First Time with a Highlander

by Gwyn Cready

  Gerard shifted but didn’t lower his fists.

  Duncan rolled his eyes. “Och. If you’re so worried about protecting her, why don’t you join us while we chat? I have a sneaking suspicion ye’ll be no’ too happy with her when we’re done.”

  Four

  The sun was brighter and his head was clearer, and as he entered the suite’s living room, Gerard, despite his preternaturally bad nearsightedness, saw that the suite’s living room was someone else’s living room—someone with his grandmother’s taste in decorating. He felt as if he’d walked into a Dickens’ novel—bed warmers by the fire, sconces on the wall, rough-hewn wood floors. Panicked, he spun in a circle, searching for something he would recognize.

  Duncan caught him by the shoulder. “Relax, mate. It’ll all make sense soon. Well,” he added, reconsidering, “that’s a bit of an overpromise. Let’s say it will all be explained soon. But you’re in no immediate danger, comments regarding Serafina’s robe notwithstanding.”

  “That wasn’t about her robe,” Gerard said, irritated and increasingly disoriented. “Or her. That’s what an old boss used to say about expensive whiskey. ‘You cannot rush the moment. Good whiskey is like a woman of the world. She opens her robe slowly.’”

  Duncan’s lip curled. “Was that supposed to be a French accent? It’s god-awful, ye ken?”

  “Pardon me. My powers of mimicry have been overwhelmed by your hospitality. Would you mind telling me where we are?”

  Duncan pointed to a spindly legged settee next to Gerard.

  “I’ll stand, thank you.”

  Duncan shrugged. “Your call. We’re in Edinburgh.”

  Gerard sank into the settee, speechless. “Pennsylvania?”

  “Seriously? That’s the one that popped into your head?”

  The night had obviously been filled with activity Gerard didn’t recall, as the random shards of memory and bare-legged woman seemed to attest, but travel?

  “I…um… We shot an ad in a college stadium there once,” Gerard said, trying to process this information. “The marching band wears kilts.”

  “Let’s hope for your sake you don’t find that odd. And, no, not Pennsylvania.”

  The woman emerged. His shirt was gone, replaced—to his way of thinking at least—by a much less interesting gown. The mass of orange-blond curls had been pinned up. Without his glasses, her face was still elusive, but he could sense a simmering and attractive energy there. He could also sense she had no desire to speak to Sasqua-Scot.

  Gerard rose instinctively, ready to insert himself into a fight.

  “Relax, Romeo,” Duncan said. “We’re all friends here. Have a seat.”

  The woman remained standing, so Gerard did as well.

  Duncan heaved a heavy sigh and sat down himself. “I can tell this is going to be a long morning.”

  “I dinna know this man,” Serafina said to Duncan, “or what he was doing in my bed.”

  Duncan templed his fingers and cocked his head in Gerard’s direction. “Do you know her?”

  Gerard shifted. The level of threat appeared to have subsided a bit, but he also didn’t have his shoes, his shirt, his glasses, his cell phone, or a clear idea of where he was or how to get out. “It depends what you mean by ‘know.’”

  Serafina reared back. “How would you like to get to know the toe of my boot?”

  “He has ground to stand on,” Duncan said flatly. “You were practically naked. I’d say he knows something about you, if only your shirt size.”

  She made an irritated sniff.

  Duncan went on to Gerard, “Apart from whatever may have been exchanged in the transaction involving the shirt—and please dinna feel the need to tell me—do you know her? Her name? Her family? Where she comes from? Anything?”

  Anything? Well, the scent that wafts off her skin is the olfactory equivalent of cocaine. Her legs are the color of vanilla gelato and look just as rich. She brims with a smoky incandescence that makes me want to buy her a drink, tell her a dirty joke, and vaporize in the detonation that follows. I’d like to grab a handful of those curls and feel the spring of postcoital perspiration in them. More than that, I’d like her to pull a curl loose right now, just for me. But do I know anything?

  He shook his head. “She has red hair.”

