Highlander Protected: A Scottish Time Travel Romance (Highlander In Time Book 3) Read online

  Highlander Protected

  A Scottish Time Travel Romance

  Rebecca Preston

  Illustrated by

  Natasha Snow

  Edited by

  Elizabeth A Lance

  Copyright © 2018 Rebecca Preston

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Natasha Snow

  Edited by Elizabeth A Lance

  Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Mailing List

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  About Rebecca Preston

  Also by Rebecca Preston

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  Chapter 1

  “And what question do you have for the moon and stars this day?”

  Marianne dropped her voice into the low, husky quality that people seemed to expect from a witch, performing an intricate gesture with her painted nails as she did. Not that her client could see her, of course, but it helped her keep variety and energy in her voice. Everything was connected, after all. She stared meditatively out the window beside her little cubicle, trying to focus as the woman on the phone droned anxiously on and on about her worries in the kind of voice that suggested a story that had been told a thousand times at least. Marianne tried hard not to stereotype (as so many of her colleagues did) but the more clients she handled, the harder it was to resist the “two types of people” categorization enthusiastically espoused by her exasperating friend and colleague Magenta.

  “It’s all money or men, honey,” she intoned in a voice roughened by cigarettes – Marianne could see her now, waving the smoke out of her face with a musical jangle of bracelets and rings. “Money or men, that’s all there is.”

  This lady was the latter category. She’d been with her boyfriend for nearly five years, but every time she mentioned anything serious like marriage or moving in together, he’d dodge the subject. She was going into excruciating detail about their most recent conversation, in the middle of which the man had started playing a video game, and though Marianne knew she was paid by the minute, she couldn’t help but cut her off.

  “And what do you need to know about him, my love?”

  “Just what he’s thinking!” The poor thing sounded distraught.

  Marianne resisted the urge to tell her that the guy sounded like a waste of space and she’d be better off on her own – she’d called a phone psychic, not a phone jaded-third-wave-feminist, after all.

  “Do you need his birthday and stuff?”

  “Yes please, my darling,” Marianne intoned, and the woman began to rattle off a long list of times, places and other details. Humming agreement, Marianne did not write any of it down. Astrology was Magenta’s strong suit. She’d never quite gotten the hang of it, herself – but she knew enough to make a clicking sound with her tongue when her client reported with acute despair that the boyfriend was an Aquarius. “Give me a moment, my dear. We will consult the mystic forces… of the Tarot.”

  Propping the phone on her shoulder, Marianne made some vague humming sounds as she tapped at her smartphone’s screen, opening the Tarot app she used for these consultations. She liked the app because it made a very pleasant (and audible) card shuffling sound. Clients were pretty old-fashioned when it came to Tarot cards, in Marianne’s experience – they liked to picture her surrounded by smoke and crystals, meditatively shuffling a deck of worn cards soaked in the wisdom of the ancients, all heavy eyeliner and incense. Unfortunately for them, Marianne Brownlee didn’t look much like a witch. A tall, regal-looking woman with straight black hair, she moved with an unconscious grace and confidence that had most casual observers guessing she was in business – management, probably, pretty high-up (just like her auntie.) She liked painting her nails, yes, but makeup was usually a little too much effort, especially the level of eyeliner commitment that was generally expected of a witch. She could never get the wings straight. Nor was she really old enough for a witch – people tended to expect either a wizened crone, or at least a woman in her mid-forties, someone roughened by time and experience like Magenta. Marianne was twenty-seven. Not a very witchy age. Thank God it was just phone calls. “Ah, my dear girl. The cards have spoken.”

  “What do they say?”

  “The Five… of Cups.” Clients loved a dramatic pause. This woman actually gasped, and Marianne raised an eyebrow. “Are you familiar with the Tarot, my dear?”

  “Not at all. What does the Five of Cups mean?”

  “It means loss, my darling.”

  A crestfallen sound. “But...”

  Marianne cleared her throat. She’d been told off more than once by her supervisor for being too much of a downer – especially when it came to deadbeat men. “But the cards do not speak in generalities. They speak to us individually. They must be interpreted in the full, rich context of our lives. Tell me, my love… what are you willing to lose, for this man?”

  “Everything.” The woman’s voice sounded tinny on the phone, but determined.

  Marianne felt a pang of real empathy. “Then my dear,” she said softly, meaning it, “you must be willing to lose him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only if you embrace the potential to lose everything will you open yourself up to the possibility of gaining your heart’s desire. My dear—” she hesitated a little – damnit, the woman had given her, her name at the top of the call, what was it — “Hannah. Hannah, can you be strong?”

