The Highlander's Touch Read online

  As Lisa glanced up, Circenn froze in mid-leap, his plan to thrust her from the room aborted. He watched with dawning horror as her gaze skimmed the interior of his hidden room. He stood motionless, surrounded by incriminating evidence. Standing amid items from her time, he knew that she would never believe him, and worse, that he must leave immediately if they were to prevent the English troops from reaching Stirling by Midsummer’s Day.

  Lisa was motionless but for her gaze, which roamed disbelievingly over the items in the room. Her eyes widened, narrowed, and widened again as she realized what she was seeing. Weapons, yes. Arms and shields, yes.

  Inexplicably, items from her own century?

  Yes.

  The first wave of emotion that buffeted her was hers: a suffocating feeling of pain, bewilderment, and humiliation that she’d bequeathed her heart so wrongly. The second wave was his: an enveloping cloak of fear.

  How could he possess such things? How could he have items from her time, yet not be able to send her home?

  Simple. He’d lied. That was the only possible explanation.

  “You lied,” she whispered. She could have gone home to Catherine, but he’d lied. What else had he lied about?

  Her hands closed on a CD player. A CD player! She raised it with shaking hands, peering closely at it, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing, SONY was emblazoned on the chrome-colored case. Eyes narrowed, she flung it across the room, where it shattered into bits of plastic, narrowly missing his head. Unappeased, she reached for another missile, closing her fingers around an oddly familiar cardboard box. She spared it a glance, and her lip curled in disbelief.

  “Tampons?” she cried. “You had tampons? All this time? How dare you!”

  Circenn gestured helplessly. “I didn’t know you had anything to clean.”

  She growled, a feral sound of pain and anger, as she flung the box of Playtex easy-glide applicators at him. It missed, too, hitting the wall behind him, showering the room with small white missiles. “No!” She raised a shaking hand when he moved to approach her. “Stay there. How much have you lied to me about? How many other women have you brought back here—that you needed tampons for? Did I not rate tampons? Was I won so easily that you didn’t have to bribe me with conveniences? Was it all a lie? Is this some sick game I can’t fathom? Didn’t the fact that my mother is dying touch your heart at all? What are you made of? Stone? Ice? Are you even human? All this time you could have returned me, but you wouldn’t?”

  “Nay.” He moved forward again, but stopped when she cringed back from him. His pained expression deepened.

  “Don’t even think of touching me. How you must have been amusing yourself with me. Me and my pathetic tears, me and my weeping for my mom, and all this time you could have returned me at anytime. You—”

  He let loose a bellow of pain and frustration. It had the desired effect of terminating her accusations, silencing her with its sheer volume.

  As she stood there gaping, he said, “Listen to me because I doona have much time!”

  “I’m listening,” she hissed. “Like a fool, I’m waiting for you to give me one decent explanation for all of this. Go ahead—tell me more lies.”

  He ran a hand over his face and shook his head. “Lass, I have never lied to you. I adore you and there have never been any other women from the future here. And these”—he flung a tampon in the air—“cleaning swabs, I cannot fathom why they upset you so greatly, but I assure you I have never let the maids use them.”

  Lisa’s brow furrowed. No man could be so stupid. “Cleaning swabs?”

  He snatched up a gun and jerked the barrel in her direction, and an unwrapped tampon shot out. It was coated with black from the slow corrosion of the steel. She eyed it for a moment, bent, and plucked it from the floor. “You clean your guns with these?”

  He lowered the gun. “Is that not the purpose for which they were designed? I vow I could not conceive of another.”

  “Didn’t you read the box?”

  “There were too many words I didn’t understand!”

  Lisa’s eyes widened and she reached for him internally, wondering why she hadn’t done that first. There, where they joined, he could hide nothing from her. But she’d been so stunned that she hadn’t been thinking clearly. She reached and felt …

  Fear that she wouldn’t believe him.

  Pain.

