Troubled By The Highlander: A Scottish Time Travel Romance (Highlander Forever Book 6) Read online

  Troubled By The Highlander

  A Scottish Time Travel Romance-Highlander Forever Book 6

  Rebecca Preston

  Illustrated by

  Natasha Snow

  Edited by

  Elizabeth A Lance

  Copyright © 2020 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

  VIP Reader Club

  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

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Preview of Highlander Found

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  About Rebecca Preston

  Also by Rebecca Preston

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  Chapter 1

  They always said doctors made the worst patients.

  Karen Frakes turned over restlessly in her bed, grimacing a little as even that slight movement made the room lurch and spin. She'd spent her whole career working hard, pushing herself to her limits and beyond every single day, determined to be better, sharper, stronger every minute that passed… and now here she was, stuck in bed and barely able to sit up. It was hard not to feel frustrated. Easy enough to tell a patient they needed rest if they wanted to recover… much, much harder to take that advice from yourself. Or from another doctor. Even if they were her colleagues, there was just something so grating about the way they looked at her, tucked up in bed like this… feeling utterly useless and more than a little frustrated to have fallen sick.

  That was meant to be rule number one, for an epidemiologist and medical doctor like Karen and the rest of her team. She'd been meticulous with her infection prevention — checking and double-checking her protective gear whenever she visited a patient, sanitizing herself thoroughly wherever she went, obeying regulations to the letter. She'd always been a stickler for that stuff — almost to the point of annoying everyone around her (and that was saying something, in their line of work.) But somehow, she'd still managed to fall sick.

  And it sucked being sick far from home. That was what she felt most keenly as she languished in her bed, impatiently waiting for the illness to lift so she could get some work done. Tunisia was a beautiful place, and while she'd been well, she'd enjoyed what she'd seen of the capital city Tunis, where she and her colleagues had been sent as part of a delegation from the National Institute of Health. And it was a good hospital to be sick in, that was for sure. But overall, feeling as wretched and miserable as she did, she'd have preferred to be home in her own bed.

  But that wasn't an option. Hadn't been for a couple of weeks now. She and her group had been sent over when a strange new respiratory condition had been observed in the city. From what they'd gathered, it was an airborne virus, with symptoms similar to a common cold or flu… but in a considerable percentage of cases, the fever got quite serious indeed. There had been enough deaths — and the spread had been fast enough — to alarm the World Health Organization and cause a spike in media coverage around the world. So, the NIH had sent them over to investigate, to work in the hospital that was taking in the more serious cases.

  When Karen had gotten sick, the disease had just been granted epidemic status. Now, she didn't quite know what was happening. Ever since her fever had started spiking, her colleagues had refused to discuss work with her, insisting that she focus on getting well before she tried to keep working through a pretty serious illness. It was aggravating. Ninety percent of cases didn't require hospitalization at all — the fatigue, fever and respiratory symptoms made them pretty uncomfortable, of course, not to mention contagious, but they were generally safe to stay home and recover there in quarantine.

  Karen had hoped that she'd be one of those ninety percent — after all, she was young, she was in good shape, she was hardly a member of a more at-risk group when it came to the disease. When she'd started noticing symptoms and the test had come back positive, they'd put her in a hospital bed just for convenience — there were plenty to spare, after all, and it saved her a trip back to her accommodations. But as the days had gone on and her symptoms had gotten worse and worse, it became clear that hospitalization had been the best thing for her.

  Frustrating! Incredibly frustrating, she thought, the spike of annoyance followed by a familiar wave of dizziness as her fever and malaise made it clear that strong emotion could wait until she was better. There were so many better things she could be doing with her time than languishing here in a hospital bed like some kind of… invalid. Ever since she'd been a little girl, she'd been a terrible patient when it came to getting sick. Her mother had had to almost tie her to the bed to get her to stay home from school when she was unwell… she'd lie in bed, gripped with anxiety that she was falling behind at school, wasting time just lying around in bed. That had been when her interest in medicine had started, actually. She'd always loved school and missing it because of a cold or stomach bug made her furious… so she'd started, at age ten, doing her research. She'd learned about the importance of hand washing, how diseases were transmitted — then she'd stumbled upon research about the immune system. It had fascinated her utterly… and, she remembered with a smile, it had been a little flame that her parents had enthusiastically fanned.