  “For him, yes.”

  Marianne’s husky Witch Voice slipped a little. “Can you be strong for yourself?”

  “Yes,” Hannah replied, a little less certainty.

  “Then Hannah, what you must do – is invest in yourself. Focus on your own life. Invest time and energy in your career, in your hobbies, in your family – in the things that make you who you are. How can you expect him to love and commit to you, unless you love and commit to yourself?”

  “The cards say that?” Hannah didn’t sound thrilled with the advice.

  “They do.”

  “Okay. Great. Thanks.”

  Marianne sighed after she’d hung up the call with her usual (and mostly scripted) intonations about fate, destiny and the stars. They were encouraged to personalize as much as possible, but it was draining to inject these rote calls with real commitment. Hannah would probably call back a week later with some new manifestation of the same old problem – which wasn’t that she was doing something wrong,
but rather that the guy she was with didn’t deserve her. It was exhausting. At least the people calling about money weren’t blinded by love.

  Loss had been on Marianne’s mind a lot lately. She’d been back in touch with her aunt – her father’s sister, a side of the family that she hadn’t seen much of since the painful decision to cut him out of her life for good. But her aunt had been desperate. Her daughter, Cora – Marianne’s cousin, who she remembered mostly as a good-natured, slightly bossy, pragmatic girl who was determined to heal the world somehow – had gone missing, and Marianne, as the designated black sheep of the family, had been suspected of harboring her, for whatever reason.

  “Why would Cora run away from the family? She’s always been a good little Catholic girl.”

  Marianne had been thrown off by the phone call, irritated by her aunt’s imperious, accusatory tone – and she hated being reminded that her father was still alive, still out there, harming everyone and everything he touched. His sister wasn’t nearly as bad, but she was enough like him to set Marianne’s teeth on edge – even the way she spoke, those crisp, dispassionate vowels. She hardly knew the woman. Theirs wasn’t a family that spent much time together.

  “I don’t know, Marianne. I don’t know much of anything, at the moment. Are you sure you haven’t heard from her?”

  “I haven’t heard from anyone since my excommunication,” Marianne snapped. “You all made sure of that.”

  Hesitation in the woman’s usually cold voice. “Marianne, what happened was – unfortunate.”

  “No shit.”

  “But please. For Cora’s sake. Will you tell me? If you hear anything? Just that she’s – safe?”

  It was the word that her aunt hadn’t said — ‘alive’ — that made Marianne soften. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you, Marianne.” Another unusual hesitation. “And for what it’s worth – your father may want you exiled from the family, but I don’t. You’ll always be my niece.”

  There had been a long, long silence before Marianne responded, and it was only the memory of a puzzling Tarot reading she’d done earlier that evening that stopped her from snapping at her aunt. The Knight of Swords, reversed. Think before you speak. She hadn’t been expecting any calls, so it had puzzled her, but here it was, coming up as the cards usually did. What good would it do to lash out, here, at a woman who had lost her daughter, at a woman who’d also had to deal with William her whole life?

  “Thanks,” she murmured, finally, and she heard her aunt let out a breath on the other end of the phone, a sound of relief. “Be well.”

  “You too.”

  Now, Marianne clicked idly around on the computer that took up part of the desk in her cubicle – it was there to manage and keep track of the calls she took, in theory, but it mostly entertained her between clients. There were a whole lot of silly Internet flash games out there. But it was news articles she was preoccupied with these days – missing persons reports from across the country, a series of haunting photos of lost people. It had been two months since Cora disappeared, and the tired old details scrolled past Marianne’s restless eyes for the thousandth time. The last anyone had seen of her was at a memorial service for a patient. Her car had been found wrapped around a tree a few miles from her house, her handbag and phone left on what remained of the passenger seat. No blood, no body, no sign at all that anyone had even been in the car when it crashed. A curious case, by all accounts, but two months on with no word from Cora and the police were beginning to give up on the case.

  For a practicing witch, Marianne had always been reluctant to actually use her magic. For her, her practice had always been about insight and wisdom, guidance from a kind of formalized, externalized but still personal source of intuition. Magic was about knowing what to do, not waving a wand and enforcing your will on the world willy-nilly. She’d lit a candle every night and willed focus, courage, and clarity on the people who were searching for Cora. But whenever she reached out for insight about her cousin, that bright, brave girl, she was met with – nothing. No intuition, no inklings – even her Tarot cards frustrated her. (The Six of Swords, several times – a hunched figure in a boat, headed away. Transition. Retreat. Healing. Travel over water? All Marianne’s associations with the card failed to apply here.) She had candles on her desk, and a salt cellar that she’d brought in back when she started the job and had actually intended on performing magic for her callers – before she’d realized that they just wanted to be told what they already knew. Now, she usually used it for her lunch.