  The woman snorted. “Deft observer of mankind, are ye?”

  “A thousand pardons. If I had my glasses, I have no doubt I would bowl you over with my powers of detection.”

  At once he was seized with a perfectly clear vision of him dropping her on a bed in slow motion, her flame-colored curls fanning out across the linen like rays of a setting sun. What had gone on between them?

  He looked at her, shocked, and she, for the first time in their brief acquaintance, lowered her eyes. She sees it too!

  “What do you remember about last night?” Duncan asked.

  Gerard froze. Then he realized Duncan wasn’t asking about the vision but the final moments in his hotel room.

  “Not much,” Gerard said. “I had a drink. Whiskey.”

  “The robe, aye. Nothing else? Just you, a glass of whiskey, and a bed?”

  With a coy smile, Gerard, unable to help himself, lifted his shoulders. “Well…”

  Serafina made a noise of disgust he hadn’t heard since his gran caught him spreading Marshmallow Fluff on his toast.

  “And it wasn’t a glass,” Gerard added. “It was a bottle, a very old bottle. With the name…” He squeezed his eyes shut to summon the image of that embossed word. It appeared, but so did another vision, this one far less enchanting than the one of Serafina on a bed. It was three men on a dock beside a huge, dark sea, and he and Serafina scrambling in terror when the men began to chase them.

  “Kerr?” Duncan said.

  “Pardon?” The vision disappeared but the rapid firing of his heart did not.

  “The bottle. Was it Kerr whiskey?”

  Gerard stared at Duncan in amazement. “How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  A subtle change came over Serafina with the name of the whiskey. A look of uneasiness replaced the general irritation on her face, and one hand quested nervously for its mate.

  She inhaled sharply, then immediately hid her surprise in a mask of unconcern.

  Duncan hadn’t been watching and swiveled when he heard the gasp. But Gerard had, and the image of what he’d seen almost made him dizzy.

  There, on the fourth finger of Serafina’s left hand, sat a slim gold band.

  Five

  Nearly deafened by the blood roaring in her ears, Serafina stilled the hand in her pocket and fought to remain calm.

  “What is it?” Duncan eyed her suspiciously.

  “I bit my tongue.”

  He cocked his head farther.

  “It’s fine now.”

  The other man had seen something, though what, she wasn’t sure. He looked at her as if she were a Highland ox whose horns had sprouted thistles. All she remembered clearly about the night before was that he’d appeared to her sometime after she’d first sipped the adulterated whiskey, though he’d been no more than a shade, his translucent image waxing and waning like mist on a loch. Wide jaw, the shoulders of a smith, hair as gold as a wagtail’s breast—the man was no trouble on the eyes. The more she drank, the clearer his image had become—though the foggier her apprehension of it—until at last she’d slipped into a thick, hibernating sleep, like a child after a summer fair, floating through hazy, happy dreams filled with random glints of remembered pleasure.

  But the waking glints, beginning to arrive with increased regularity, were stirring an emotion closer to concern. The man’s hand, running lightly down her back. A hurried run down a dark dock. Tugging the waist of a man’s breeks—beautiful wool breeks, whose rich, gray fabric caressed her fingers, as soft as the fur o
f a baby rabbit.

  She couldn’t stop herself. Her eyes flew to the man’s breeks. Oh, God! Gray wool!

  When she looked up, he was looking right at her. Her cheeks exploded in flames.

  How could any of this have happened without her remembering it? The answer, she told herself, is because it didn’t.

  But the ring…

  She wriggled her fingers in her pocket, desperately hoping the solid, immutable gold was gone. But it wasn’t.

  Unbuttoning a man’s breeks was one thing—and she prayed it was the last in the series of unorthodox activities she appeared to have engaged in the night before—but marrying him? How far out of her senses had she been?

  She felt dizzy, as if she might faint, and she too lowered herself onto the settee.

  “Well, look at this,” Duncan said. “A pair of woebegone twins.”

  “I have reason to be woebegone,” Gerard said, straightening.

