“Why do ye need to leave?”
Maggie shook her head. “One of my patients needs me. I can’t tell you any more than that.”
“And why not?” He crossed his arms over his chest, clearly used to being obeyed without question.
“Because people are entitled to privacy regarding their medical conditions.”
His forehead creased. “I’m understanding your words but not your meaning. If a man is ill, everyone in his village knows of it.”
Maggie rolled her eyes. “Yes, that might’ve been true three hundred years ago. Not so much anymore. In any event, what do you want to do?” She got to her feet and looked at him, one brow raised in a question mark.
“How far are we from Inverness?”
“About ten miles.”
“How much is that in leagues?”
“Not exactly certain, but I think there are roughly three miles to a league.”
“That isna so bad. I could walk if I chose to leave here. Probably a bit chancy to rely on magic.”
Maggie came to his side and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Leaving is not a good idea, until we get you different clothes. Magic’s not either, but you already realized that. No one is used to it anymore. Even witches take care to shield their spells.” She shook her head emphatically. “You need modern clothing if you’re going to wander about. I’d planned to buy you some. Let’s see, if you don’t come with me…” She considered alternatives. “Aha! This could work. Get up.” She clicked her tongue against her teeth and made a come along motion with two fingers.
Lachlan snorted. “I’m scarcely a horse for ye to cluck at. I will rise, but because I desire it, not because ye ordered me.” He flowed to his feet and gathered her into his arms. His green gaze snared her, and the corners of his mouth twitched with amusement. “Now, lass, are ye wanting a kiss afore ye leave?”
Of course I want kisses. Any woman would want kisses from you.
She wriggled loose. “No, silly. I wanted to get a better look at your body. So I can bring you home some clothes. As long as I stay with something fairly loose-fitting—”
“Aye.” He thrust his cloak aside. Next he unbuckled his sword belt and dropped the sword on the floor with a clatter. With the tiniest of flourishes, Lachlan began unwinding his kilt from his upper body. He was far too thin, but his body was unbelievable, simmering with barely repressed sexuality. Beautifully muscled shoulders and upper arms came into full view, along with a chest lightly sprinkled with tawny hair, as he pushed his shirt back on his shoulders.
Maggie’s throat thickened. Desire shot through her so intense she wondered if her knees would buckle. She held up a hand. “Stop. That’s all I need.”
His eyes twinkled merrily. “And are ye quite sure, lass? I could remove my plaid and take my shirt all the way off—so ye were certain to get the sizing correct.”
In spite of herself, her eyes travelled downward. The unmistakable swell of an erection belled the front of his kilt. Before she could stop herself, her hand snaked toward him. She yanked it back. “Quite certain. I—er, I have to leave. Now. If I get any closer to you, I’m not sure I’ll be able to drag myself out of here.”
“Really?” He cocked his head to one side and gave her the come-hitherest of looks, his expression ablaze with unmistakable hunger.
“Goddammit.” She took a step backward and willed her out-of-control libido to give her a break. “You know how drop dead gorgeous you are. I’ll bet those seventeenth century lassies fell all over one another to get a glimpse under your kilt.”
“Aye.” His voice was like liquid honey. “That they did. But I only let a few verra special ones take a peek.” He unwrapped another fold of plaid. The hard, flat planes of his stomach emerged, with slabs of muscle that descended under the fabric precariously draped around his waist.
Feeling dazed, half-drunk on lust, Maggie picked up her purse, looked around for her medical bag, and then remembered it was in the trunk of her car. “I really do need to leave. Are you staying here or coming with me?”
He thought for a moment. “Staying. I believe I shall bathe and await your return.”
Sudden joy bloomed inside her, so poignant it almost hurt. He’d be here when she got back. She’d been afraid he’d want to take off.
Watch it, Maggie. Nothing can come of this—beyond maybe the greatest sex I’ve had in my life.
Why not? Talk to Grannie. See what she has to say.
“Lass?” Lachlan looked at her with a quizzical expression, almost as if he could read her mind.
