Highlander in Her Bed by Allie Mackay Read Free Book Online

butter?
    Mara glanced aside, at the busy little bay with its sun shadows and silver-flecked water, the young man's words and his gently lilting voice painting funny images in her head and, oddly enough, making her heart do silly little flip-flops.
    For one crazy moment she imagined a small white croft house, low and thatched, with a plume of peat smoke rising from its single squat chimney. A rosy-cheeked woman sitting beside the hearth, a butter churn gripped between her knees as she furiously worked the plunger up and down.
    Scenes from another world, her father would have enthused with a dreamy smile. A forgotten simplicity sadly set aside in favor of today's hectic lifestyle.
    Celtic whimsy, she called it, catching herself before she, too, succumbed to Brigadoon fever.
    "How did you know who I am?" She sought neutral ground, a safe place far from such foolish notions and how they could set a vulnerable heart to thinking.
    Dreaming.
    "I could have been anyone," she persisted, nodding at a young woman leaning against the harbor rail not far from where they stood, an overstuffed rucksack at her feet. "Her, for instance."
    Malcolm's eyes lit with merriment. "Not a chance, Mara McDougall." He dismissed the possibility with a toss of his bright head. "That one doesn't have the look, see you?"
    "The look?" Mara swallowed. "I don't think I know what you mean."
    "Och, nay?" Malcolm peered at her, his expression saying so much more than the two oh-so-Scottish-sounding words. "I mean the look I saw on you when you gazed out over the pier, out toward the isles."
    Mara's face heated. "So?"
    "So?" Malcolm the Red lifted a brow. "You belong here, Mara McDougall," he said simply, his wonderful burr daring her to claim otherwise.
    And, heaven help her, but her mouth suddenly felt way too dry, her tongue too clumsy, for her to form even the weakest denial.
    Not as foolish as she felt standing on the pavement looking at him with a dumbstruck stare.
    Ben suffered no such inhibitions. Still snuffling around the Highlander's legs, the dog used a tongue-lolling grin and a few energetic tail swipes to convey his enthusiasm.
    Malcolm smiled, too, and produced something edible from a pocket, much to Ben's tail-thumping delight.
    "Aye, it's the pull that came o'er you when you looked at the Hebrides just now," he told her, something in his eyes as he said the words making her almost believe it. "No true Scot, no matter where he was born, can come here and not feel it."
    And she did feel it.
    Or felt something .
    Something indefinable and just a tiny bit… daunting.
    An uncomfortable awareness that things she'd cringed at in her father's plaid-hung, thistle-bordered house, like the doorbell playing "Scotland the Brave," didn't seem so outlandish here in this little Highland town with its scores of soft-voiced, red-haired men and the surrounding hills rising so clear against a blue summer sky.
    The young Highlander was watching her again, and closely, but before she could open her mouth to speak, he flashed another of his full-of-charm smiles and picked up her suitcase, hefting it easily under his arm.
    "Come, I'm after getting you out to Ravenscraig. They'll have a nice fire waiting on you, and tea," he promised, already heading for a small car parked a distance down the curb.
    "There's something you should know," he announced a short while later as they turned north onto the coastal road. "The good folk at Ravenscraig might seem a bit—"
    "A bit what?" Mara snapped to attention, shot him a quick, wary glance.
    She'd been staring out the window at the ghostly wisps of mist drifting down the sides of the hills and thinking about sitting in a comfortable wingback chair before a crackling fire in the hall, sipping a good lager or stout, Ben curled on a rug at her feet.
    Maybe even a tartan rug.
    But the thought failed to bring the chuckle it would have any other time, for something about the young Highlander's tone gave her the distinct impression that