Kiss of the Highlander (The Highlander Series, Book 4) - Softcover

Moning, Karen Marie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0440244803 ISBN 13: 9780440244806

Publisher: Dell, 2008

Synopsis

A laird trapped between centuries...

Enchanted by a powerful spell, Highland laird Drustan MacKeltar slumbered for nearly five centuries hidden deep in a cave, until an unlikely savior awakened him. The enticing lass who dressed and spoke like no woman he’d ever known was from his distant future, where crumbled ruins were all that remained of his vanished world. Drustan knew he had to return to his own century if he was to save his people from a terrible fate. And he needed the bewitching woman by his side....

A woman changed forever in his arms...

Gwen Cassidy had come to Scotland to shake up her humdrum life and, just maybe, meet a man. How could she have known that a tumble down a Highland ravine would send her plunging into an underground cavern — to land atop the most devastatingly seductive man she’d ever seen? Or that once he’d kissed her, he wouldn’t let her go?

Bound to Drustan by a passion stronger than time, Gwen is swept back to sixteenth-century Scotland, where a treacherous enemy plots against them ... and where a warrior with the power to change history will defy time itself for the woman he loves....

About this title

About the Author

Karen Marie Moning is the internationally bestselling author of the Highlander and Fever novels. Her books have appeared on the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists, and have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Rita. She lives in Georgia and Florida with her husband Neil and the world-traveling cat, Moonshadow.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Highlands of Scotland
September 19, Present Day


Gwen Cassidy needed a man.

Desperately.

Failing that, she’d settle for a cigarette. God, I hate my life, she thought. I don’t even know who I am anymore.

Glancing around the crowded interior of the tour bus, Gwen took a deep breath and rubbed the nicotine patch under her arm. After this fiasco, she deserved a cigarette, didn’t she? Except, even if she managed to escape the horrid bus and find a pack, she was afraid she might expire from nicotine overdose if she smoked one. The patch made her feel shaky and ill.

Perhaps before quitting she should have waited until she’d found her cherry picker, she mused. It wasn’t as if she was drawing them like flies to honey in her current mood. Her virginity was hardly presented in its best light when she kept snarling at every man she met.

She leaned back against the cracked seat, wincing when the bus hit a pothole and caused the wiry coils of the seat to dig into her shoulder blade. Even the smooth, mysterious, slate-gray surface of Loch Ness beyond the rattling window that wouldn’t stay closed when it rained — and wouldn’t stay open otherwise — failed to intrigue her.

“Gwen, are you feeling all right?” Bert Hardy asked kindly from across the aisle.

Gwen peered at Bert through her Jennifer Aniston fringed bangs, expensively beveled to attract her own Brad Pitt. Right now, they simply tickled her nose and annoyed her. Bert had proudly informed her, when they’d begun the tour a week ago, that he was seventy-three and sex had never been better (this said while patting the hand of his newlywed, plump, and blushing bride, Beatrice). Gwen had smiled politely and congratulated them and, since that mild show of interest, had become the doting couple’s favorite “young American lassie.”

“I’m fine, Bert,” she assured him, wondering where he’d found the lemon polyester shirt and the golf-turf-green trousers that clashed painfully with his white leather dress shoes and tartan socks. Completing the rainbow ensemble, a red wool cardigan was neatly buttoned about his paunch.

“You don’t look so well, there, dearie,” Beatrice fretted, adjusting a wide-brimmed straw hat atop her soft silvery-blue curls. “A little green about the gills.”

“It’s just the bumpy ride, Beatrice.”

“Well, we’re nearly to the village, and you must have a bite to eat with us before we go sightseeing,” Bert said firmly. “We can go see that house, you know, the one where that sorcerer Aleister Crowley used to live. They say it’s haunted,” he confided, wiggling bushy white brows.

Gwen nodded apathetically. She knew it was futile to protest, because although she suspected Beatrice might have taken pity on her, Bert was determined to ensure that she had “fun.” It had taken her only a few days to figure out that she should never have embarked upon this ridiculous quest.

But back home in Sante Fe, New Mexico, as she’d peered out the window of her cubicle at the Allstate Insurance Company, arguing with yet another injured insured who’d managed to amass an astounding $9,827 worth of chiropractic bills from an accident that had caused a mere $127 in damage to his rear bumper, the idea of being in Scotland — or anywhere else, for that matter — had been irresistible.

So she’d let a travel agent convince her that a fourteen-day tour through the romantic Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland was just what she needed, at the bargain price of $999. The price was acceptable; the mere thought of doing something so impulsive was terrifying, and precisely what she needed to shake up her life.

She should have known that fourteen days in Scotland for a thousand dollars had to be a senior citizens’ bus tour. But she’d been so frantic to escape the drudgery and emptiness of her life that she’d only cursorily glanced through the itinerary and not given her possible traveling companions a second thought.

