Page 17 of Highlander’s Curse (The Daughters of the Glen #8)
“Absolutely not.” She shook her head emphatically, setting the long tail of curls swaying back and forth in a tantalizing dance at her shoulders. “I mean, don’t get me wrong; like I said, he’s a great guy. I’m just not, you know, into him.” She shrugged one shoulder and looked down at her beer.
Her admission was a relief to hear, though he told himself it was only because he didn’t want to see her involved with a Nuadian. After all, his priority was returning to his own time and he needed her safe and healthy in order to send him home.
“Okay, so I came clean. Now it’s your turn. Why are you really here? I assume your showing up tonight isn’t some random accident, so why did you come looking for me?”
The serving woman’s return with their food bought him a few minutes to gather himself, but not nearly long enough now that he actually faced telling her what he needed to.
“I need yer help.” Of course he did.
Abby continued to chew the bite she’d forked into her mouth, though what had started out as truly delicious had quickly taken on the feel of just so much mush.
Disappointment roiled in her stomach. What had she expected?
That his one night with her had sent him scurrying across the Atlantic hunting for her?
That maybe he dreamed of her every single, wretched night, just as she dreamed of him?
That sort of thinking obviously would be the epitome of stupid, now, wouldn’t it?
She flickered her gaze in his direction, darting her eyes away just as quickly when she found him staring at her.
Stupid of her, yes, but you’d think a great-looking guy like Colin MacAlister would have more than enough experience with women to at least lead her on for a bit.
Appeal to her vanity, maybe. Lull her into thinking he had a thing for her.
To, at the very least, try to make her feel like he actually had some tiny bit of interest in seeing her for, well, for her.
But no, he was here because he needed something from her, and he wasn’t making the slightest effort to hide the fact.
Was it she who’d always claimed she valued honesty in a man? She might have to reconsider that particular “virtue.” A little white lie to soothe her wounded ego wouldn’t have been so awful.
“Perfect,” she muttered before she reached for her mug and downed a deep swallow, waiting for the dark liquid to wash over her throat.
If they liked her, she didn’t like them.
If she liked them, they wanted something from her.
“All right, fine, I’ll bite. What exactly do you want from me?
” Must be a doozy of a request considering he’d gone to all the trouble to hunt her down.
“I want to go home.”
“Pardon me?” Home ? She looked up in surprise, meeting his gaze this time. “What do you mean, you want to go home? Go. I’m not stopping you. I didn’t make you come here in the first place.”
“But that’s exactly what you did. You and yer wishing.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she denied, even as the warmth of guilt heated her neck and face. How could he possibly know she suffered from some massively stupid infatuation over him? That he’d haunted her dreams since the day they’d met?
“It’s no ridiculous at all. It’s the Magic.”
Magic ? Her heart pounded so hard she thought everyone in the noisy bar must be hearing it by now. Was this his way of telling her he’d come to find her because he felt the same bizarre attraction she did?
“So what does that mean? Magic. That you like me? Is that why you hunted me down? Because you like me?”
He sat back in his seat, his expression what she might expect from someone who’d just discovered his dining partner had an extra foot growing out the side of her head, toes wiggling.
“I like you well enough, lass, but that’s neither here nor there. We’ve a need to discuss why you summoned me and, more important, how yer to send me home.”
Again with sending him home. Abby carefully placed her fork across her plate and slowly steepled her hands in front of her, struggling to find some appropriately clever and witty retort. She had nothing.
“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
When Colin leaned forward, his eyes glinted with something that looked remarkably like anger. Abby fought down the urge to back away from him.
“No? So what yer telling me is that you’ve no idea that you used the Faerie Magic to wish me here, to yer time.
Seven hundred years into the future you drag me.
And though I’ve no way back to my own time but to fulfill some purpose of yers that brought me here, you willna even disclose to me what that purpose is so that I might complete yer blighted task and get back to my own life.
It’s no even of any consequence to you that the lives of my kinsmen depend on my returning. That’s what yer saying, is it?”
