The Legend of Lady MacLaoch (9 page)

Just as I was making up my mind to get the hell out of there, things got worse.

Fletcher saddled up to us. “He’s not bothering ye, is he?” he said with as much false concern as bravado.

I was punchy—all the liquor had seemingly evaporated from my system and been replaced with adrenaline from wanting to drop-kick Kelly.

“Yes, Fletcher, he is. What are you going to do about it?” I said aggressively and stared him down. Waiting.

“Oh. I uh, uh,” was all he could muster, looking from me to the MacLaoch and back.

“It’s all right, Fletcher,” the MacLaoch said and clasped him on the shoulder. “She’s messing with ye. How’s your mother?” He asked, nonplussed by the whole situation and smoothly shifting subjects.

“Och, she’s good.” Fletcher replied without a hitch, as if it were natural that everyone was interested in Fletcher’s pathetic life. “Bitches too much, says how I have to go get me a real job. What she thinks I do ’ere, I don’ know.”

“Mmmph,” MacLaoch said.

“She’s such a pain in my arse, ye know?”

“Well, she’s yer mother, and ye’d do well to mind her, aye?” MacLaoch said, leaning against the bar, cradling his whisky in the palm of his hand, regarding Fletcher as a teacher might a wayward, but ultimately harmless, student. He seemed so at ease offering advice and taking in Fletcher’s ridiculous concerns.

“I
do
. It’s just that she does it all the time.” Fletcher shook his head in exasperation. “Fucking women.”

MacLaoch closed his eyes as if praying for mercy. “Och, Fletcher. Mind.” He nodded his head in my direction, his brows drawn together in disgust.

“Oh, sorry, aye,” Fletcher said to me, not really meaning it.

“Fuck you, Fletcher,” I said without emotion, but really I felt it toward both of them, so I plucked MacLaoch’s expensive whisky from his hand and polished it off. It slid down smooth and blossomed like a smoky sea with an afterkiss of vanilla and honey.

I slammed down the glass. “Well it’s been fun, boys, but I’ll be seeing y’all.”

MacLaoch had an expression that could only be recognized as humor: a light lift at the corner of his mouth and eyes.

“Aye, a fuck ye to us both,” he said under his breath as he eyed the empty glass. “Fletcher. Know how to play the one about the seafarer?” he said, standing and putting his hand out gently to stop me from going.

Fletcher made a noncommittal sound.

“Good. Play it for me, aye?”

He brightened at this. “Aye! Anything for the chief.”

I watched Fletcher go back to his crew and pass along the request and begin to play before it fully sunk in that Fletcher had just called this MacLaoch Chief.
As in, Chief of the Jerky people,
I thought snidely in my whisky haze.

I turned back toward MacLaoch to find him looking down at me, “Come,” he said, giving me his hand.

I looked at it, then back to him. It seemed as if the jovial feel of the pub had actually caught up with this man.

“I promise I won’ bite.”

“Fine,” I heard myself say, and I let my hand slide into his. It was rough and firm and very warm.

I felt the music catch me up into its rhythm as we moved into the dance area—the song was so hauntingly beautiful that the urge to move with it was undeniably strong. I felt the Celtic echoes of the Scottish pipes meld into one with the slow pace of the strings, and beneath it all the rhythmic pounding of the drums adding an exciting anxiety I couldn’t place. It was as if the sound of the drums was awakening a memory that was beginning to hum into life.

“Have you danced to Gaelic music before?” he asked. “Except with my cousin, of course.”

“No, and I wouldn’t consider being mauled by Kelly as dancing either.” I leaned back and looked up at him so that he could see that I was serious.

“Well, this will be new for ye then,” he said. “Just relax an’ I’ll show ye how it’s done.”

Before I could respond, he put one hand firmly at my lower back and the other kept its grasp around my hand and then he moved me. Really
moved
me, with the gentle strength and confidence of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. I closed my eyes, giving in, and moved with him.
This,
I thought,
is how it should be.

The MacLaoch was a different man than the one I’d interacted with the day before, as if he’d begun to believe that I was who I said I was, and in my reason for being there in Glentree.

As the last notes of his whisky hummed in my system, I noticed small things about the MacLaoch—the faint smell of ocean and the blustery pastures of his skin. The look and feel of the soft wool of his sweater and the strength of his hands. He was a solid width and the perfect height, such that if I wanted to, I could rest my head just under his chin. This clansman had a compelling force of nature to him. Something in that thought made me think of what Fletcher had said earlier.

I leaned back to look up at him again. “Why did Fletcher call you the chief?”

He shrugged. “I suppose it’s because I am the chief.”

“The chief of what?” I said as the obvious explanation hit me.

He tipped his head back to look at me, as if to make sure I wasn’t having a laugh. I was so busy trying to make him a groundskeeper, Kelly’s caretaker/bodyguard, castle caretaker, and even clan historian that not once did I think of anything else, much less a chieftain—which I had assumed was a regally dressed person with a starched, affected attitude.

“I see . . . You are the thirty-fourth clan chief of Clan MacLaoch.” I spoke softly, feeling my embarrassed blush start at my neck and cruise up to my hairline.

“That I am,” was all he said, watching my reaction.

All the things that transpired between us began to replay in my mind’s eye: My yelling at him, my physically threatening him, my trespassing. My busting into his castle, and later, my reading the letter from his uncle. And he’d paid my bar tab. Sure, his cousin was an ass, but . . .

I could feel my skin getting hotter and my stomach getting queasier and looking him in the eye was getting harder and harder to do. I had to go, and right then was the time.

“Whoa,” he said and firmed his grip on me, reading my expression exactly. “What are ye running from, lass?”

