The Dark Highlander Read online

  “What color are they?” he asked warily.

  “Gold.”

  He flashed her another unguarded smile. It was like basking in the sun, she thought, tracing her fingers over his beard-shadowed jaw, smiling helplessly back.

  He prodded her again. “You’re good for me, lass. Now get off your back woman, lest I start something you refuse to let me finish.” He sat up, bringing her with him, kissing her, nipping at her lower lip. The kiss turned heated and fierce while he was trying to stand and they fell out of bed, so she landed on the floor atop him. He promptly rolled her beneath him and kissed her till she was gasping for breath.

  He gave her a cocky smile a few moments later as he helped her to her feet. “I’ll wager you won’t be sore long,” he purred.

  Definitely not, she thought, damn the teasing, torturing man! Muscles in the inner parts of her thighs she’d not known she had, protested when she tried to walk. And still, she wanted more.

  Only much later did she realize that he hadn’t answered her question.

  “’Tis nigh time,” Silvan grumbled when they entered the great hall.

  “Da, where’s the fifth Book of Manannán?” Dageus asked without preamble.

  “There is no fifth Book of Manannán,” Chloe said matter-of-factly. “There are only three. Everyone knows that.”

  Dageus gave her a cool smirk. “Ah, the nefarious everyone. I’ve long wondered who comprises that group.”

  Silvan looked amused, cocked his head and glanced inquiringly at Dageus. “Think you she needs a distraction? I thought you’d been distracting her quite thoroughly.”

  Chloe blushed.

  “’Tis in the tower library,” Silvan added. “But hurry back, we’ve much to discuss and Nellie has shown me a most amazing thing.”

  When Dageus loped out of the hall, Silvan patted the seat beside him. “Come, m’dear,” he said with a warm smile. “Bide a wee with me and tell me of yourself. How did you meet my son?”

  When was she ever going to come up with a suitable answer for that? Chloe wondered wryly. She glanced away from his penetrating gaze, blushing a bit.

  “The truth, m’dear,” Silvan said softly.

  Chloe glanced back at him, startled. “Am I that transparent?”

  He smiled reassuringly. “Knowing my son as I do, I doona believe ’twas an ordinary meeting.”

  “No,” she agreed with a gusty little sigh. “We didn’t exactly meet. We . . . er, well, it was more like we collided. . . .”

  Her story made him laugh aloud and Silvan couldn’t wait to repeat it to Nellie, who would savor every word of the outrageous tale. The lass was a fine storyteller, melodramatic enough to keep things lively and exploit the good parts for all they were worth. Funny, too, with a self-effacing sense of humor that was most appealing. The lass had no idea how bonny and unusual she was. She considered herself “a bit of a nerd.” After she’d defined the word, Silvan decided a nerd was a fine thing to be. (That he himself fell into the “brainy, not particularly graceful, and a little bit backward” category might have influenced his opinion a wee.) Aye, the telling of the tale was a lovely bit of word-weaving, and the tale itself reeked of the fated meeting of a Keltar and his mate.

  While she spoke, he deep-listened. He sensed a pure heart in her, a heart like Dageus’s, more sensitive than most, wildly emotional, hence carefully guarded. He heard her love for his son in the slightly husky timbre of her voice. A love so strong that it fashed her a wee, and she was not yet ready to speak of it.

  That it was there was enough for Silvan. His son had indeed found his mate. He pondered the irony of the timing, even as he blessed it.

  One thing gave him pause, however: She still didn’t know what was wrong with Dageus, and there was a newly blossomed bit of fear in her heart.

  He understood that well. When a heart realized it loved was also, paradoxically, when a heart learned to fear most deeply. She wanted to know what was wrong with Dageus, yet she didn’t want to hear aught that might spoil their joy, and Silvan suspected she’d have a bit of a battle with herself before she finally got around to asking.

  When Dageus handed Chloe the fifth Book of Manannán, the senior MacKeltar decided he was besotted with her. She handled the tome with utter reverence, touching naught but the barest tips of the edges of the thick pages, staring with huge wondering eyes.