  And here she was, twenty years later, working for the NIH. It was her dream job — had been ever since she was a little girl. And though the chances of getting sick had always been slim, and she'd always laughed her mother's concerns away, now she felt a little guilty. She sat up slowly, reached for her phone as she gritted her teeth through the nausea. She'd told her parents she'd fal
len ill, though she'd understated the severity of the condition a little… her mother fretted too much at the best of times. It was just a nasty flu. It'd be gone soon…. and she could get back to work dealing with it.

  The worry, of course, was that it would spread to other countries. So far, the spread seemed to be contained locally… but they had their concerns about the disease's incubation period. So far, it was looking like symptoms took between a week and ten days to show themselves — and some evidence also suggested that patients were contagious during almost that full period. That spelled disaster. When Karen had gotten sick, they'd been in talks with the local government about instigating some quarantine procedures for the more vulnerable members of the public — the elderly, people with chronic lung conditions or who were immunocompromised, or very young children. She wondered how all that was going now. Nobody would speak to her. This illness, she knew, had the potential to be of worldwide interest… every move they made right now was critical. It was frustrating as hell that nobody was keeping her abreast of what was going on… but she knew that it would be infinitely worse for them to risk getting infected by her. That was why they weren't visiting as much. She understood. She'd have done the exact same thing if it had been one of her team mates, and not her, in this bed.

  But it was her. And it was awful, as much as she was trying not to think about it. The fever was all-encompassing, a dull, sick presence that made her head swim. She felt inches from unconsciousness all the time — it was an active effort to stay awake, to stay focused on the here and now. Her body felt like a complete stranger to her… weak and exhausted, she could barely raise a hand without feeling like it weighed a thousand pounds. And in the back of her mind, a lingering fear — one that had hung around since she was a child, one she'd never quite managed to banish entirely — a fear that this was worse than she thought, a fear that the disease's fatality rate just might be about to get another number…

  But that was ridiculous. She was a thirty-four-year-old non-smoker in excellent health. She wasn't going to die — she was just going to feel like crap for a few days, and then she was going to recover, and with any luck she'd get some immunity from the disease out of it. That was, unless it mutated again… early days, still. Sighing, Karen expended the last of her energy and rolled over, her eyes drifting shut as she settled into a deep, deep sleep.

  Chapter 2

  Wet and cold, that was the first thing she became aware of. Her clothing was soaked through with what felt like cold water… and the air around her, bracing and sharp. She shivered, still deeply asleep, feeling her limbs stir and shift as she struggled out of what felt like the deepest sleep of her life… where was she? What was going on? Flashes of her whole life danced in a confusing tangle around her face — her apartment back home in Georgia, her parents' house, the hotel in Tunis, the hospital room… none of it seemed to fit. Confusion warred with her exhaustion. Had she been moved? What was going on?

  Fighting hard, she opened her eyes, grimacing a little at how sleep-encrusted they were. She reached up with one hand to wipe some of the grit from her eyelids and realized that her white-blonde hair had come down — she usually kept it pinned up, but she must have disturbed it during her sleep. But that quickly became the last thing on her mind as she felt an unmistakable shove in her shoulder and looked up to see a sheep peering curiously down at her.

  A sheep. Patiently, Karen waited for the dream to clear up… then frowned as the world came into sharper and sharper focus. It was sunny, that was the first thing she noticed — her hospital room had been all interior walls, without so much as a window to look through. But that wasn't all. Rather than lying in a hospital bed, she was sprawled out among wet grass, with a blue sky above her and the gentle sounds of water not far from where she lay. But that was impossible.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" she croaked at the sheep. Seemingly offended, it turned and trotted away from her, bleating indignantly — she saw it join a small group of other sheep and they shambled off together across what was unmistakably a grassy field. Blinking hard, she looked around her. To her left, a grassy field, rolling away toward thick trees. To her right… an enormous body of water, ringed by a rocky beach. A lake, she assumed — though she had no idea what lake it could be. What was the nearest body of water in Tunis? And how the hell was it so cold? It had been the height of summer when they'd arrived, and northern Africa wasn't exactly chilly during its long summer days.