  And honesty. He genuinely didn’t know what the tampons were. But there was something else, something he was willfully concealing. A monstrous dark thing, cloaked in despair. It made her shiver.

  He raised his hands in a gesture of supplication. “Lisa, I never lied to you about the fact that I cannot return you. These are gifts a man named Adam brought me. I have never been to your time, nor can I get there, nor send anyone else.”

  She pondered his words, weighing them for truth. She recalled watching him pick through the fabrics and overhearing mention of this Adam person: Adam whose gifts Circenn had disdained, except for the gold fabric he’d chosen for her wedding gown.

  One floor beneath them, men roared for Circenn.

  Ignoring the summons, he said, “I would not have had it come out like this—not now, when I have no choice but to race off to battle. You must believe that I have never lied to you, Lisa. Believe in me and await my return. I promise we will speak of it all then. I will answer any questions you have, explain everything.” He sighed, rubbing his jaw. His eyes were dark with emotion. “I love you, lass.”

  “I know. I can feel it.” She inclined her head stiffly. “You do love me. If I hadn’t blown up so quickly, I would have sensed your feelings and realized that all this aside, you harbored no intent to harm me.”

  He heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank Dagda for our bond.”

  “Go on,” she said, encouraging him to reveal the dark secret that was yet untold. As Circenn moved toward the entrance she realized he’d misunderstood her words.

  He looked askance when she didn’t step aside. “I must reseal the chamber, lass, before I can ride out. I promise to let you examine it to your fill upon my return.” He moved toward her, edging her back into his chamber.

  “No,” Lisa said quickly. “I meant go on and tell me the rest.”

  He stopped moving reluctantly. “I thought you meant that I should join my men and we would speak of this upon my return.” He noted her tense jaw, her unyielding gaze. “What else do you sense?” he evaded.

  “Something that terrifies me, because it scares you, and I suspect that anything that causes you fear would crush me. There is something you aren’t telling me that your fear cloaks. You must tell me, Circenn. Now. The quicker you tell me, the more quickly you may go. What are you hiding from me?”

  He drew a deep breath. “Adam, who gave me these oddities”—he gestured sweepingly—“could return you to your time. I did not tell you that because it was pointless. Recall that I swore an oath to kill the bearer of the flask?”

  She nodded.

  “Adam is the one I swore the oath to.”

  Lisa closed her eyes. “In other words, the only person who could return me would kill me first. All right. What is the other thing?”

  He looked at her with an expression of innocence she didn’t buy for a moment. “I can still feel it, Circenn. You haven’t told me the biggest thing.”

  “Lisa, I will tell you all, but now I must get to Stirling.”

  Conveniently—it must be part of a male timing conspiracy, Lisa thought—Duncan bellowed Circenn’s name with obvious frustration.

  “You see?” Circenn said. “The men await me. It will be a near race, Lisa. I must go.”

  “Tell me,” she repeated evenly.

  “Doona make me do this now.”

  “Circenn, do you really think I could bear sitting here for weeks wondering what other fantastic fact you’ve been concealing? It would be torture for me.”

  Circenn’s hands clenched around the gun.

  “I will follow
you on horse, if I must, right into battle.”

  A pregnant, tense silence filled the space between them.

  The continued bellows of the men below heightened her tension. Whom would he heed? His men or her? Lisa felt her heart pounding. He licked his lips and started to speak several times, then stopped, averting his gaze. When he finally spoke, his voice was tight and weary.

  “My mother was a Brude queen who was born five hundred and seventy-odd years ago. I am immortal.”

  Lisa went as still as the stone walls around her. She blinked rapidly, deciding she must have misunderstood. “Say that again.”

  He knew which word she needed repeated. “Immortal. I am immortal.”

  Lisa stepped back. “As in live forever, like Duncan McLeod—the Highlander?”

  “I doona know this Duncan McLeod, lass. I was unaware there was another like me. The McLeod have never spoken of such a man.”

  Lisa could not speak for a moment. “Im-immortal?” she managed in a dry whisper.

