
Three Minutes to Midnight

         
10
         
 

Gwen stretched languorously, her hands skimming
the muscles of Drustan’s back. She felt sleepily sated and sexy and tender and, oh…so much more complex than she had before. She felt brand new somehow.

Gwen Cassidy had finally been well and truly plucked.

An indefinable sense of peace and rightness nestled in her belly, her heart was full, her mind at ease.

But breathing beneath his weight was a challenge even the new and improved Gwen wasn’t up to, so with a gentle nudge she eased him off her. He rolled onto his back and she slipped astride him, straddling him the same way she had the day she’d found him but with one highly erotic and delightful difference: They were both nude. There was so much she wanted to do with him. She wanted to make love on top of him, beside him, with him behind her….

“Drustan,” she murmured, studying his face, so beautiful in the silvery light of the moon. His eyes opened, hot-metal silver, lazily seductive. “Thank you,” she said softly. He’d made her first time a beautiful, passionate, intense experience, and if for some unfathomable reason she never got to make love with him again, she knew he would be the standard by which she judged men for the rest of her life.

She was falling head over heels in love. And it felt incredible.

He caught her face in his hands and pulled her down for a hungry kiss. “Never thank me, lass. Only ask me for more. That’s the finest praise a man can hear from a woman. That and this”—he slipped a hand between her legs—“woman’s dew that tells a man how much she desires him.”

He smiled at her, and at precisely the same moment noticed the carriage of the moon in the sky. His smile faded abruptly and his body tensed beneath hers. The passion receded from his eyes, replaced by panic.

“Christ,” he swore, “ ‘tis nearly too late!” Rolling her off him, he leaped to his feet, grabbed his plaid, and raced to the stone slab. “Come,” he commanded.

Befuddled by her rapid dismount, still feeling sexy and sleepy and soft, she stared blankly at him.

“ ‘Tis nearly midnight,” he said urgently. “Come.”

She reached for her clothing, and he snapped, “No time to dress. But you must bring your pack, Gwen.”

Puzzled by his comment, and not completely comfortable with her nudity, she grabbed her backpack and hurried to join him at the slab nevertheless, the scientist within her intensely curious to discover how he planned to prove his claims true. Besides, she told herself, there would be time for more lovemaking afterward.

He worked swiftly, stealing intermittent glances at the sky as he dipped his fingers in the paint and sketched the final symbols on the slab.

“Take my hand.”

She slipped her hand into his. He studied the designs a moment, then shook his head and exhaled loudly.

“Pray Amergin, let them be right. Stand close to me, Gwen. Here.”

Gwen positioned herself where he indicated and tried to peer around him to see the last symbols, but he angled his body between them, blocking her view.

“What do you think is going to happen, Drustan?” she asked, glancing at her watch, surprised that anything had remained on her body in the frenzy of their lovemaking. She nearly laughed when she realized that it, and the strap of the pack over her shoulder, were all she now wore. The second hand moved with an audible
tick-tick-tick.

“Gwen, I—” He broke off, and looked at her.

Her gaze flew to his. Had he felt it too when they’d made love? Being inexperienced in lovemaking, she was uncertain if the emotion she felt when she looked at him was a temporary side effect of physical intimacy. She suspected it was of more significant duration but wasn’t in any hurry to make a fool of herself. But if he was feeling it too, she might believe that what existed between them was every bit as real and valid as any mathematical equation. His gaze swept over her body, in such a way that he made her feel beautiful, not short and…
all right, a little plump.
She’d always felt inadequate in a world that plastered leggy, slim cover models on every magazine and in every movie.

But not with him. In his eyes, she saw a reflection of herself that was perfection.

“Would that we had an eternity,” he said sadly.

Her fingers tightened around his hand, silently encouraging him to continue. When her watch chimed the hour of midnight with tiny metallic tings, she flinched.
One. Two. Three…

“You are magnificent, lass,” he said, tracing his finger down the curve of her cheek. “Such a fearless heart.”

Five. Six. Seven.

“Have you come to care for me, if only a bit, Gwen?”

Gwen nodded, her throat suddenly thick, not trusting herself to speak. He looked so sad that she was afraid she might blurt out silly sentimental things and make a fool of herself. She’d already said one thing during their lovemaking she’d never thought would slip past her lips, and now if she wasn’t careful she’d get disgustingly mushy on him.

Nine.

“That, and my faith in you, must be enough. Would you aid me, were I in danger?”

“Of course,” she said instantly. Then, more hesitantly, “What about me?”

“My life for you,” he said simply. “Lass, doona fear me. No matter what happens, promise me you will not fear me. I am a good man, I vow I am.”

Stricken by the pain in his voice, she brushed his jaw with her fingers. “I
know
you are, Drustan MacKeltar,” she said firmly. “I don’t fear you—”

“But things might change.”