  Was this some kind of vivid hallucination? She looked down, frowning a little. She was still in her hospital pajamas, and she was shivering in the cold of the morning. It was morning, wasn't it? The sun was still low in the sky, but there was a freshness to the air that told her it was early. Where the hell was she? How the hell had she gotten here? And more to the point — what the hell had happened to her fever? She felt good as new — aside from the lingering drowsiness of having been awoken from such a deep sleep. Had she dreamed herself well? Dreams were never this vivid.

  The sound of shouts on the air disturbed her from her confusion and she sat up straight, surprised to see a couple of horses approaching. There was an old man on one, wearing strange clothes — they struck her as profoundly medieval, for some reason, though she couldn't put her finger on why. He was in his fifties maybe, a skinny older man with a worried look on his face, and it was clear from his body language that he was deferring to the man on the other horse.

  This guy made her sit up and take notice. He was younger than the first man, and the first thing she noticed about him was his grey eyes and the soft brown hair he wore tied back from his face. He was also, she realized with a start, enormous. As he slid down from the back of his horse, she stared at him dazedly. Was that a kilt he was wearing? She'd never seen someone wearing a kilt in real life before — except for a guy who'd come through town to play the bagpipes at a school assembly when she was a kid. Was he some kind of musician, maybe? No — he wasn't carrying a set of bagpipes, but she did see what looked like a sling on his belt, with a bag of what must have been stones for it on the other hip. She frowned. Her little brother had had a slingshot when they'd been kids — what the hell was this guy doing with one?

  "You weren't joking," the kilted man said to the older man, who had stayed on his horse. Why did he look so worried? He kept shooting sidelong glances toward Karen, as though he was uneasy about even acknowledging that she was there. "Good morning, missy!"

  Missy, was it? She'd have been annoyed by that if this guy weren't so easy on the eye — and if his expression hadn't been full of such unmistakable kindness. "Hi," she offered back, feeling herself clam up. Ridiculous. Even in the middle of what had to be some kind of very vivid fever dream, she couldn't talk to handsome men to save her life.

  What was it about her that made her shut down like this? In the rest of her life, she was perfectly socially capable. She was charming, even — charismatic, a good leader, a people person. This hopeless shyness had come on when she had been thirteen and had experienced her first ever crush on a boy in her class — he'd thought she'd hated him because she never spoke to him, but the truth had been a lot more pathetic. It was a big part of why romance hadn't played a big role in her life — that, and her busy job. Now she was in her mid-thirties, without a significant relationship to speak of under her belt — all because men who looked like this one sent her into a tailspin.

  "I'm Connor Grant," the man was saying to her, easy and friendly as anything. "Do you remember anything about how you got here?"

  "Nothing," she managed, not sure exactly what was happening. Was she actually — here? It felt real enough, but it was impossible, wasn't it? Unless she was missing a significant chunk of her memory… a few weeks' worth at least, given that the illness seemed to have completely cleared up. That was a worrying thought.

  "Aye, that's to be expected," Connor said with a smile that was oddly reassuring, even though she had no idea what he meant.

  She trusted this man, she realiz
ed with a start. Was it because he was attractive? she wondered. Or was it because she was mostly convinced that this was a dream, and therefore it didn't matter what was happening? A bit of both, she decided.

  "What's your name, lass?"

  "Karen Frakes," she said automatically. "What's your accent?" She'd been trying to place it. Working for an organization like the NIH meant she ran into a lot of people from around the world, but she'd never been much good with accents.

  Connor grinned at her. "Good to meet you, Karen. My accent's from the same place I'm from. The same place we are right now." He gestured around them, from the water of the lake to the treeline a few hundred yards behind them. "Scotland."

  She nodded to herself. That was an odd one… but not entirely unexpected. Her dreams tended to take her all around the world, just as her job did. She'd never been to Scotland before, but it made about as much sense as anywhere else. It is a beautiful place, she thought unexpectedly. She wouldn't mind it if she were actually here… but of course that was utterly impossible. Wasn't it?