Bad Boys In Kilts

by Donna Kauffman

  As he reached the steps leading to the back door and mud room, a loud, shrieking noise pierced the sound of the storm. He paused, but with the thunder and heavy rain, it was impossible to know what he’d actually heard. Typically the only sounds that floated through his valley, other than those created by Mother Nature, were the sheep baaing and dogs barking as they went about their chores. Whatever that had been didn’t fall under any of those headings.

  When the sound didn’t repeat itself, he opened the rear door and shuffled inside, shooing Jinty in before him, then closing it with a heavy rattle behind him as the wind helped drive it shut. He’d go investigate if need be when the rain died down a little. Probably just a tree down and the wind having its way with the wayward limbs. It was amazing the odd echoes of sounds the valley and mountains could create.

  The dog gave a good shake as Tristan dropped his pack and grabbed a towel off the stack. “Good work out there,” he praised her. She wriggled under his ministrations, loving nothing more than a good towel rub. With another shake when he was done, she bounded from the room and set to prancing in circles in front of the kitchen pantry just beyond.

  Tristan chuckled. “I’m coming, just hold up a minute.” He took a second to drag his boots and socks off, then peeled out of his sodden shirt and pants as well, leaving him in cold, wet boxers. “The hell with that,” he grumbled, and dragged them off as well. One of the blessings of living out in the midst of nowhere. And he much doubted any of his tenants would be dropping by with a grievance this stormy evening.

  Giving his own shoulder-length hair a good rub with a fresh towel, he shook it out much as Jinty had hers, then wrapped the towel around his hips as he padded into the kitchen. “What’s on the menu tonight?” he asked her, as he opened the doors to the pantry and looked at the canned meat on the shelves. He dumped some dry kibble in her dish, the mere sound of which made her all but quiver in paroxysms of pleasure, then cranked open a can of corned beef and dumped some of that in as well. She worked hard, so if he spoiled her a little, well, who was to know?

  She danced out to the kitchen with him and sat next to her water dish, tail going like a propeller against the hardwood floor. Tristan popped her dish to the floor and gave a dry smile as she dug in with gusto. If only it were so easy to please everyone who depended on him, he thought. “Cans of corned hash for all!” he announced with flair, waving his arm in a beneficent gesture in front of him, as if king to kingdom. Shaking his head at his own folly, he contemplated heating the rest of the can up for himself, then decided a shower sounded like the better option at the moment. Maybe if he felt half human, he’d find the energy to actually cook something up.

  He paused by the peat stove and stuffed in a few fuel bricks, feeling a chill in the air that went beyond his damp, mostly naked state. Though warm enough during the day, the late October nights were considerably cooler of late. He wound his way through the living area toward the rear bedrooms. He’d converted the smaller of the two into his personal office—even though there was an outbuilding housing his official one, he liked being able to work here when he could—leaving the larger bedroom with the en suite bathroom for himself. There was another bedroom off the far side of the main house, with a second full bathroom wedged between it and the kitchen, ostensibly for guests. Though, over the years, it had housed only his brothers on the rare occasion that one or the other came out to share a bottle of the family whisky and opted not to head home until morning.

  He was halfway through the front room when he noticed oddly angled shafts of red light piercing the rainy night beyond his front windows. Backtracking, he peered through the panes of glass, but the heavy rain made it difficult to see. Then a crack of lightning split through the gloom and he got a momentary flash of the track road leading to his house. And that’s when he remembered the screeching noise he’d heard before stepping inside.

  The red beams of light belonged to the brake lights of a small car, the rear of which was presently jacked up on the low stone fence that ran alongside the track road, next to the storm gully, which handled the overflow of stream water during heavy rains.

  A second flash of lightning showed that those storm waters were rapidly rising. And that the front end of the car was already submerged.

  Chapter 2

  Well, won’t I have the last laugh now?

