Beyond the Highland Myst(698)

She stared up at him with a startled, searching expression, her lips parted, the lower one slightly puffed out.

His mouth tingled from the touch. He wondered if she felt it too. Wondered what she was thinking, feeling.

He stretched his senses and probed, suspecting deep in his bones it wouldn’t work. If Voice had no effect on her, he highly doubted deep-listening would.

Deep-listening was the Druid art of reading the minds and hearts of others, and was another of his greatest skills. Nay, that wasn’t quite right. He excelled at all Druid skills. He always had.

He was an anomaly: the only Keltar ever to have been born with the full power of all of his ancestors, combined and compounded; an abnormality of nature; an anathema in an otherwise ancient, honorable, and predictable bloodline. While his da had excelled at healing, and his granda had been adept at predicting the seasons for the sowing and reaping, and his uncle had been highly skilled in both Voice and alchemy, Cian had been born with all those talents a hundredfold, plus abilities no Keltar had ever displayed before. ’Twas much of why he’d ended up trapped in the Dark Glass.

Too much power for one man. Pull back, Cian, his mother used to say, with troubled eyes. One day you’ll go too far.

And indeed he had. He’d coveted the Dark Hallows himself, even knowing they bore the innately corruptive essence of black magyck, and that no man could own one and remain unchanged. Still, he’d hungered, just as Lucan had, for ever-greater power; but where Lucan had been perfectly willing to embrace evil, Cian’s error had been that he’d arrogantly believed himself incapable of being corrupted or defeated by either man or magyck.

How wrong he’d been.

But that was another time, a long-ago story, and one best forgotten.

She was now.

He opened himself, focusing his senses, probed gently at her.

Nothing. He probed harder. Silence. Utter and absolute.

Centering, he pounded at Jessica St. James, a battering ram at the castle gates of her mind.

Not a hint of an emotion. Not a whisper of a thought.

Astonishing.

To test himself, he fired a questing arrow at the man arranging for the room. He flinched back hastily. The desk clerk was a miserable man. His wife had recently left him for one of his best friends. Cian swallowed, trying to scrape the foul taste of the man’s despair from his tongue. Despair served no one well. He wanted to shake him and say, Fight, you fool. Fight for her. Never cede the battle. Never yield the day.

“Doona give up, man,” Cian hissed.

The desk clerk glanced up, looking startled.

“You can’t just let her walk away,” he growled. “She’s your wife.”

The clerk’s eyes narrowed, flickered uneasily. “Who are you? Do I know you?” he said defensively.

“What?” Jessica said beside him. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Forget it.” To the desk clerk he said, “Be at ease.” It wasn’t his place to save the world. Well, mayhap it was, but he knew what must be done, and it wasn’t this.

With a soft snort of exasperation beside him, Jessica accepted a packet from the once-again submissive desk clerk, twitched that sweet bottom of hers, and stalked off toward two huge burnished-gold doors in the wall. She cast a glance back over her shoulder at him, and her expression could not have more clearly said: Well, come on, you great, big, overbearing brute. I don’t like you one bit, but we’re stuck together.

Cian admired the view for a moment, before picking up the mirror and loping off to join her.

Twenty days with this woman.

Mayhap, somewhere, some divinity in which he’d not believed, believed in him. Believed he would redeem himself and was rewarding him in advance.

She stopped at the doors. Yawning, she stretched her arms over her head, arched her back, and twisted from side to side as if stretching out her spine.

Bloody hell, the woman was a woman in all the right places!

Who cared the why of things?

She was his for the next twenty days.





* * *





9



Jessi sat at the cherry writing desk in room 2112, hooking up her laptop, scowling into the small wall mirror that hung above it, wondering why hotels always put mirrors above writing desks. Who wanted to look at themselves while writing? Apparently a lot of people must, because every hotel she’d been in had pretty much the same setup: closet inside the door on the left; bathroom inside the door on the right (or vice versa); first bed facing a writing desk with requisite mirror hung above it; a small table between the beds sporting clock radio and phone; second bed facing a TV armoire/dresser; and, at the far wall, a small table and two chairs sat before a wall of windows.

This room was no different, though a cut above some she’d been in, with merlot-and-champagne carpet, patterned with a gold diamond design, walls papered in textured ivory with gold embellishments at the moldings, beds topped with crisp ivory linens and champagne comforters, the windows hung with billowy wine drapes.