Thirty-eight senior citizens, ranging in age from sixty-two to eighty-nine, chatted, laughed, and embraced each new village/pub/bowel movement with boundless enthusiasm, and she knew that when they returned home they would play cards and regale their elderly and envious friends with endless anecdotes. She wondered what stories they would tell about the twenty-five-year-old virgin who had traveled with them. Prickly as a porcupine? Stupid enough to try to give up smoking while taking the first real vacation in her life and simultaneously trying to divest herself of her virginity?

She sighed. The seniors really were sweet, but sweet wasn’t what she was looking for.

She was looking for passionate, heart-pounding sex.

Sex that was down and dirty, wild and sweaty and hot.

Lately she ached for something she couldn’t even put a name to, something that made her restless and anxious when she watched 10th Kingdom or her favorite star-crossed lovers’ quest, Ladyhawke. Were she still alive, her mother, renowned physicist Dr. Elizabeth Cassidy, would assure her it was nothing more than a biological urge programmed into her genes.

Following in her mother’s footsteps, Gwen had majored in physics, then worked briefly as a research assistant at Triton Corp. while completing her Ph.D. (before her Great Fit of Rebellion had landed her at Allstate). Sometimes, when her head had been swimming with equations, she’d wondered if her mother wasn’t right, if all there was to life could be explained by genetic programming and science.

Popping a piece of gum in her mouth, Gwen stared out the window. She certainly wasn’t going to find her cherry picker on this bus. Nor had she entertained even a modicum of success in the prior villages. She had to do something soon, because if she didn’t, she would end up going back home no different than she’d arrived, and frankly that thought was more terrifying than the idea of seducing a man she hardly knew.

The bus lurched to a halt, pitching Gwen forward. She struck her mouth on the metal frame of the seat in front of her. She cast an irate glance at the rotund, bald bus driver, wondering how the old folks always seemed to anticipate the sudden stop, when she never could. Were they simply more cautious with their brittle bones? Strapped into the seats better? In cahoots with the ancient, portly driver? She dug in her backpack for her compact and, sure enough, her lower lip was swelling.

Well, maybe that will entice a man, she thought, poking it out a little more, as she dutifully followed Bert and Beatrice off the bus and into the sunny morning. Sucker lips: Didn’t men fixate on plump lips?

“I can’t, Bert,” she said, when the kindly man tucked her arm in his. “I need to be alone for a little while,” she added apologetically.

“Is your lip swollen again, dear?” Bert frowned. “Don’t you wear your seat belt? Are you sure you’re okay?”

Gwen ignored the first two questions. “I’m fine. I just want to go for a walk and gather my thoughts,” she said, trying not to notice that Beatrice was regarding her from beneath the wide brim of her hat with the unnerving intensity of a woman who had survived multiple daughters.

Sure enough, Beatrice pushed Bert toward the front steps of the inn. “You go on, Bertie,” she told her new husband. “We girls need to chat a moment.”

While her husband disappeared into the quaint, thatch-roofed inn, Beatrice guided Gwen to a stone bench and pulled her down beside her.

“There is a man for you, Gwen Cassidy,” Beatrice said.

Gwen’s eyes widened. “How do you know that’s what I’m looking for?”

Beatrice smiled, cornflower-blue eyes crinkling in her plump face. “You listen to Beatrice, dearie: Fling caution to the wind. If I were your age and looked like you, I’d be shaking my bom-bom everywhere I went.”

“Bom-bom?” Gwen’s eyebrows rose.

“Petunia, dear. Booty, behind,” Beatrice said with a wink. “Get out there and find a man of your own. Don’t let us spoil your trip, dragging you about. You don’t need old folks like us around. You need a strapping young man to sweep you off your feet. And keep you off them for a good long while,” she said meaningfully.

“But I can’t find a man, Beatrice.” Gwen blew out a frustrated breath. “I’ve been searching for my cherry picker for months now — ”

“Cherry ... Oh!” Beatrice’s round shoulders, swathed in pink wool and pearls, shook with laughter.

Gwen winced. “Oh, God, how embarrassing! I can’t believe I just said that. That’s just what I started calling him in my mind because I’m the oldest living ... er — ”

“Virgin,” Beatrice supplied helpfully, with another laugh.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Doesn’t a pretty young woman like you have a man back home?”

Gwen sighed. “In the past six months I’ve dated oodles of men....” She trailed off. After her prominent parents had been killed in a plane crash in March, returning from a conference in Hong Kong, she’d turned into a veritable dating machine. Her only relative, her grandfather on her father’s side, had Alzheimer’s and hadn’t recognized her in forever. Lately, Gwen felt like the last Mohican, wandering around, desperate for someplace to call home.

“And?” Beatrice prodded.

“And I’m not a virgin because I’m trying to be,” Gwen said grumpily. “I can’t f...

About this edition

• Publisher: Dell
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0440244803
• ISBN 13: 9780440244806
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432