Return of the Highlander (Immortal Warriors) by Sara Mackenzie Read Free Book Online Page A

bridge as soon as they were able and, wood being a rarity, had sent for sturdy hardwood to be carted to Loch Fasail. No mean task.
    “So, Maclean, a railing low enough so that wee children didn’t slip through.” The woman tapped the page and smiled as if such a thing amused her. Or maybe pleased her. “Not so black-hearted, after all.”
    “’Tis a matter of practicalities,” he said angrily. “Every winter children die, and children grow into men and women who work my land and fight for me againstmy enemies. I need them all. Why would I no’ save them if I could?”
    His face felt hot. Something about the woman’s knowing smile made him uneasy, as if she saw things he preferred she did not. He glowered at her a moment more, but it did no good, so he went to explore the rest of the cottage. There was little to see. He noted gloomily that the rooms were poky and chilly, and halfway up the narrow stairs the lights went out. He paused, listening to the woman cursing and bumping into things in the darkness.
    “Aye, now you’re no’ smiling,” he muttered with some satisfaction, and continued on. The darkness did not affect him. It was as if, like him, it did not exist.
    Upstairs there was a room with a shiny bath fixed to the floor and a thing with a lid that looked enough like the water closet he’d had built in Castle Drumaird to make him think a man might piddle in it, and another bowl, shiny like the bath, with a cake of soap in a little dish nearby. Next he found the chamber where she slept, under the slope of the roof. The height of the room was uncomfortably low, even worse than those downstairs. Maclean tried to straighten, expecting his head to pass through the ceiling, but instead it hit the wood with a dull crack.
    Cursing, rubbing his skull, he spent some time examining her belongings. Female things, fripperies, he thought with disdain, and yet he was curious enough to peer into the open pots of cream. They smelled like her, sweet and fragrant. There was a bristle brush for her long dark hair with some of the strands caught in it still. Clothing of many colors lay untidily on the bed, thematerials different from any he had ever seen. Did no one spin and weave anymore? In Maclean’s time the women of the glen wore a plain shift with a skirt and jacket over it, and over that an arisaid, the female equivalent of the plaid.
    There was a looking glass, but when he went and stood before it he had no reflection.
    Frustrated, he turned to the table on the far side of the bed. It was swept clean. Even the second pillow had been removed from the bed.
    The man really was gone, and it did not seem as if he were returning.
    Had she driven him away as the man had seemed to be accusing her? Maclean had disliked the man, but that did not mean he should take the woman’s side in this matter. A man’s thoughts and feelings must always come first. Man was superior to woman, and Maclean did not believe two hundred and fifty years had changed that fundamental law.
    Still…“The lass shouldn’t be alone. She needs a man to care for her, to warm her in the night, to make children in her belly.”
    His voice sounded deep and unsettling in the quiet room.
    Was that why she had been grieving when he looked at her through the window? Was it sorrow for the man who had left her, or because she was now alone?
    Maclean realized then what the unwelcome emotion that consumed him earlier had been as he stood watching the woman cry.
    Need. Want.
    The woman was alone; he was alone. She suffered,too. He could comfort her, maybe, and she could help him to understand what sort of world this was that he found himself in. Of all the people he had seen so far, only she was real to him. He wanted to be real to her.
    He wanted to be again.
    Gingerly he sat down on the bed and was surprised when he didn’t sink right through it. There seemed to be rules to his invisible state after all. He could not touch flesh, or be touched by it, but now