Scot of My Dreams (14 page)

I didn’t belong here; I was merely passing through. A working-class woman with people depending on me. It was all well and good to play out a Cinderella fantasy, but after midnight (at least at the end of the month), I’d be on a plane back to Georgia to pick up the pieces of my very nice but very ordinary life.

“I’m not scared,” I said automatically.

“You think too much,” he said. “I thought you Americans were fans of
carpe diem
.”

He had a point. This vacation was supposed to be about me learning to relax. Maybe I needed to look at the broader definition of that word. Did I have it in me to chill out and enjoy my sexy laird without considering the consequences?

That sounded risky and irresponsible, neither of which were my usual style. With Bryce giving me that warm, coaxing grin, how could I say no?

“Fair enough,” I said. “From here on out, I’m living in the moment. But what about you? Am I the only one struggling?”

He chuckled wryly, taking my arm and steering me out to the car. “Not at all. I was preaching to the choir. You’re looking at a man bound by his datebook and his obligations. I had to cancel three meetings to go with you today.”

“Bryce!” I was dismayed. “I don’t want to be responsible for keeping you from your work.”

“Too late,” he said. “You began doing that the day Brodie knocked you down, and you looked up at me with those gorgeous hazel eyes.”

I didn’t have an answer to that, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that his words pleased me. Maybe he was trying to butter me up. Maybe he was feeding me a line. But if this was my Scottish fantasy, what did it matter?

Culloden was a fifteen-minute drive from Dunvarstone, as far to the west as Inverness was to the east. I knew snippets of the site’s history, but I was counting on Bryce to fill the gaps in my knowledge.

The gravel car park was mostly empty. We had come on a weekday. The heaviest tourist traffic from June and July was long gone.

Inside the small but modern visitors’ center, I was impressed with the attention to detail. I’d never been a history aficionado, but I was definitely interested in this part of Scottish legend and lore. The
Outlander
series began in 1743, and even from the beginning was shadowed with the heroine’s bleak knowledge of what was to happen in 1746.

Bryce made the history come alive for me.

As we looked at various relics, he spun a tale of brave, stalwart men, doomed by the impossibility of their way of life in the face of a changing world. “The English presence in Scotland was a thorn in the flesh of the clansmen. Fort William, south of here, was the seat of English power. The redcoats sent out sorties to subdue unruly bands of Scots. The situation became more volatile as Scots’ sympathy for Bonnie Prince Charlie increased.”

“They wanted to put him back on the throne.”

“Aye. We Highlanders are nothing if not loyal and fierce, even in the face of ridiculous odds. Ye might think that a gathering of all the mightiest clansmen in the country would have been intimidating, and it was. But broadswords and dirks were no match for English weaponry. The redcoats massacred the Highlanders in less than an hour. The clans lost 1,500 to 2,000 of their men to death or severe wounds that were later fatal.”

“And the clan system never recovered.”

“No. ’Twas even illegal to wear tartans for a long time after that.”

I tried to imagine what it must have been like. I was a child of the modern age. The images of clashing steel seemed like fiction at best.

Then Bryce escorted me into the theatre. “The film is intense,” he said. “We can skip it if you like.”

“No. I want to see it. I want to understand.”

We stood in the center of a room that was neither large nor small. Movie screens had been stitched together, so the visuals were projected in a 360º experience.

I took Bryce’s hand unashamedly. When the film began, noise and smoke surrounded us. Men charged from every direction, wild-eyed, determined. The red-coated Englishmen stood out, but they were no more impressive than the bold, tartan-clad Highlanders.

Swords clashed, shots rang out. And when it was over, the ground was littered with the dead and dying.

Along with the other visitors, we left the room in a somber mood, almost as if we had attended a funeral. I exhaled, reminding myself that all these events happened far in the past. “I need a minute to regroup after that,” I said. “Would you mind if I go to the gift shop? I want to pick up some souvenirs.”

Bryce shook his head. “Of course not. I have a couple of calls to make anyway. Meet me out front when you’re ready to tour the battlefield.”