  He nodded. He thumped the stock of the gun on the floor in response to a particularly furious summons.

  Rejecting the absurd possibility, Lisa reached for him emotionally. Her incredulity was squashed with one firm draw on their bond.

  He was telling the truth. He was immortal.

  Or at least he believed he was.

  Could he be deluded? After a moment of reflection, she discarded that possibility. A person would know if he had lived five hundred years—it wasn’t exactly something one could overlook.

  Not looking at her, he continued, “I discovered I was immortal when I was forty-one.”

  “But you don’t look forty-one,” she protested, eager to object to any small part of such madness.

  “I wasn’t when Adam changed me. I was, as near as I can calculate, nearer thirty than forty. He never would admit exactly when he slipped me the potion. But when I confronted him, he confessed that he had indeed poisoned my wine.”

  “Why? And who is this man that possesses the power to make you live forever? Who is this Adam who could send me home? What is he?”

  Circenn sighed. There was no point in trying to rush away now. He would give her a few answers to consider while he was gone. When he returned, he would tell her all, and offer her the flask again—to drink, this time. “He is of the old race called the Tuatha de Danaan. He is what some call the fairy.”

  “Fairy?” Lisa was incredulous. “You expect me to believe in fairies?”

  Circenn smiled bitterly. “You accept that you have traveled seven hundred years across time, yet dispute the existence of creatures who predate us by millennia and possess unusual powers? You cannot pick and choose your madnesses, lass.”

  “The fairy,” Lisa repeated, sagging against the edge of the rotated hearth. “No wonder my traveling through time didn’t seem so strange to you. I thought you’d accepted it unusually well.”

  “Think not of the fairies as wispy, ethereal creatures, flitting about on wings—they are not. They are an advanced civilization that inhabited some faraway world before they came to ours in a cloud of mist, thousands of years ago. No one knows whence they came. No one knows who or what they really are, but they are powerful beyond compare. They are immortal, and they are capable of sifting time.”

  “But why did he make you immortal?”

  Circenn exhaled a bitter sigh. “He said he did it because his race had selected me as guardian of their treasures, of which the damned flask is one. That is why he made me swear to kill whoever found it. He said his race had long been looking for someone who could keep their hallows safe; they needed someone who would never die and could not be bested in battle.”

  “So you will truly live … forever?”

  Circenn said nothing, his eyes dark with emotion. He nodded.

  Lisa shook her head, beyond coherent thought. Her gaze swept over him, disbelievingly.

  “Lisa—”

  “No.” She raised her hands as if to protect herself. “No more. That’s it. I’ve heard enough for today. That’s all I can hear. My ears are full.”

  “Is it so terrible a thing to accept? I accepted that you were from my future,” he said. “Haud yer wheesht!” he roared, thumping on the floor again.

  “Just let me have time to think. Please? Go. Go off to your war,” she said, pointing to the door. Then a small, half-hysterical laugh escaped her.

  “Lisa, I am not leaving you like this.”

  “Oh yes you are,” she said firmly, “because according to my recollection of events, you and your Templars are necessary at Bannockburn.” She needed desperately to be alone, to think. It was not hard for her to push him out to war, now that she knew he could not die. “But you bled when I poked you with the knife,” she added, as an afterthought.

  “Beneath my shirt the wound closed instantly, lass. I can bleed, briefly.”

  Footsteps thundered down the corridor; his men had exceeded their patience.

  Circenn nudged her back a step and swiftly sealed the chamber. “You said my Templars were necessary at Bannockburn. You know of this battle?” he said, his gaze brooding.

  “Yes.”

  “So it seems perhaps we’ve both been withholding information from each other,” he pointed out quietly. “Is there anything else I should know?”

  “Is there anything else I should know?” she countered.

  Suddenly he looked weary. “Just that I love you with all my heart, lass.”

  He kissed her swiftly and was gone.

  IMMORTAL. CIRCENN BRODIE WAS IMMORTAL.