  And sputtering. “B-b-but this isn’t s-supposed to even exist and—oh, God, it was written using the early L-Latin alphabet! Do you think I could trade one of my relics for this?” she breathed, turning a gaze on Dageus that Silvan himself would have been hard-pressed to deny.

  Och, aye, the lass could happily pass hours as he himself was wont to do, puzzling over the ancient texts, delighting in the stories therein. Nerd, indeed. And Dageus, well, Dageus seemed fair frozen by the prospect of denying her aught. He rescued his son swiftly. “I’m afraid it has to stay here, m’dear. There are reasons certain tomes have ne’er been made available to the world.”

  “Oh, but you must at least let me read it!” she exclaimed.

  Silvan assured her she could, then focused his attention on Dageus. The discovery of the chamber library had invigorated him, made him feel a score of years younger and given him a whole new sense of what it meant to be a Keltar. And in that chamber, surely there were answers to their problems. He could scarce wait to show it to his son. Enjoying the moment, he said with studied nonchalance, “I’m assuming I’m no’ the only one that wasn’t aware of the chamber library beneath the study?”

  Dageus made a choking noise and his startled gaze flew to Silvan’s. “Beneath the study?”

  “Aye.”

  Dageus grabbed Chloe’s hand, tugged her from the chair, fought a little battle with her as she tried to hang onto the text, plucked it from her hands and firmly deposited it on the table, then dragged her along as they hastened after Silvan.

  When Silvan applied pressure to the left brace beneath the mantel on the hearth, the entire side of the hearth swung out, revealing a passageway behind it. He explained how Nellie had, one day in a fit of energetic cleaning, stumbled upon it whilst sweeping cobwebs from beneath the mantel and scrubbing black soot from the stone face of the hearth. She’d grasped the brace while scrubbing and the next thing she’d known the fireplace was moving, with her clinging to it.

  “And why didn’t she tell us?” Dageus said, incredulous.

  Silvan snorted. “She thought we knew and believed she wasn’t supposed to know.”

  Dageus shook his head. “And ’tis another library?”

  “Och, son, it looks to be our entire history, undisturbed for centuries.”

  Stunned, and she suspected a bit forgotten by the two Keltar men for the moment, Chloe followed Dageus and Silvan into the dark void, down steep stone steps into a cavernlike chamber that was roughly fifteen feet across and twice that long. The chamber was lit by dozens of candles in wall sconces. It was lined from floor to ceiling with shelves, dotted with tables, chairs, and trunks.

  Chloe’s head whipped left and right, back and forth at a dizzying speed.

  Focus, Zanders. You’re going to make yourself sick from excitement.

  No archaeologist entering a heretofore sealed and forgotten tomb could have felt any giddier. Her heart was racing, her palms sweaty, and she was not managing deep breaths very well. She strode forward, pushing past the two men, determined to see all she could before they remembered her and perhaps thought twice about letting her see it. She was in an ancient underground chamber, surrounded by her most favorite things: dusty relics from ages long past. Relics that would send the scholars in her century into paroxysms of joy, giving them topics to gnaw on and argue contentedly about for the rest of their lives.

  There were stone tablets chiseled with Irish oghamic inscriptions. More stones with what looked like Pictish ogham script, a script modern scholars had never succeeded in translating, as Picts had adopted Irish ogham but hadn’t been able adapt it to thei
r own language since Pictish and Gaelic were phonetically incompatible. Maybe they could teach her how to read it! she thought, dizzied by the possibility.

  There were cloth-bound volumes, secured and tied in faded fabric, leather-bound volumes and scrolls, enameled plates, hand-stitched codices, bits of armor and weaponry, and—heavens—even that long-forgotten flagon was a relic!

  After a few moments of breathless perusal, she glanced over her shoulder at Dageus and Silvan who’d paused just inside the chamber, their heads bent above a squat stone column upon which lay a sheet of gold.

  “Da, is this what I think it is?” Dageus’s voice sounded strangled.

  “Aye, ’tis The Compact, as legend told, etched upon a sheet of pure gold.”

