Beloved Highlander

Her eye was caught by a man standing by the wall, conversing with a soldier in a red jacket and white breeches. Slim and fair-haired, he was dressed in a wide-skirted yellow brocade coat that had seen better days, knee breeches and stockings, and shoes with silver buckles. Despite the tarnish on the buckles and the stockings in need of a good scrub, he looked very fine for such a setting as this. A gentleman in a dung heap.

As he waved his slender hands in broad, artistic gestures, a voice in Meg’s head chanted: It must be him, it must be him.

This was just as she had always imagined….

She was beside him now, her face level with his, but he ignored her. “It’s too bad,” he was saying. “One has to travel miles to buy a decent pair of gloves!”

“Captain Grant?” She sounded strangely breathless.

Both men turned to look at her, but Meg had eyes only for one. With an aching sense of disappointment, Meg realized she no longer found his face aristocratic or refined. Instead, as he raked his gaze over her, he appeared unpleasantly sly, his eyes far too close together, his jaw far too narrow. And there was something unwholesome about him.

The chant in her head had changed.

Do not be him, it begged. Please do not be him!

Her wish was granted. The fop made a dismissive gesture with his artist’s hand toward an even gloomier part of the tavern. Relieved, Meg moved quickly through the crowd, easily avoiding the few patrons sober enough to reach for her. She was no longer afraid, just eager for this to be over.

“Captain Grant?” she called again, a little desperately now, her voice all but lost in the hubbub.

A brute with massive shoulders and wild hair pointed out a table, his finger unerringly directing her to the only occupant. A man sat with his back to her, slouched over the drink he held cupped in his big hands. Slowing to a stop, Meg let her eyes travel over him, widening with each inch. Even the voice in her head was silenced.

He was wearing a worn green jacket that pulled taut over his wide shoulders, and a faded plaid that appeared almost gray in the poor light. His hair was unpowdered, and it was not so much golden as fair brown, the color of honey, its untidy length caught at his nape. A ribbon of shock was slowly unfurling in Meg’s stomach.

This man was absolutely nothing like the Gregor Grant she had pictured in her mind for so long. His back was far too broad, his arms, resting on the table’s surface, far too well muscled, and his legs, stretched out from under his kilt, were far too long. He looked careworn and scruffy and far gone from drink. He was alone, with an air about him that discouraged company.

This isn’t him. This cannot be him.

“Captain Grant?”

Her voice came out sharper than she meant, and at the sound of it he turned his head, scowling nastily at being interrupted in his solitary drinking. Meg saw then that his eyes were amber coloured, gold as a wildcat’s, and slightly out of focus beneath slashing black brows. There were violet shadows beneath, and he had not shaved in a while. His cheeks were prickly with a stubble as dark as those fierce eyebrows. Oh, and he was handsome. Not in the delicate, fine-boned way she had imagined—there was nothing effeminate about Gregor Grant. His was a face that had lived and suffered, a tough masculine face, the face of a man who gave no quarter and expected none.

The Gregor Grant she had imagined had been a boy. This was a man, a man who would do no one’s bidding but his own. A man who was scowling up at her with the most fascinating and yet unfriendly eyes that she had ever seen.

Meg had come to find a dream, a wispy, insubstantial girlhood dream.

Before her was solid reality.

Chapter 2

A little earlier, Gregor Grant had run his fingers through his hair, lifting a swath out of his eyes and blinking about him. The light in the Black Dog was prone to be dim, could not help but be, with its low-beamed ceiling and warrenlike rooms. It literally soaked up the smells of ale, whiskey, woodsmoke, and its malodorous clientele. Gregor should know—he was a regular customer—but even so, in his present inebriated state, everything seemed worse than usual.

His body ached. Tough and fit as he was, the duel he had fought and won against Airdy Campbell in the crisp dawn had tested him. And Airdy’s sword had found a way past his defenses, slashing into the soft flesh of his upper arm. He should feel bitter, because Barbara Campbell, the cause of that duel, had promptly abandoned him, her hero, and gone back to her husband. Gone back despite Airdy’s defeat, despite all her declarations to the contrary.

But Gregor did not feel any more bitter than usual, just somewhat used. He had been a fool to listen to Barbara’s pleas for his help, her tales of Airdy’s cruelty and her own desperation. She had claimed she wanted to be free of Airdy, and Gregor had given her the opportunity. But instead of taking the chance he offered, she had promptly thrown herself back into trouble’s arms.

Gregor’s head throbbed.

He did not normally drink to excess; he was not the sort of man who needed to find oblivion in the bottom of his cup. Only occasionally did the past threaten to rise up and swallow him whole. Forgetfulness, however it was arrived at, was welcome then. This just happened to be one of those occasions.

The whiskey he had been drinking tonight was distilled in the hills, powerful raw stuff that singed the lining of the throat. It was very good for bringing on amnesia, to help him to forget what his life had once been and could be now, and was not. And yet for some reason, tonight, the spirit had had the opposite effect. One by one, his memories had come trooping out of the past and tapped him on the shoulder.

Glen Dhui.

In his mind he could see the turreted house, solid gray against the soft purple of the heather, keeping watch. His house, the house of his Grant ancestors. He still, in his heart, thought of it in that way. And it still stood watch, but the Grants were no longer Lairds of Glen Dhui. The Government had taken the estate after the 1715 Rebellion, after Gregor’s father died and Gregor was imprisoned. His mother and sister had fled to Edinburgh, into the arms of his mother’s family, and there they had stayed. For a time Gregor had chosen to wander, before he managed to beg himself a commission in the Duke of Argyll’s regiment.

Twelve years since Gregor had been home. Twelve years since he had had a home.

“Captain Grant?”