  That was the last thought Bree Sullivan had before she lost control of her car completely. She could see the headlines now:

  INTERNATIONALLY FAMOUS AUTHOR

  SWERVES TO MISS SHEEP, DIES A WATERY

  DEATH BEFORE DELIVERING NEXT

  BLOCKBUSTER NOVEL.

  Followed, of course, by the one millionth article explaining, in detail, why nothing she might have written could ever have hoped to match the phenomenal, best-selling, record-breaking sales of her first and only novel, Summer Lake, anyway.

  If only she’d done something clever, like have six more connected books already outlined and ready to go, sales all but guaranteed. But no, the former small-town Missouri librarian hadn’t thought ahead to her obvious future as a sudden celebrity. She’d totally failed to foresee that the entire free world would be rushing out to buy her first book, thereby turning her little world completely upside down. And silly her, she hadn’t foreseen that she would spend a whirlwind ten months plugging her suddenly hotter-than-DaVinci novel on locations around the globe she’d never dreamed of visiting, while being interviewed by celebrity newscasters she’d formerly only seen on her television set. Where they’d been interviewing actual famous people. Not quiet little Bree Sullivan from Mason, Missouri.

  Now, almost eighteen months after Summer Lake had first hit the shelves, she could hardly remember the woman she’d been back then. The one who’d led such a sheltered life that she’d been bowled over by an invitation to do a local radio talk show about her book. The same woman who’d all but swooned, certain she’d really hit the big time when she’d been invited on that local morning talk show in St. Louis. Sure, she’d dreamed of having some modest success, enough to hope that someday she could quit her day job and write for a living ... but even her fertile writer’s imagination hadn’t extended much beyond that. Hell, she’d been thrilled just to see the book in print.

  Then the invite had come to be on The Dave Stevens Show. Oh, wow, she remembered thinking, to be flown to the big city and be on national television? Well, her world just couldn’t get any bigger. Ha.

  If she’d only known then what was about to happen, she’d have stayed in Mason and kept her day job. She’d have clung to her normal, middle-class, Midwestern lifestyle with everything she had. But no. Hot, edgy, controversial talk show host Dave Stevens had seen the local St. Louis spot and picked up a copy of her book. Hosting the first daytime show geared toward men, Dave had intended to use his ratings-grabbing, confrontational format to needle her about the value, or lack thereof, of sappy romance fiction. He would drill her on why women fell for such delusional claptrap, after which they’d give the men in their lives a hard time for not measuring up to the book’s fantasy hero.

  Only instead, when he’d read the book in preparation for the show, he’d shocked himself by liking it, and had ended up doing a twist on his own format by making himself the butt of his own confrontational style, putting Bree in the interviewer’s seat—and grabbing the highest ratings ever for a daytime talk show. He’d ended the show by daring his male viewers to pick up the book and read it with a significant other.

  “Guys, if you want to understand what women want—and trust me, if you want to get any on a regular basis, you do!—read this book. It’s like an instruction manual for clueless men.”

  She couldn’t have devised a more brilliant marketing campaign if she’d thought it up herself. Her publisher was over the moon, her agent immediately began to field offers. In less than one week, all hell had broken loose. Summer Lake sold faster than they could print and ship it out. It topped every best-seller list and stayed there. Going from
the summer’s must-read beach book, to everybody’s book club pick for the fall, to the must-have stocking stuffer for the holidays. You weren’t considered cool and in the know if you couldn’t debate in detail which of the three lead heroines you most identified with, or which of the three heroes you’d most like to sleep with. By spring, she’d been the subject of one of David Letterman’s Top Ten lists, made the cover of People magazine—not once, but twice. She’d attended actual film openings in Hollywood and London, wearing clothes by designers she’d only read about, and had her book fought over in a much-publicized battle by two major studios for film rights, which had eventually gone for over seven figures, with all six lead roles claimed by the hottest reigning box office stars.

  But no—for some silly reason, Bree had stupidly never foreseen that particular, mind-blowing, once-ina-lifetime, winning-lottery-ticket-like future, and so she had only written a single, stand-alone novel, with no obvious follow-up spin-off. What had she been thinking?