  With a quick glance around to ensure that her colleagues weren’t watching her, she upended the cellar and drew a quick circle that incorporated the base of the monitor as well as the candle (unscented – Magenta had sensitivities, and a nose like a bloodhound.) There was a photo of Cora up on the screen from one of the missing persons’ reports, and Marianne stared at it as she took a few deep breaths, expanding her ribcage and settling her heartbeat.

  “Hey,” she murmured, her voice sounding nothing like the one she put on for clients, as she lit the candle with her cigarette lighter. “Goddess. It’s me.” It was a spell she’d found on Google once, frustrated by the loss of her car keys – and she’d been only a few words into it when she’d remembered putting them on top of the fridge. Whether or not it was appropriate to use a Lost Keys spell for an entire human being, Marianne wasn’t sure, but it couldn’t hurt.

  “Someone’s lost in time and space,” she murmured, eyes on Cora, adjusting the words on the fly to describe a person and not a set of keys. “Bring her to her proper place.” A gust of wind blew through the office as a gaggle of phone psychics burst through the door from a late lunch, laughing uproariously about something. It scattered the salt and blew the candle out. On Marianne’s empty chair, her phone screen lit up with a call that was destined to go unanswered, the Tarot app still open on a reading she had accidentally made while turning the phone off. The Tower.

  Chapter 2

  It was like coming out of a dream. One of those really strange dreams, where all the rules of reality were fragmented, but because of the nature of dreams, the mind followed along. I guess I was always an air hostess on a plane to Mars, inhabited exclusively by every single one of my ex-lovers, the brain would think, woodenly, because confronting the lingering traces of doubt would shock the dreamer into waking up from the dream.

  Marianne had a lot of dreams like that. Every time she woke up, she was exasperated that she’d allowed herself to believe such ridiculous things for so long – but her exasperation was never quite enough to stop her from falling right into the same trap the next night.

  Cold air bit savagely at her exposed skin. Her boots – black Doc Martens, relatively new and still more or less pristine – sank not into the bland carpet of her office, but dirt, twigs and leaves. Not that she could see especially well with the fog that swirled around her body and obscured her view of what definitely, absolutely was not the muted beige walls of her workplace. Not a single cutesy poster of a cat to be seen. Instead, huge, towering trees surrounded her on all sides. These were not the kind of trees she was used to in her suburban environment. They seemed wilder somehow, more untamed. Frightening. And the air smelled strange, too – no hint of traffic smog, or Magenta’s obnoxious ‘all-natural’ perfumes (mostly essential oils – peppermint was her favorite, and it always made Marianne gag when she got too close), or even the stale popcorn smell that never seemed to leave the office microwave no matter how many times it was wiped out with a paper towel and surface spray. God, she never thought she’d miss the minutiae of work.

  Marianne took a few deep breaths, teeth chattering a little in the biting cold. Jeans, a T-shirt and a cardigan just absolutely were not cutting it here in this foggy forest in what felt like the middle of nowhere, or the end of the world. She took a step, then another, because staying in the one spot felt a little like drowning, and with the simple familiarity of motion, her brain began to tick.
/>   Something had happened, clearly. This was not the usual state of affairs. Was it a hallucination? She’d never experienced anything like it before – not even at the handful of college parties she’d attended in absolute secret, where hand-rolled cigarettes had circulated with meaningful eye contact. She’d never heard of spontaneous hallucinations that were this – total. Even the most realistic among her strange dreams had a certain hollow unreality to them – an incompleteness, a failure of detail. When she looked down at herself, she saw every detail of her slender frame, every fold of her clothing, every inch of her favorite cardigan (including the slight unravelling on the left sleeve, where Magenta’s incorrigible old cat had caught his claw in it.) Besides, the air was cold enough to hurt when she breathed it in through her nose. No matter how weird her dreams got, they never actually hurt.

  Not a dream. Not a hallucination. Then – was this a vision?

  Belinda was a much better witch than she was. Belinda was always carrying on about the messages and visions she received from the cosmos, the walks she went for in the spirit world. Marianne had always assumed she was speaking allegorically – but maybe this was what she was talking about. After all, the last thing she could remember was calling on the Goddess, lighting a candle, and forming a circle of salt – had her magic brought her here?