Read Kiss of the Highlander for Free Online Page A

no longer in Scotland, but then she’d informed him he was a mere three-day hike from his home.
    Mayhap he’d lost several days, even a week. He shook his head, trying to clear it. He felt the same as he had once before when as a young lad he’d had a high fever and woken over a week later: confused, thick-witted, his normally lightning-fast instincts slowed. His reactions were further dulled because lust was thundering though his veins. A man couldn’t think clearly when he was aroused. All his blood was being sucked to one part of his body, and while it was one of his finer parts,
cool
and
logical
didn’t describe it.
    The last thing he remembered, prior to awakening with the English lass sprawled so wantonly atop him, was that he had been racing toward the little loch in the glen behind his castle and growing unnaturally weary. From there, his memories were blurred. How had he ended up in a cave, a three days’ hike away from his home? Why couldn’t he remember how he had gotten here? He didn’t seem to have suffered any injury; indeed, he felt hearty and hale.
    He struggled to recall why he had been running toward the loch. He paused, as a tide of fragmented memories washed over him.
    A sense of urgency…distant voices chanting…incense and snatches of conversation:
He must never be found,
and a curious reply,
We will hide him well.
    Had his petite English been there? Nay. The voices had been oddly accented, but not like hers. He quickly discarded the possibility that she had aught to do with his plight. She didn’t seem the brightest lass, nor particularly strong. Still, a woman of her beauty didn’t need to be; nature had given her all the gifts she needed to survive. A man would use all his skills as a warrior to protect such lush beauty, even had she been deaf and mute.
    “Are you all right?” English nudged his shoulder. “Why did you stop, and please don’t let the light go out. It makes me nervous.”
    Skittish as a foal, she was. Drustan pressed the tiny button again and flinched only mildly this time when the flame issued forth. “The month?” he asked roughly.
    “September.”
    Her reply hit him like a fist in his stomach: the last afternoon he recalled had been the eighteenth day of August. “How near Mabon?”
    She regarded him strangely, and her voice was strained when she said, “Mabon?”
    “The autumnal equinox.”
    She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “It is the nineteenth of September. The equinox is the twenty-first.”
    Christ, he’d lost nearly a month! How could that be?
He pondered the possibilities, sorting and discarding until he struck upon one that horrified him because it seemed the only explanation that fit the circumstances: once he’d been lured to the clearing, he’d been abducted. But assuming he had been abducted, how had he lost an entire month?
    The unnatural exhaustion he’d experienced while running toward the glen suddenly made sense. Someone had drugged him in his own castle! That was how his captors had managed to take him, and apparently they’d been keeping him drugged.
    And that someone could even now be returning to the cave to force him to slumber again. They would not find him so easy to take captive a second time, he vowed silently.
    “Are you all right?” she asked hesitantly.
    He shook his head, his thoughts grim. “Come,” he warned before he dragged her along behind him.
    She was so small that it would have been easier to toss her over his shoulder and run with her, but he sensed that she would vociferously resist such treatment and he cared not to waste time arguing. She was fine-boned and petite, yet prickly as a hungry boar. She was also lushly curved and scandalously clad and stirred a cauldron of lustful urges in him.
    He glanced over his shoulder at her. Whoever she was, wherever she was from, she was unaccompanied by a man, and that meant she was going home with him. The lass made his heart pound and his blood roar. When he’d