  And so the inevitable had happened. As the first anniversary of the book’s release loomed, the paperback version hit the stands and renewed the buzz all over again. Everyone had been asking when the next book was coming out, but now the questions were impatient, edged with concern that maybe her success had all been a fluke. Well, of course it had been a fluke, she’d wanted to shout. So, at first she’d laughingly told interviewers that she hadn’t exactly had much time to write lately, thinking it was nice that they were at least interested enough to ask. And, at first, they’d laughed along with her, all the while gushing over her overnight success story.

  But now her diehard fans had turned into an unruly mob, with the press fueling the flames every chance they got, all demanding to know when—or if—she’d deliver the goods again. As if it were a given that she had a litany of blockbusters floating around in her brain, just waiting for the chance to get jotted down. Journalists began to speculate, quite nastily at times, that she would flame out as a one-hit wonder. Bree Sullivan Backlash erupted. As if she’d asked for the fame and the fortune in the first place! And now, by not feeding the hungry hordes, it was as if she was intentionally not making good on that unspoken promise.

  She’d been hounded to the point of going into seclusion to avoid the inevitable cross-examination. So her publisher had happily taken up where the media had left off. After all, she had signed a deal for two books—which had thrilled her to no end at the time—and, dollar signs floating in their eyes, they would love to know when she planned on getting that next one turned in. Everyone wanted to cash in while she was still hot, everybody wanted a piece of her. None of this was exactly conducive to her creative process, which had abandoned her completely somewhere right around that St. Louis talk show a million years ago.

  She fought to keep the car on the road after swerving to miss the sheep that had suddenly appeared in her headlights. But there was no saving it. The back end of her car slid from the road, slinging gravel and mud everywhere before plunging into a water-filled gully, which surged the back end up onto a low stone wall ... and shoved the front end nose-down in the rushing water.

  It all happened so fast. It was so dark, the wind so strong, the rain so heavy, that the whole event was a veritable blur to Bree. She’d been fighting unfamiliar terrain, the sudden loss of light, the ratcheting winds and pelting rain on one mountain curve after another. She hadn’t even been aware she’d descended into a valley, so snake-like was the track road she was on, until the strobe-light effect of the harrowingly powerful, ground-shaking lightning strikes had illuminated a stretch of fenced-off fields ... and what looked like a rapidly swelling stream. She’d made it across the single-lane bridge, but then had been plunged back into the worst of the storm.

  Shoulders hunched, heart in her throat, neck long since gone completely stiff, it was almost a relief to have the battle finally over, even if it meant losing. Because, hey, by dying, she’d rob them all of the chance to continue the endless, nauseating speculation about what, where, and, most importantly, when, her next effort would finally appear. And it served the double bonus of saving her the global-scale humiliation and embarrassment of proving the gleeful naysayers right. Six months of staring at her laptop screen had produced exactly nothing. Nothing worth publishing, anyway. If only this particular solution didn’t, by necessity, include the actual death part, she might have signed up right then and there.

  Instead, she fought back, grappling with the wheel and stick shift, but a sudden overdose of adrenaline combined with bone-deep fatigue and abject terror served to rob her of whatever driving skills she’d managed to amass since going AWOL before dawn this morning and running away from her life. It had been hard enough in calmer conditions to sit on the right side of the car, keeping track of the brake, gas, and clutch pedals, using the regular arrangement of feet while shifting gears with her left hand ... and combining all that with driving on the wrong side of the road.

  She heard someone scream as the car screeched along the stone wall, yanking the back end up and sending her slamming forward as the nose end of the car was sucked immediately into the rushing gully waters. Only then did she realize, as the echoes reverberated through the interior of the car after the motor instantly cut out, that it had been her.