I twisted my hand from his grip. “Please just let me go,” I mumbled, the queasiness getting stronger.

He stopped dancing and released me.

I turned from him and walked out the front door without a backward glance.

CHAPTER 13

I
didn’t sleep well that night. I kept waking up thinking of all the things I had said and done to the man who was head of Clan MacLaoch.

When I did sleep, it was a sleep filled with lucid dreams.

One in particular stood out from the rest. I was standing at the water’s edge across from Castle Laoch, on the ill-fated Isle of Lady MacLaoch. I could see the castle in the distance, the steel gray of the still ocean water reflecting the light of the overcast sky. My feet were bare—the round, hard stone of the shore’s tumbled black rocks were beneath my feet—and the frigid water lapped at me gently.

While I knew in my dream that it was my body I was in, in the same breath I knew I was not in it alone. Our hair was down and curling about us, alight on the on-shore breeze blowing gently about our face. We pushed it back and looked into the wind, the gauzy white of our ancient dress floating on the soft, moist ocean air.

The woman within me was happy: someone had arrived. She could rest in peace now. I could feel the ease in her heart as if a great project, one that had consumed her in life and in spirit, was coming to an end. The door to her chapter was closing, while mine was just beginning.

Her happiness caught me up—giddiness bubbling through us, we couldn’t wait any longer. Around the bend at the end of the rocky beach, he strode, and our body lit like a torch. Warmth and a soulful love bloomed within us at the sight of him, and we ran to him.

I yearned with each stride to hold him once more to me, to feel his embrace. It felt as though I had waited centuries for his return, yet I knew in that place between reality and dreaming that it was I who was returning; he had been there all along.

I started to recognize him, but before my sluggish, dream-addled mind could place him, a glint on my ring finger stopped me. I staggered in my dream, caught by the light reflected off the gold. The ring was a fine engraving of a thistle, and I felt I knew the clan crest; I looked closer, curiosity distracting me. I felt rather than knew that the ring upon my finger was mine, destined always for me.

Yet, I had no one in my life that I felt so drawn to. Never had I felt this connection to another, and I hungered for it.

In that moment, the woman who shared my dream left me. I was me, it was now.

All the powerful feelings within me manifested into life the instant the arms of the man wrapped around me. He slid one hand into my hair and the other around my waist, pulling me close. I embraced him in return; it felt like the sharing of souls, each of us pouring a piece of ourselves into the other.

I woke suddenly, my heart pounding.

The man in the dream hovered on the edge of my consciousness, turning to vapor when I reached for him again.

CHAPTER 14

T
he next morning I woke as the first trickles of defused light came over the horizon. I’d slept little after the dream and, lying in bed, I stared at the ceiling, my mind on a racetrack.
What had that dream been all about? I can’t believe the man I met yesterday was the MacLaoch chieftain. Oh lord, did I really shout at him and slam his whisky?

I groaned and rolled over, stuffing my face and all my problems into the pillow.

Worse than just being embarrassed, I was going to have to rectify the situation. My stomach churned, due in part to being slightly hung over but mainly to the thought of admitting to all the things that had transpired between us.

Restless, my mind fully awake then and yammering away on my problems and how to fix them, I decided to get some fresh air.

I tossed on clothes and jotted down a note for Carol, letting her know I was skipping breakfast, and shoved it under the door of the breakfast room. Outside, I felt a tad clearer in the head, with the crisp, foggy morning air filling my senses. I turned toward the downtown area, hoping there was a café open with Internet access. I needed to know more about this MacLaoch, and what it meant to be a clan chieftain in the twenty-first century.

There was only one coffee shop in Glentree—a place that prized its tea—but it was open. Moments later, with a frothing cup of coffee, a scone (still warm from the oven), and a slow Internet connection on the café’s lone public computer all before me, I searched online for the thirty-fourth clan chief and came up with one Rowan MacLaoch. Links showed his name everywhere: parliamentary documents, witness testimony over escaped sheep, an old article mentioning him as the newest clan chieftain—and the youngest. The last link I clicked on was an article naming him as the benefactor of the Victor Ivandale Memorial Garden in Lassiemouth; Ivandale had been a fighter pilot who had died in action.

The clan’s crest dotted many of the web pages I looked at, matching in complete detail the one on the ring in my dream. A medieval shield with a massive sword bisecting it, an abundant thistle bouquet to one corner, and encircling the entire thing, what looked like a decorative belt. The clan’s motto was inscribed in bold letters on the belt: A warrior unto death.

Fitting, I thought, given what I knew of the clan’s history of fighting. It seemed, from my few interactions with him, that this chieftain still carried that fearsome trait in his blood.

By far the most impressive report was from a
Scottish Living
article that pegged MacLaoch as the number-one richest clan in Scotland. Not only did it still have political sway, it was worth a fortune, due to its ownership of a large number of highly collectable and historically rich artifacts. Due, most likely, I thought, to the clan members’ pillaging habits in earlier centuries. No one had tried to take anything back, apparently, because the MacLaochs were a miserable lot with a curse on their heads.

Despite that, I was the one feeling cursed—there was an underlying theme to all the things that I had read: the MacLaochs were a large group and governed by one man. He was a leader, protector, and land overlord, mentor and skirmish queller. He was the clan’s chieftain and his name was Rowan James Douglas MacLaoch. The list of indignant things I’d done to him ran through my mind yet again—all the way back to the first moment I laid eyes on him, threatening his person for having slapped me awake.

Feeling queasy again and thoroughly stuffed full of information, I wrapped up my search and headed outdoors. Remembering signs on my way into town to a rare coral beach, Tràigh a’ Chorail, I headed back the way I came and then down the well-marked trail.