  “Do you?” Duncan said. “Let me guess. You have no idea where you are or how you got here, and you have something important to do tomorrow?”

  Gerard visibly plumped, like a frigate bird trying to attract a mate. “Monday, actually,” he said. “I’m about to be voted a partner in my firm.”

  Duncan regarded the man with renewed interest. “What sort of firm?”

  “Advertising. Piper Cornish.”

  Duncan laughed a short laugh. “Blimey. At least I had bookkeeping to fall back on.” He held up his hands. “Sorry. I shouldn’t laugh.”

  “Did you just say ‘blimey’?” Serafina had noticed a subtle change in Duncan from the moment he’d burst into her room. She couldn’t quite describe it, but it was as if he had thrown off a too-small frock coat and was enjoying a freedom of movement he hadn’t had in a long, long time. He talked differently. He sat differently. He even moved differently.

  Duncan coughed and reddened. “Aye, well, it was something my ma used to say. It means ‘oh, dear’ or ‘och.’”

  Gerard stared at Serafina, frowning. “You’ve never heard ‘blimey’ before? You’re a Brit, aren’t you? Or am I right? That accent’s really a fake?”

  Serafina couldn’t have been more surprised—or insulted—if he’d called her a whore, though considering the relationship she appeared to have developed with his breeks, the accusation in that case might have been deserved.

  Duncan laid a calming finger on her hand, which had balled itself into a fist.

  “I am nae a ‘Brit,’” she whispered, hot with fury. “Nor is my accent false. Though yours might be. I’ve nae heard such an ear-churning mix of bleats and barks in all my life. Where, might I ask, does such cacophony originate?”

  “No reason to answer that,” Duncan put in quickly. “We have other fish to fry here.”

  “Look,” Gerard said, anger rising, “I don’t understand the weird performance art you two have running here, but enough is enough. Either tell me what’s going on, or pantomime a death scene for me and let me get the hell out of here.”

  “You’ve never seen her before, then?” Duncan said.

  A knock sounded at the door. Before Duncan could rise to answer, the door opened. The inn’s housekeeper stepped in with an urn of fragrant coffee. “Oh, there the two of ye are,” she said to Serafina and Gerard. “You asked me last night to be on the lookout for unsavories from the docks. There are three of ’em downstairs, and they dinna look like they are looking for a game of push-the-hoop.”

  Six

  Gerard’s stomach tightened. Whatever unpleasantness the Scot offered, it was nothing compared to the men he remembered from last night. “This is bad.”

  The men’s voices grew louder as they tromped up the inn’s stairs. “I’ll go any damned place I please,” one of them said in a voice instantly identifiable to Gerard. The hair on his arms stood on end.

  Duncan strode to the door and closed it. “Go,” he said, pointing to Serafina’s bedroom. “I’ll handle them.”

  And it was then that Gerard saw the same sort of ancient pistol on Duncan’s belt he’d seen on the belts of the men in the visions. The contents of his gut curdled.

  “We need to get out of here.”

  He pulled Serafina from the settee and hurried her through the bedroom door and locked it.

  “Were we at a dock?” he whispered.

  The men’s knock rattled the hallway door.

  “We need Undine’s magic to undo this,” she said.

  Gerard didn’t know this deity who answered human entreaties, but he was beginning to feel a distinct need to fall to his knees and beg for help himself.

  Serafina ran to a door on the adjoining wall and threw it open.

  “She’s not here,” she said, crestfallen. As best as he could tell, the room beyond was a bedroom much like the one in which they stood.

  Either the deity made earthly visits, or Undine was a mortal with more interesting things to do than hang around waiting for her friends’ lives to implode.

  “We need to get out of here.” She ran to the window and looked out.

  “I’m not leaving Thor to the bad guys.” The guy might have been a pain in the ass, but you never left a man behind.

  “Thor, as you call him, is perfectly capable of taking care of himself. And he has a pistol.”

  “Come in, come in.” Duncan’s voice carried through the closed bedroom door, full of relief and bonhomie. “You have the hands of a surgeon, I’m pleased to see. Did ye bring your cauterizer? My piles are as hot as a blacksmith’s coals.”