  How ironic, she thought. In the twenty-first century, she’d raged against her mother’s mortality. Now, in the fourteenth, she was raging against his immortality.

  Her life couldn’t be a simple one of going to college and collecting kisses from handsome and mostly harmless young men. That just wouldn’t do for Lisa Stone. She suddenly understood how bewildered and put-upon Buffy must have felt upon discovering it was her plight in life to slay vampires.

  She hurt.

  He rode miles away from her, but their bond did not diminish. She was battered by his feelings, buffeted by his anger and sorrow and guilt. She found herself pushing it away, relegating it to the background. She could not afford to feel what he was feeling right now. She needed to feel only her own emotions, to sort through them undistracted by his pulsing intensity.

  The man was downright overwhelming sometimes, and it was no wonder. He had over five hundred years of living, and loving and losing his loved ones, and being invincible. She felt a surge of concern emanating from him because she was trying to shut him out. Too exhausted to do more, she sent a burst of reassurance, then firmly corralled his emotions in a corner of her mind.

  That was better.

  Perhaps a walk would clear her thoughts, she decided, rising from his bed, where she’d been sitting since he’d left.

  She strolled through the silent castle and ventured into the night. It was strangely quiet: there were no knights jousting in the courtyard, no children playing—war was grim business indeed. She didn’t have to worry about Circenn dying, but most families at Brodie had a loved one who might be mortally wounded in battle. An air of sobriety draped the estate.

  Absorbed in her thoughts, she wandered to the reflecting pool and sank down on the stone bench. Tilting her head, she gazed up at the velvety black sky. Why couldn’t she have fallen in love with a normal, mortal man? She’d been so happy with Circenn, but she was a realist, if nothing else.

  She had some idea of what it would be like to age. She knew how she would feel when she was forty and he was thirty still. She could only imagine with horror how she would feel when she was fifty, yet he still appeared thirty. She could taste the fear of being sixty—when she would be old enough that most would think she was his mother, or worse—in this land where women had children at fourteen—his grandmother.

  Oh, God. Her body would age and wrinkle, but his never would.

  Lisa didn’
t think she was a shallow person, but there was only so much a woman’s vanity could willingly embrace. Would he still make love to her? Would she be able to permit him to gaze upon her when her body was so aged? It wasn’t merely a question of vanity; the physical contrast between them would be a daily reminder that she was dying but he was not.

  Take the years and don’t think too far ahead, a part of her offered hopefully.

  But she knew herself too well. She wouldn’t be able to. She would be living in fear, watching her mirror, waiting for the inevitable.

  And there was an even bigger picture to be considered.

  Not only would she age while he didn’t, she would ultimately die, while he continued to live. He would be left without her, and she knew she would have to encourage him to love again when she was gone—and, God forgive her, she didn’t think she possessed such a noble soul.

  Encourage Circenn to share such a precious, intimate bond again with some other woman? She was seized by hatred for her faceless, nameless successor.

  But she would have to, because she knew him well enough to know that he shared her tendency for self-inflicted atonement. He would deny himself. He could spend thousands of years alone, refusing intimacy, and such stark solitude would drive any person mad. He must love again after she was gone, for the sake of his own soul.

  Then, too, there was her intimate knowledge of what her death would do to him; because of their bond, he would feel every less-than-noble emotion she endured, and every bit of the pain. She knew what it felt like to watch a loved one die. It went beyond hell.

  What if she had actually been able to feel her mother’s physical pain over the last few months? Her despair and her fear?

  Circenn would feel every bit of hers, unless she could somehow hide it.

  I can’t! I’m not strong enough!

  Frantic, she lunged to her feet, driven to movement.

  She walked swiftly, skirting the pool, gazing up at the heavens as if they might hear her and grant a prayer. Focused on the sky, she tripped and fell to the ground.

  It was the final straw. Crying, she huddled with her arms about her knees and began to rock. After a few moments she realized that she had fallen on the side of the mound and was weeping in probable chamber-pot remains.