Once Upon A Highland Legend Read Online Free PDF Page A

witchery be that, wench?”
    “What the hell are you talking about?” the lass exploded. Her cheeks turned a vivid shade of pink that was nicely complimented by her dark, shiny hair. She wasn’t a lay about, he didn’t believe, because her skin was kissed golden by the sun.
    Callum screwed his face. “Ye’re a pawky wench. I saw no bag lying aboot, and I dinna believe ye anyhow. Ye dinna hail from my kinsmen and ye canna simply have come traipsing up the ben all by yourself with a cell in your bloody purse.” His hand went to the hilt of the dagger in his belt. “Tell me now afore I take your head—where are your murderous, thieving kinsmen?”
    The woman took a step back, startled, it seemed, and it was then he noticed the small round crystal in her hand. Her fist was curled about it as though she meant to use it to strike him. Every time the wind lifted her plaid, Callum found his gaze shifting to her tiny skirt. Her legs were long, lean and lovely. By their sacred stone, in that instant, she might have hit him with her bloody rock, and for all his bluster, he didn’t truly care. If she managed to knock him out, mayhap she would knock some sense into his head, so that he might better know what to do with his quibbling kinsmen and that accursed stone in their possession.
    “I’m no thief!” she countered angrily. “But I’ve always heard it takes one to know one,” she shot back at him.
    Callum scratched his head. Shaking himself free of the distraction of her legs, he asked, “So ye’re confessing as much, are ye?”
    She seemed taken aback by the question. “What! I’m confessing nothing!” The woman’s hands went to her hips and her expression appeared as stormy as the clouds that were suddenly rolling in overhead. The breeze whipped again, kicking up the hem of her measly skirt and Callum blinked as he caught sight of tiny red breeches. These were strange, strange garments she wore, but no stranger than her speech. She swept past him suddenly her black hair lashing furiously at her back as she moved toward the cairn he’d labored so hard to build. “You’re the thief!” she accused him outright, and then suddenly, she was undoing all his hard work, disinterring his Da.
    “Oh, nay ye dinna!” On any other day Callum might have mustered some patience, not today. “Bloody hell, wench!”
    He wasn’t in the mood. The weather here was as fickle as a whore in a room full of rich men and he wasn’t about to stand by and let her undo all his hard work—nor stand here arguing while the sky emptied down upon their heads. This was the most changeable weather he had ever known—unpredictable as a woman’s temper. She didn’t respond at once, so he plucked her up and put her over his shoulder and turned and started down the mountain.
     
    Annie shrieked in protest. “Put me down!”
    “Nay,” the man said much too calmly.
    “Hey!” Annie smacked him once upon the back. “You can’t just pick me up and carry me off like some savage!”
    He said nothing to that, simply continued to make his way down the hill and the cairn grew smaller as they marched away from it. Above them, the sky was darkening, clouds swirling around the peak of Bod an Deamhain. The blanket the man was wearing whipped up in the breeze, rewarding Annie with an eye-full of his ass—a nice, muscular ass, but that was beside the point.
    “Hey!” she screamed again. “This is two thousand fourteen! You can’t just carry women away like this!”
    Still he didn’t respond, simply marched down the hill without a word, and remembering the crystal in her hand, she whacked him once more on the back, as hard as she could.
    He growled like a bear and tossed her down on the ground, knocking the air out of her lungs. Annie dropped the crystal.

Chapter Three

     
    Callum’s first instinct had been to toss the girl, but he regretted that at once. She lay before him crumpled like a broken flower. He had never once abused a woman in