“Nothing can change that.
Nothing
could make me fear you.”

“Would that it could be true,” he said, his eyes dark.

Twelve.

Thirteen?

He cried out then, dragged her roughly into his arms, and kissed her, a deep soul kiss—and the world as Gwen Cassidy knew it began to unravel at the seams.

She began gyrating in his arms, bobbing and spinning like a cork in a whirlpool, up and down, side to side, back and forward…then a new direction that wasn’t a direction at all.

Space-time shifted, her very existence within it changed, and somehow she melted from Drustan’s arms.

Her backpack slipped from her shoulder and went sailing off into a vortex of light.

As if from a great distance, she saw her hands reaching for it, but there was something wrong with them. They had an added dimension her mind couldn’t comprehend. She wiggled her fingers, struggling to grasp their new quality. Her palms, her wrists, her arms were so…different.

She thought she saw Drustan spinning past and then she thought she heard a distant sonic boom, but a sonic boom would have meant that she was moving faster than the speed of sound, and she wasn’t moving at all, unless one counted the fact that she felt as ineffectual as a butterfly batting fragile wings against the gale-force winds of a tornado. She fancied she could feel the tips of those delicate appendages tearing off. Besides, she thought dimly, struggling for some core of sanity, the person moving faster than the speed of sound didn’t hear the sonic boom. Only those standing still did.

Then a flash of white encompassed her, so blinding that she lost all sense of time and space and self. Whiteness filled her: She choked on it, breathed it, felt it beneath her skin, soaking into her cells and rearranging them according to some alien design.
Terminal velocity for the average skydiver,
the scientist within her recited in a chilly voice,
averages ninety-three to one hundred twenty-five miles per hour. Sound travels seven hundred sixty miles per hour, on a humid day. Escape velocity is the speed required to exit the earth’s atmosphere and achieve interplanetary travel, or twenty-five thousand miles per hour. Light travels one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second.
Then the peculiar thought:
A cat always lands on its feet. Maintain an angular momentum of zero.

There was no sense of motion, yet there was a horrible vertigo. There was no sound, yet the silence was deafening. There was no fullness of body, yet there was no emptiness. Escape velocity achieved and exceeded, white and whiter, she was—in? on? off?—a long bridge or tunnel. She had no body to instruct to run.

The white was gone so abruptly that the darkness hit her like a brick wall. Then there was blessed sight and sound, and feeling in her hands and feet.

Maybe not so blessed,
she decided. Taste was a bitter metallic bile in the back of her throat; weight was a sickening pressure after the terrible vacuum.

Stifling the urge to vomit, she lifted a head that weighed two tons and felt as swollen as an overripe tomato.

Around her, the night exploded. Driving hail pelted the ground, gouging tendrils of mist from the soil. The wind wailed and keened, flung leaves and snapped branches. Large chunks of ice stung her bare skin.

“Drustan!” she cried.

“Here, lass.” He stumbled to her side, then slipped on the hail-covered terrain and fell to his knees.

“Drustan, what’s happening?” As he drew himself erect, she saw that his face was pale and drawn; lines she’d never noticed before etched sharp grooves around his mouth. He was looking down at his hands with horror. Her gaze flew to them, wondering what was wrong with them. Whatever he saw, she couldn’t see. They seemed to disappear into the mist.

“I erred when I sketched the final symbols,” he yelled hoarsely. A large ball of ice struck his cheekbone, raising an immediate welt. “I went back too far. I thought I could come with you, but I cannot. Forgive me, lass, it wasn’t supposed to be this way!”

“What?” Gwen could scarcely hear him, so deafening was the wind. Strands of her hair stung the skin of her neck as the wind whipped it wildly about her face. The gale was so lashing, it felt it was raking the skin from her cheekbones. The hail was bruising her scalp; her head ached in dozens of spots. She inched toward him and clutched at his arm. It felt curiously insubstantial beneath her fingers, although she could see the muscles in his arms bulging. He tried to close his misty hand around hers, but it sort of slid through hers.

“What’s
happening
to you?” she wailed.

“Save me. Save my clan, lass,” he yelled. “Keep the lore safe.”
Christ, he could feel himself being torn in two. Talking to her, simultaneously trying to reason with his past self. It wasn’t working. It took immense effort merely to move his lips and form words. He was coming apart…two places in one time, and all the while reeling because he finally understood the next dimension…and he had to tell her what to say and do! He must tell her how to use the spell he’d taught her!

“
What
are you talking about?” she cried. “Ouch!” she cried, as a chunk of hail struck her forehead.

But he didn’t answer, just flickered in a way that terrified her, as if he was fading but fighting to stay. Nearly hysterical, Gwen tried to cling to him, but he slid through her hands.

His silver eyes flashed, he looked wild, forbidding, a dark sorcerer from eons past. He thrust his plaid at her, wordlessly demanding she take it.