  “S—seat belt,” she stammered, her body beginning to tremble as the enormity of the situation began to really hit her. She immediately grabbed at the straps and began yanking, before finally getting a slight grip on herself and her rising hysteria. “Latch, unlatch it.” Hoping the rational sound of her voice would calm her down, she tried to take a few deep breaths, but immediately began almost convulsively gulping air, as if her body thought the car was already filling with water and drowning was imminent. The belt mercifully popped free, which had the unfortunate result of plunging her chest-first into the steering wheel due to the steep forward pitch of the car.

  She glanced wildly around the passenger seat of the rented car for her purse, her computer bag, as if those things really mattered at a time like this. Like she had anything on the computer worth saving, anyway. But they had been thrown to the floor on the passenger side, out of reach, the steep pitch sending them halfway up under the dash. The tiny two-seater had little room for maneuvering in general, but at its current angle, she had none at all. She felt the panic rise again as she tried the door handle and found it wouldn’t budge. Electric locks. The windows were electric, too. With the motor dead and flooded, nothing worked.

  “I was only kidding!” she shouted. “I don’t want to die, dammit.”

  She was wrestling around in her seat, trying to push herself back with her legs so she could angle toward the door, try and see if there was any manual way to pop the locks. Why-oh-why had she let her British editor talk her into renting such a teeny beast of a car? She wasn’t the hot rod type. Hell, she wasn’t the type to jet set over to Britain and take up residence in a four-hundred-year-old manor house, either, the guest of a baron no less, in an offer of solitude to write her book.

  Yeah. That hadn’t worked out too well. Baron Farthing-ham had let it slip that she was staying with him. At a grande ball, no less. By dawn the gates and walls surrounding the place had been besieged by press and fans alike. When she hadn’t appeared to talk to them, the tabloids had taken up the gauntlet. And the Brits thought Americans were rude. She’d been shocked at some of the headlines:

  BITCHY BREE BAGS A BARON!

  ALL PLAY AND NO WORK EQUALS NO BOOK

  FOR LOYAL FANS.

  DIVA SULLIVAN TOO BUSY TO CARE?

  She could only imagine what they’d say now. Maybe she wouldn’t be quite having the last laugh after all. “It sure doesn’t feel too funny at the moment,” she said between gritted teeth as she tried and failed to pry up the little nub of a lock on the door.

  A sudden pounding on the passenger window made her scream. And there was nothing ambiguous about who had made the sound this time. Someone was out there, in the storm-ravaged gloom.

&nbs
p; A rescue! Oh, thank God.

  Except, she was out in the middle-of-nowhere Scotland. Which pretty much described the highlands, as far as she could tell. Before the storm she hadn’t seen so much as a red phone booth for hours. Who in the world would happen to see her car go in a ditch way the hell out here?

  She looked at the window as her rescuer peered inside. . . and got her answer. A deranged lunatic.

  She choked on a terrified scream as her throat completely closed over. Staring in at her was what appeared to be a very naked man, with long, wet hair plastered to his head and face in stringy ropes. A naked man with a very determined look on his face as he banged repeatedly, almost violently on the passenger window, shouting something unintelligible at her.

  Death by drowning suddenly looked preferable.

  Chapter 3

  “Release the locks!” Tristan shouted again. One of the rear tires had ridden up onto the low stone wall, tilting the car at an odd angle, and burying the front end of the tiny sports car into the storm-filled gully. But with the force of the water pushing at the side of the car, it could go at any second, and when and if it did, it would likely turn over. And right onto him. The driver’s side was propped up too high and too close to the wall for him to fight his way to that side, which left him here, dangerously downstream. And there she sat, like a fish in an empty bowl, waiting for it to fill up. Idiot woman would like as get them both drowned before he could get her out of there.

  He tried the door, but it was still locked, so he banged on the passenger window again, motioning to the top of her windshield. “Unlock the top!” Between the wind and the raging rain, not to mention the windows being up and sealed tight, maybe she wasn’t hearing him. But she was sure as hell staring at him. Why in bloody hell wouldn’t she just put the damn top down and climb out?