“Seven hundred . . .” Abby paused, staring at the man sitting across from her. He was kidding, right? He had to be kidding.
But no, there was nothing in his expression, nothing in his serious blue eyes, that said anything even close to kidding . This man believed the giant, steaming pile of BS he was spewing.
“Okay. That’s it. Done.” She stood, catching up her handbag and slinging its strap across her chest. “Don’t bother to ask me to dinner again, okay?
And you know what else? Since you ruined my meal, thank you very much, you can just pay for it.
And make sure you leave Mrs. Duncan a good tip while you’re at it, too. I am out of here.”
She didn’t bother to wait for his response, pushing her way past the men lined up at the bar. The air in here had grown too thin, the walls somehow moving in closer to one another, making her feel trapped and just a bit woozy.
Outside, breathing in the clear evening air, she stopped, looking first toward the bed-and-breakfast and then to her right, off toward the empty tree-lined road that led outside the village and beyond.
She needed some time to think. Some time to regroup. Some time to decide whether she wanted to scream in anger or cry with disappointment.
At the B and B she could escape to the relative privacy of her room to deal with all this, but more than likely Jonathan waited there, and of all the things she was in no mood for, he was at the top of the list.
No, he’d just dropped to number two on the list.
Besides, number one on the list might very well come hunting her with more of his send-me-home drivel, and if he did, the B and B would be the most logical place for him to look.
That made the decision easy enough.
Turning to her right, she adjusted her purse strap high up on her shoulder and headed out, her pace picking up as she approached the edge of the village limits.
Damn it! Of all the times she’d imagined seeing Colin MacAlister again, of all the times she’d dreamed of him, not one of them had turned out even remotely like the last few minutes. Damn it all to hell!
At what point had she made the fateful leap that had sent her hurtling into bizarro world? Instead of simply picking guys to like who didn’t like her back, now she was picking men who apparently needed heavy medication simply to function in normal society.
Medication that Colin apparently had been skipping lately.
For the past few months she’d allowed her imagination free rein, skipping along blindly without a protest as she’d almost convinced herself the hunky Highlander was actually The One, for no better reasons than because he’d haunted her dreams and got her totally hot just thinking about him.
And look what she’d gotten out of indulging in that little fantasy.
The man of her dreams, literally, was a total loon, babbling on about needing to be sent to his home seven-freaking-hundred years ago.
“Stark raving lunatic,” she growled, walking even faster.
She wanted to kick something. Or hit something. Or simply stomp her feet up and down while screaming at the top of her lungs.
Worse, worse, way worse than his being a loon, was what all this meant about her.
She was an idiot of gobsmacking proportions.
Because, loon or not, just thinking of him, of his perfectly sculpted features, of the scent that filled her nose when he was close, of the way his hands felt on her skin, or the way his voice soothed her soul—all of it made her want nothing so much as to be with him.
If what she experienced wasn’t crushing in a major way, she couldn’t even begin to imagine what it could be.
Other than serious mental illness, maybe. Perhaps Colin MacAlister wasn’t the only one in need of medication.
Slowing to a stop, she stared off into the distance, listening to the sound of her own racing heart.
She’d left the outskirts of the village behind and reached an area where the road narrowed. Steep rock walls as high as her waist hemmed in both sides of the lane out here, stretching off into the distance.
It was quiet here. Lonely. The perfect place to confront herself.
“I am way too smart to be this stupid.”
The affirmation, intended to bolster her confidence, echoed back at her off the rocks in a mocking parody.
Now that she’d stopped moving, Abby realized the bottoms of her feet burned like crazy and she considered for the first time her poor choice of footwear.
Flip-flops were hardly intelligent stomping-off-in-a-huff shoes and were even less practical should she need to scramble over one of these rock walls to avoid any vehicle careening down the narrow lane.
Not to mention, now that she thought of it, how noisy they were, flapping against her feet when she walked.
“And total gravel magnets,” she grumbled under her breath as she braced a hand against the rock wall to balance on one foot in order to remove the tiny, irritating pieces of gravel lodged between her feet and the soles of her shoes.