The shop was brightly lit and reassuringly modern. I struggled to bring myself back from the carnage I had witnessed, albeit secondhand.

As I wandered from aisle to aisle, I pondered what I wanted to take home as a remembrance. The woolen clothing was wickedly expensive. On the other end of the spectrum, the books and toys about the Loch Ness monster weren’t really my thing. I found some nice postcards, but I wanted more.

On the back wall of the store, I perused the books for sale. Plenty of history, a few biographies and novels, and though I shouldn’t have been surprised, a decent collection of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books.

They were like old friends to me. I picked them up one at a time, studying the titles. For some reason, I couldn’t find the first one,
Outlander
. Maybe because it was the most popular. Perhaps it was difficult to keep in stock.

And then something caught my eye, a book that seemed out of place. The spine read,
Cross Stitch
. I picked it up, wondering if this was some kind of sequel or companion volume I had missed. But no. It was actually
Outlander
with a different cover and title—a Scottish edition. Very cool. I decided this would be my souvenir.

I suppose I should have chosen something specifically about Culloden, but after all, Culloden was integral to the
Outlander
books, so in a way, this
was
a souvenir. I paid for my purchases and went in search of my favorite laird.

Though Bryce was still on the phone, he turned and waved when I approached him across the car park. The smile on his face nearly stopped me in my tracks. How surreal was this? Three weeks ago I was shampooing Mrs. Emerson and putting hot rollers in a county-fair queen’s updo. Now, here I was having earthy, spontaneous sex with a hot Scottish laird and living in his castle.

McKenzie and Hayley would never believe me. Heck, I was living it, and even I wondered if I was in the midst of a long Technicolor dream. It wasn’t time travel. It was better. Because I still had indoor plumbing.

Bryce finished his call. “You want me to put that in the boot?”

The boot
. I loved my Scotsman with his Sean Connery accent and his Chris Hemsworth body. “Sure,” I said, handing it over.

I’d been hoping the sun would come out, but in a way, the heavy clouds and blustery breeze lent a note of gravity to our visit.

At first glance, there was nothing much to see on the battlefield. Only acres of scrub and heather and tall grasses that bent with the wind. The silence was eerie. For the moment, Bryce and I were the only people around. We walked slowly, not speaking. I think he wanted me to absorb the atmosphere.

All around me, shadows moved just out sight. Time was a frail curtain, a thin veil that separated me from the events of the past. Perhaps the brief film had affected me more than I realized. Or maybe it was the Scottish Highlands, this moody place that seemed so attuned to its history.

Bryce touched my arms. “Do you see the flags?” His voice was low.

“Yes.” They were more like pennants really, snaking lines of red and blue.

“They mark the positions of the English lines and the clansmen’s.”

My stomach curled. As a woman, it was hard for me to understand the atrocities of battle. Standing here in the midst of a field that had been soaked in blood, I could almost hear the shouts, smell the acrid smoke of gunfire, flinch at the sharp clang of metal on metal.

Though I had never been to Pennsylvania, I had friends who toured Gettysburg and said the ground there was hallowed. Now I understood those stories more than ever. Two and a half centuries were not enough to erase the significance of a mighty confrontation that literally changed the course of a people and their land.

Bryce must have visited here often, but he let me take my time. “Do you still feel it?” I asked. “The pain. The loss. The incredible bravery.”

“Aye.” He looked out over the plain, his profile silhouetted against the gray sky. “If heart and valor and sheer bloody will could have won the day, they surely would have. But the poor lads were outmatched at every turn. The Scots had the numbers. But not the weaponry.”

He led me at last to a stone cairn, perhaps ten or twelve feet high. The rounded monument was made of stacked rocks gathered from the battlefield. A small plaque at the base gave the details of the confrontation.

Though I found the unusual structure interesting, it was something far simpler that stopped me in my tracks. “What are these?” I asked. Flanking the grassy path back to the building at intervals of several feet were boulders engraved with names.

Bryce knelt and touched one. “There’s a stone here for every clan who lost men that day.”