Maybe he can. He’s a centuries-old magician of some sort. “Nothing. It’s nothing. I shouldn’t be gone much more than a couple hours.”
“Excellent. I’ll warm the bed for you, once I’m clean.”
“No. You will not. This couch…” she pointed, “…makes into a bed. You’ll sleep there.”
A knowing smile flitted across his face. “Ye’re no maid, yet ye act like one. We will discuss the topic further upon your return.”
She started to ask how he could know she wasn’t a virgin but clamped her teeth together to keep the words from escaping. Discussing sex with Lachlan would just make her hotter and, damn him, he probably knew it. “Look,” she managed. “If you do decide to go out for a walk or something, leave me a note. Paper and pens are in the desk just over there.”
He was by her side so quickly, she didn’t see how he could’ve managed it. He closed his arms around her and slanted his mouth over hers. That delicious scent surrounded her as he plumbed her mouth with his tongue. His hands trailed down her back and cupped her ass firmly. His erect cock jumped against her belly. She’d just lifted her arms to hug him back when he let go and took a step back.
Lachlan grinned mischievously. “Aye, lass. Ye’re needing to be bedded, and by a fellow who knows his way about a bedchamber. ’Tis little enough I can do to repay you for your kindnesses to me. We shall pick up where we left off once ye return.”
“Oh, we shall, shall we?” she muttered, too tongue-tied to come up with a snappy rejoinder. She stumbled out the door on unsteady feet and then turned back. “Lock it after me. You turn this—”
“Things havena changed so much. I’ll figure it out. Go.” He made shooing motions with his tapering fingers. “The sooner ye leave, the sooner ye shall return.”
“Holy shit.” She glanced down at herself and clapped a hand to her forehead. “I can’t go like this.” She hastened back inside and loped to her bedroom. On the far side of the door, she locked herself in and shucked her cut-off shorts, shirt, and halter top, trading them for teal scrubs and a long white coat emblazoned with Margaret Hibbins, M.D. in navy blue script over the left breast pocket. She looked at her feet, decided her sandals would do, and prepared herself to run the gauntlet past Lachlan. Part of her hoped for another kiss—
Let’s get real, I’d love to rip that kilt off him and…
Stop it. I need to leave. He’ll still be here when I get back.
She aimed for a casual saunter down the hall and through her living room.
He eyed her appraisingly from the couch as she walked past him. “Fascinating. Do lassies never wear skirts these days?” He laughed, the sound low and musical. “I liked your other garb far better.”
She snorted. “I’ll just bet you did. It was comfortable but not very professional.” Not understanding what got into her, she blew him a kiss and escaped out the door.
With the taste of him still in her mouth and the scent of him in her nostrils, Maggie blundered down the steps and out of the building to her car. She wanted to rush back, make certain nothing evil befell him, but then she came to her senses. Whoever Lachlan Moncrieffe was, he’d been taking care of himself for centuries. If the evil he faced over three hundred years before was still after him, there’d be precious little she could do to fight against it.
She slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Talking to her grandmother suddenly felt more important than just ab
out anything else. She grappled for her cell phone, intent on activating its Bluetooth connection but then stopped. There were better ways to communicate with her grandmother. More private ones.
“Grandma. I need you.” Maggie waited. Sometimes it took a while for telepathic communication to work, particularly with the Atlantic Ocean standing between them. If they hadn’t been linked by blood, she doubted they’d be able to converse at all from so far away.
She was nearly at the hospital, when, “Yes, child, I see some of what is troubling you,” sounded in her mind.
“Tell me about the man,” Maggie demanded without preamble.
“He is old, and his magic is strong.”
“Do you know what kind of magician he is?”
A hesitation and then, “Yes.” The single word held a universe of meaning.
Maggie waited, but her paternal grandmother, Mary Elma Hibbins, remained silent. Maggie could picture the wraith-thin older woman, with her ageless face and waist-length black hair pulled into its usual braid. That hair had a few strands of silver, but not many. Right now, her grandmother’s finely arched brows were probably drawn together and her dark brown eyes pinched with worry.