  “That’s not very sensible,” Chloe pointed out faintly. “It’s too malleable. Pure gold is too soft, too easily damaged. That’s why so many of the ancient torcs had cores of iron beneath the gold. Well, that and to help deflect a potential sword. What Compact, anyway?”

  “Precisely their purpose,” Silvan murmured, lightly tracing the edge of the gold sheet. “’Twas said they did it to symbolize how fragile The Compact was. To underscore that it must be handled gently.”

  “What Compact?” Chloe asked again, stepping gingerly between a pile of leather-bound tomes and a heartbreakingly rusted shield, peering deeper into the shadowy corners of the chamber. She wondered if they’d let her live down here for a while. Another glance at Dageus made her recant that thought. Unless he lived down there with her.

  “The Compact betwixt the Tuatha Dé Danaan and man.”

  Chloe sat down heavily on her bottom.

  “Not on the tomes!” Silvan gasped.

  Chloe, startled, toppled sideways and sprawled on the dusty stone floor, appalled that she’d just planted her rump on a pile of priceless texts. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m just a little over-excited. How old is it supposed to be? What language is it in? Can you translate it? What does it say?”

  Silvan busied himself sorting through an urn of scrolls.

  Dageus shrugged. “No idea what language it’s in.”

  “You can’t read it?”

  “Nay,” Dageus muttered.

  Silvan harrumphed.

  Chloe’s eyes narrowed but she decided to leave it alone for the moment. She was feeling light-headed again and didn’t want to push it. She needed to slowly absorb her new perspective of history, one that included both Druids with the power to manipulate time itself, and the existence of an ancient civilization that had possessed knowledge and technology advanced far beyond anything man had ever achieved.

  Grandda had been right—the Tuatha Dé Danaan had once lived, and not just in myth!

  Breathe, Zanders, she told herself, dropping to her knees on the floor and reaching for the nearest tome.

  Many hours later, Chloe rested her head back against the cool stone wall and closed her eyes, listening to Silvan and Dageus talk. Languages she couldn’t translate, scribed in long-unused alphabets, danced on the insides of her eyelids.

  There was dust in her hair, on her face and in her nose, she was wearing a dust-covered medieval gown in a castle that had no showers or indoor plumbing, and she couldn’t have been happier. Well, unless she’d been sent back in time to the Alexandrian Library right after Anthony had given Cleopatra the Pergamum Library, bringing the estimated total of volumes housed therein to nearly a million, if anything historians claimed was to be trusted.

  “So, according to the journal you found, our ancestors rarely used this chamber, passing the knowledge of the place only from laird to eldest son?” Dageus was saying. His deep burr sent little shivers of sexual awareness through her.

  “Aye,” Silvan replied. “I spent a bit of time paging through it yestreen. The most recent entry was made in eight hundred and seventy-two. ’Tis my guess the laird died unexpectedly and, like as not, quite young, and the chamber was forgotten.”

  “All this history,” Dageus said, shaking his head. “All this lore, and we never even knew about it.”

  “Aye. Had we, things might have been very different. Mayhap some of us would have made different choices.”

  Chloe opened her eyes a slit. There’d been a strange, pointed note in Silvan’s voice when he’d made the last comment. She studied Dageus’s chiseled profile, bronzed by the flickering candlelight, wondering what he wasn’t telling her. She’d not forgotten about the curse or his unceasing searching of the old tomes. Though she’d had ample opportunity to ask him yesterday, she’d not wanted anything to mar the wonder of their day together.

  Truth was, she didn’t want anything to mar the wonder of this day, either. She would zealously defend it from the merest hint of gloom. She’d never felt so bubbly, so elated, and she didn’t want it to end. She—who always pushed inquisitively, who never took “I don’t know” for an answer—abruptly had no desire to make even the smallest inquiry.

  Tomorrow, she promised herself. I’ll ask him tomorrow.

  For now, between suddenly finding herself in the past, experiencing passion with such an intense man, and discovering so many treasures, she had enough to contend with. She was having a hard time just keeping pace. Merely pondering the fact that she was in the sixteenth century was overwhelming enough.