I wandered slowly, reading the sobering record. MacKenzie. Campbell. MacDonald. And then one that took my breath.
Fraser
. I crouched beside it, caught in a tug-of-war between fact and fiction. Jamie Fraser, the hero I loved from
Outlander
, never existed. Yet here was proof that his story was woven with threads of truth. No wonder the book and the television series resonated so deeply with me and thousands of others.

The actors and the characters they played were products of a talented imagination. But Jamie and Claire and Dougal and Black Jack Randall and all the others lived and breathed because of the very real carnage that had played out at this exact spot.

We wandered a bit longer, but my stomach was beginning to growl. I wanted to stay, which was odd, because Culloden was poignant and deeply sad. Nevertheless, I was drawn to the site as if by an invisible cord.

Bryce put an arm around my waist. “We can come back another day.”

He had picked up on my ambivalence.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m ready for our picnic.”

We didn’t say much in the car. I was lost in thought. When I went home, would this experience fade into memory? I didn’t want it to…I needed to hold these moments close, so that in the months to come, I’d be able to relive every minute of my time with Bryce.

He drove us back toward Dunvarstone, but took a side road that wound to the top of a modest hillock. A single oak stood sentinel. While Bryce unfolded a woolen blanket and spread it beneath the tree, I brought out the picnic basket and opened it to see what goodies Bibi had provided for our meal.

I sat cross-legged as I examined the various containers. “Back home, we’d have peanut butter crackers and apples on an outing like this. I’m impressed.”

Bryce laughed as he sprawled out, his head at my hip. “I can’t take credit.”

We dined on thinly-sliced tomato and chicken sandwiches with some kind of spread that tasted of lemon and cranberry. Bryce popped open a bottle of champagne and poured me a glass. “Thank you,” I said, taking a taste immediately. The pale gold liquid was crisp and refreshing. The sun was beginning to peek out from behind the clouds, and the afternoon was warm.

Bryce touched his glass to mine. “To good friends,” he said, his expression wry.

“Friends with benefits?”

“Apparently so. Though I must say, you’re the first woman who ever clung so stubbornly to that designation.”

After the morning’s awkwardness, it was fun to feel so relaxed with Bryce. Had the champagne worked its magic, or was I learning to go with the flow?

“I don’t particularly want to hear about all your women,” I teased.

He shook his head. “There’s naught as many as you might think, lass. After my father dumped the running of Dunvarstone on me and took off to Italy, I’ve hardly had time to breathe, much less scout for lady friends.”

“So me dropping into your lap, metaphorically speaking, was a convenience thing?”

“Someone should spank you,” he said, the tone conversational. “I suppose it might as well be me.”

“Kiss me instead,” I said recklessly. “I promise to be good.”

The amusement in his gaze darkened to something far more dangerous. He took my half-full glass from my hand and set it aside with his. “Och, ye’re a confident lass, aren’t you? You think that because we’re in public, nothing will happen to you?”

I let him draw me down beside him until we were both lying on the blanket. The wool was scratchy against my bare legs. “I’m not scared,” I said breathlessly.

Bryce leaned over me, one hand cupping my breast through thin layers of cloth. One of the few benefits of being among the mammary-challenged was the ability to go braless with no one the wiser. I heard him suck in a sharp breath when he noticed.

He nuzzled the sensitive skin below my ear. “If I’d known these beauties were open to the morning air, I’d have cut short the history portion of our day and dragged you somewhere private.”

I liked that he called them
beauties
. It was probably a kind fabrication, but it made me feel good. One guy I dated actually told me I needed to get a boob job or no one would ever want to marry me. It had stung at the time, but eventually, I realized he was just a jerk.

After all, a lot of men were into legs and butts, so I had a chance there.

Bryce tapped my forehead. “Hello, Willow. Why do I get the feeling I lost you?”

“Sorry.” The way he stroked my breast was making me light-headed. I might not have much to fill out a bra, but my nipples had always been super sensitive. “You really don’t mind, do you?”

“Mind what?” he asked, as he worked at the four tiny buttons that were more decorative than practical.

“That I’m not stacked.”