Maggie pulled into the hospital’s lot and parked in the physicians’ parking area. She started to tell her grandmother they’d have to save the rest of this conversation for another day, when Mary Elma said, “I’ll be on the first plane I can catch. I’ll text you so you know when my flight arrives in Glasgow.”
“What? Why?”
Alarm sluiced through Maggie. It wasn’t that her grandmother never traveled. Quite the contrary, but to embark on an impromptu trip that would land her by Maggie’s side meant she was worried. Scratch worried. Her grandmother must be frantic. Maggie’s heartbeat pounded loud in her ears. Something had frightened Mary Elma—badly—and her grandmother didn’t scare easily.
“I’ll answer your questions once I get there, child. Don’t let the man leave your side. Be extremely careful. I see darkness around him. He’s in mortal peril, yet you can help. He is…one of a special breed. I’d thought them all long since dead. That he still lives is, perhaps, important in ways I have yet to discover. I must confer with the Coven Council.”
Mary Elma’s voice faded. Without being told, Maggie knew her grandmother severed the connection. “What the fuck?” she muttered as she got out of her car. Going around to the trunk, she opened it and hefted her medical bag. For the first time, she wished she’d shown more interest when her grandmother and aunts tried to teach her about her witch heritage.
Her parents died when she was only six, fighting a rival coven over rights to a special, arcane magic that slowed the aging process radically. At the time, no one explained much of anything to her because she was too young to understand, which left her free to form her own conclusions—none of them good. When she began to menstruate, the coven women took her under their wing—and were shocked she had absolutely no interest in her magical heritage. The way Maggie saw things, magic killed both her parents and robbed her of being raised by them. She wanted nothing to do with such a lethal, unpredictable entity. Not now. Not ever.
Despite many lectures from various relatives, she’d never changed her mind. It wasn’t accidental she chose a science-based career. At the time, she thought medicine was about as far away from witchcraft as anything could be. Maggie winced. She could still see the shrewd smile on her grandmother’s face when she pointed out that some of the most famous witches of all had been healers.
Maggie punched in a code and pushed through the hospital’s back door into the emergency room. A brisk head shake, and she forced herself to focus on the reason she was here, not ghosts from her distant past. The sting of antiseptic overpowered Lachlan’s scent. She hadn’t realized it still lingered around her. White walls and linoleum floors whizzed past as she jogged to the nurses’ station.
Before she could open her mouth to say a word, Chris sidled over to her, his hospital gown flapping. “And ye finally got here, eh. What did I interrupt? Some hot little love fest?”
Maggie couldn’t stop the heat that raced from her chest to her face. “Where I was is no business of yours,” she said brusquely. “Why aren’t you in your room?”
“Because I want to leave.” His tone switched from aggressive to plaintive. “They said ye’re the only one who can spring me.”
“That’s true.”
“That’s bloody unfair.” He pouted. “They give shrinks too damn much power.”
“That may be. How about if you lead me to your room, and you can tell me what happened.”
His bright blue eyes snapped dangerously, offering glimpses of the madness behind them. He shoved a hank of red hair shot with gray out of his eyes. At over six feet, Chris’s muscled frame was intimidating. As a younger man, he’d probably been attractive. At fifty, his face was deeply lined, and broken blood vessels suggested a too-intimate relationship with alcohol. “Aye, ye’re wanting to follow me to my room. Sounds like sexual harassment to me.”
Maggie shrugged. “If you’d be more comfortable, we can talk in the patient lounge.” She glanced meaningfully at him. “You need your clothes for that.”
“That’s just it. They took them away.”
Of course they did.
She altered her tone, making her words soft, non-confrontational. “It’s your call, Chris. What do you want to do? The sooner we talk, the sooner I can make a decision about where you need to be right now.”
He grabbed her arm. “Home,” he screeched. “I need to be home, you goddamned, fucking—”
“That will be enough. Take your hand off me.” Maggie squared her shoulders and met Chris’s gaze. If she let him bully her, she’d be dead in the water. Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw orderlies and nurses race toward them. In moments, they had Chris well in hand.