  As if he felt her gaze on him, Dageus turned his head suddenly and looked straight into her eyes.

  His nostrils flared and his eyes narrowed, his gaze hot and possessive. “Da, Chloe needs a bath,” he said, without taking his gaze from hers. He caught his lower lip with his teeth and all the muscles in her lower body clenched. “Now.”

  “I’m a bit dusty myself,” Silvan agreed after a brief, awkward pause. “I suspect we could all use a bit of a break and a bite to eat.”

  Dageus rose, seeming larger than usual in the confines of the low-ceilinged chamber. He held out his hand. “Come, lass.”

  Chloe went.

  “Must we chain him like that?” Gwen asked, frowning.

  “Aye, love,” Drustan replied. “He’ll kill himself before he’ll talk, if I’m fool enough to give him the opportunity.”

  They stepped back, staring through the bars of the dungeon where a lean man with close-cropped brown hair was chained to the wall, his arms and legs outspread. He snarled at them through the bars, but the sound was muffled by his gag.

  “And you have to gag him?”

  “He was muttering something that sounded suspiciously like a chant before I did. Unless I’m questioning him, he stays gagged. Doona venture down here without me, lass.”

  “It just seems so . . . barbaric, Drustan. What if he’s not even involved in this?”

  Drustan collected the assortment of personal possessions he’d removed from the man’s pockets before restraining him. He’d divested him of two lethally sharp daggers, a cell phone, a length of cord, a large amount of cash, and a few pieces of hard candy. The man carried no wallet, no identification, no papers of any sort. He tucked the phone, cord, and candy in his pocket, palmed the blades and wrapped an arm around Gwen’s shoulders, guiding her away from the cell toward the stairs.

  “He is. I caught him lurking outside the study doors. When he saw me, he looked as if he recognized me. Then he looked puzzled and finally shocked. I’m fair certain he thought I was Dageus and didn’t know Dageus had a twin. Further, Dageus told me that Chloe told him her assailant had a tattoo on his neck. Though Dageus had no idea what kind of tattoo, ’tis entirely too coincidental that our intruder also has a tattoo on his neck. Aye, he’s involved. And though he’s not talking, he will,” he vowed with grim determination.

  “None of this makes any sense to me. Why would anyone want to hurt Dageus or Chloe? What could they possibly want?”

  “I doona ken,” Drustan growled. “But you may rest assured we’ll be finding out.”

  21

  It was stuffy in the chamber library and Dageus shifted restlessly in his chair, then dropped to the floor and leaned his back against t
he cool stone wall. He glanced at Chloe and smiled wryly. Her mere presence made it damned hard for him to concentrate on the work at hand.

  She was sitting cross-legged on a pile of cushions in a corner of the underground chamber, poring, as she had been for some time now, over the fourth Book of Manannán. A few days ago, he’d swapped her for the fifth volume, so he might search that tome himself, since she was slower translating than he. Much to her extreme and oft-voiced consternation, she was unable to read most of the lore in the chamber. Scribed in forgotten dialects, using archaic alphabets compounded by grossly inconsistent spelling, the majority of them were impossible for her to decipher.

  His hot gaze raked her from head to toe and he swallowed a little growl of ever-present desire. Dressed in a thin, clinging lilac gown—one of several Nell had altered for her, and he suspected Nellie was deliberately choosing ones to drive him to distraction—with a deeply scooped neckline and snug bodice, she was a vision. Her tousled curls spilled about her face and she was pinching her luscious lower lip, deep in thought. She got as lost as his da did in the old tales, becoming absorbed to the point of deafness.

  When she shifted position, curling on her side on the soft cushions, her breasts pushed together above the neckline of her gown and lust quickened within him. Though he’d loved her upon awakening, as he did each morn, he ached anew to bury his face in that lush valley, kiss and lick and nibble till she was panting and crying his name.

  The past ten days had passed swiftly, far too swiftly for Dageus’s taste. He wanted to halt time, to elongate each day, stretch it to the length of a year. To cram a lifetime into the now, suck it dry of the bittersweet joy of being mated.