  Gerard was impressed. Now, there’s a man who could sell dish soap.

  Serafina had already grabbed a handful of clothes and opened the shutters. “C’mon!”

  He snagged his shirt from the floor and ran after her. She was descending a ladder, whose presence triggered another memory flash.

  “We used this last night,” he said, astounded. “I remember.”

  “Did we?” Serafina said evasively.

  “God, man, put yer kilt down!” one of the dock men cried. “I’m nae a surgeon, and I have no wish to look at your bloody arsehole!”

  Serafina grabbed Gerard’s hand when he reached the bottom and tried to pull him toward the street.

  But his legs were frozen.

  There, before him, was a screeching, bustling, stinking scene from an Elizabethan commercial gone wild. He couldn’t see much, but what he could make out astounded him. Horses pulled wagons through the streets, kicking up clouds of red dust. Barking dogs circled a man carrying something feathery. Women in all manner of long dresses hurried from storefront to storefront. Somewhere, a tin whistle played, and the notes were pure and clear. The scent of garlic cooking filled his head as well as the more pungent smells of burning wood and human waste. And the men—the men!—in dingy shirts and gigantic plaid wraps—red, green, blue. He saw more colors here than he saw on women most days in Manhattan. And there, rising above the tops of the houses across the street, stood the blurred but familiar outline of a castle.

  He collapsed against the ladder and nearly slid to the ground. “He meant Edinburgh, Scotland, didn’t he?”

  “Of course he meant Edinburgh, Scotland. Are ye daft?”

  The last syllable of her “Edinburgh,” so different from his, had been swallowed in that deep well of reverberation found in the throat of every Scot.

  “What year is this?” he asked, on the verge of terror.

  “Oh, God, not again.” She yanked his arm harder. “I canna go through this again!”

  “What do you mean ‘again’?” he said, barely avoiding a speeding carriage as he shrugged on his shirt.

  She hesitated long enough for Gerard to know she knew something.

  “What happened last night?” he demanded. “What do you know?”

  She pulled him down a close, one of those remarkable Edinburgh
artifacts that were part darkened alley, part apartment hallway, and part barely navigable crawl space.

  “I don’t know everything,” she whispered. “But I remember some things—and I definitely answered that question for you. You were bawling like a wee baby.”

  “I was not.”

  “You were practically bawling like a wee baby out there,” she said, pointing to the street. “It’s 1706, and stop buttoning. You canna wear those clothes.”

  1706?

  “Take them off,” she commanded.

  “Wait. What?” Gerard searched his head for what he knew about the turn of the eighteenth century. The answer, it seemed, was remarkably little. It was the start of the Age of Enlightenment, after Plymouth Rock and before the Continental Congress, both of which had happened half a globe away. He dug in the storage closet of his memory and shook the dust off the threadbare remnants of his secondary education for something of British history. Two queens—cousins, he recalled—and a beheading. Shakespeare. And something about corn.

  A door opened, and a woman with a boy at her feet and what looked like a musket resting in her arms came into view behind Serafina.

  “Take off your clothes,” Serafina repeated.

  “Is he bothering ye?” the woman asked Serafina.

  “Am I bothering her?” Gerard held up his palms. “You are hearing this, aren’t you?”

  “Nae,” Serafina replied. “Just a wee skirmish about his breeks.”

  The woman lifted the stock to her shoulder, and something made a small, metallic click. “I’ve not known a man to refuse a lady’s proper request regarding his breeks. In my experience, your sex usually can’t get them off fast enough.”

  “Oh, we-ll,” Gerard said theatrically. “As long as the lady has made a proper request.” He unzipped his fly, looked at the women, and made a prim about-face. “And what, pray tell,” he said, kicking his finely tailored trousers to the cobbles, “would you have me wear instead, or do the folks in 1706 prefer bare asses?”

  One of the women giggled, and he was willing to lay odds it was Serafina.