“Are you all right, Doctor?” Berta hustled to her side, gray hair escaping its pins. Her pale green eyes were screwed into a concerned expression, and her ample curves strained against the fabric of her white uniform.
“Yes, yes. I’m fine. Let’s get him back to his room. Physical restraints until I can talk with him, then chemical ones until we get him past this current break.”
An hour later, Maggie rounded up her purse and medical bag. It took far longer than she anticipated to deal with Chris, who’d taken a mixture of prescription drugs, followed by a healthy jolt of whiskey, and become hostile and belligerent when his sister interrupted his drinking. Good thing she’d happened along. If Chris continued to drink, he’d probably be dead, what with all the other drugs he had on board.
Maggie sighed. She’d signed orders to keep him in-house until he stabilized. After that, he really needed a board-and-care placement to make certain he took medications for his bipolar disorder and stayed away from other mind-altering substances. She pursed her lips and strode down the corridor, heading for the parking lot. The odds of Chris being even marginally compliant with whatever she mapped out ran less than fifty-fifty. While he may have dulled his mental processes from years of boozing, he was far from stupid. The drugs she prescribed made him feel like crap, while the ones he procured on the street amped his mania.
“Why didn’t I go into ophthalmology or dermatology—or even plastic surgery?” she muttered and got into her car. Maggie started for home, but then she remembered clothes for Lachlan and navigated to a shopping center where the stores stayed open late.
By the time she left a menswear shop laden with bags, she felt much better. The female shopkeeper had been a hoot as Maggie described Lachlan’s build. “Och, aye, lassie,” she crowed, “and ’tis a fair brawny lad ye’re shopping for. With those broad shoulders and long legs, how’s the rest of him equipped, eh?”
Maybe to defuse the tension from her truncated conversation with her grandmother and the drama at the hospital, Maggie laughed so hard with the shopkeeper that tears rolled down her face. She’d just dumped Lachlan’s jeans, sweaters, and jacket in
the backseat of her car when her phone trilled its text tone.
Grannie!
Maggie dug the phone out of her bag. Sure enough, it was indeed a text from Mary Elma informing her she’d be arriving day after tomorrow at six in the morning. Maggie’s nostrils quivered with annoyance. Why the hell did all trans-Atlantic flights to Glasgow have to show up at some ungodly hour?
Maggie mentally rearranged her schedule as she drove, so she could meet her grandmother’s flight. Maybe I’ll bring Lachlan with me. Sounds as if the two of them will be kindred spirits… Still running on autopilot, she pulled into the parking lot adjacent to her house and glanced up at her apartment. Days were long in June, yet it seemed odd he hadn’t turned on any of the lights. Her flat didn’t have all that many windows and tended to feel dark and shut-in once light faded from the day.
Perhaps he doesn’t understand how the switches work.
Balancing her purse and purchases, she locked her medical bag in her car and trudged up the steps to her flat. Maggie knocked softly, expecting Lachlan to open the door. When he didn’t, her heart rocketed into an erratic rhythm, and her throat felt thick. She pushed her fragile magic outward. It didn’t tell her a thing.
Big surprise. I never embraced it, so why should it help me now?
Maggie set the bags down in the carpeted hall and fished her key out of her purse with none-too-steady hands. She twisted it in the lock and pushed the door open. Knowledge struck her like a blow to the gut. Lachlan wasn’t here. She didn’t bother calling his name. Her flat felt empty without him in it. He had a vibrant energy, almost like a force field, and it was definitely absent.
Don’t panic. Maybe he left me a note like I told him.
Sure. That’s probably it. He got restless. Went out to stretch his legs.
Bullshit. Who am I kidding here?
She kicked the bags of clothes inside. Once they were out of the hall, she pulled the door shut and flipped on a light. Sure enough, a single sheet of paper sat atop her desk. She dropped her purse onto a chair and hurried over to it. In strong script, with many flourishes, he’d written an almost indecipherable note. After trying to figure out what was, in essence, an archaic form of English, she finally grabbed another piece of paper and wrote out the parts she knew. At length, she thought she had the gist of things.
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