“I was the only one, Alasdair.”
Bickering lovers? Haley mused about the peculiar pair, wondering how a simpering girl could inspire the love of such a commanding force as this man.
She felt another small twinge of jealousy. Where were all the suitors lining up to take care of Haley?
And where did a girl like that meet a man like him anyway? A helpless waif and a man calling himself Alasdair MacColla. Gooseflesh pebbled her skin. Why that name?
And why had they taken her?
Haley retraced her steps. She'd been contemplating a gun she'd suspected had belonged to James Graham. It was a far-fetched theory, but she couldn't deny the certainty she felt in her gut. She'd discovered a weapon that could rock history as everyone knew it. Something that would prove Graham didn't really die when the history books said he did.
And then she gets abducted by a man claiming the name of none other than Graham 's famous compatriot, the warrior
Alasdair MacColla.
Not likely.
The two events had to be linked somehow.
A rival academic? Who else would speak such perfect Gaelic? She couldn't tamp down a shiver of excitement, thinking that this MacColla's interest only corroborated her theory.
Sensing him near, Haley turned, and was taken aback at his closeness. She mustered as great a dare in her gaze as she could, despite needing to tilt her chin up to meet his eyes.
He was handsome in the light, and it was off-putting. It'd been easy to imagine him as some mangy beast in the dark, with his soiled kilt and wild hair. The caricature had made him easy to size up, easy to place.
But the day had brought to light strong features. Large, brown eyes. A wide mouth. A rugged, square jaw. His thick, dark eyebrows exaggerated a high forehead. Wild hair hung loose from either side of a ragged part, coming to rest on wide shoulders.
He looked so… big. The rough weave of his shirt strained over biceps and shoulders, doing nothing to conceal the solid wall of muscle beneath. Heat surged to her cheeks, and Haley hated the traitorous and irrational response to such a conspicuous show of maleness.
To spite her own response, she forced an indifference she didn't feel, and allowed her eyes to rove the rest of him, taking in his tremendous brawn, the barrel chest and thickly knotted calves that emerged from his kilt.
Rival academic? Yeah, right. Talk about a crazy professor type.
“Do you really need to dress up like Alasdair MacColla?”
She eyed his tartan. The muted dark greens, blues, and black had seen better days. It appeared he took a left turn at the seventeenth century and didn't look back. “Don't tell me. You're a student at Brown, aren't you?”
MacColla stared blankly. “You're a wee daftie of a lass.”
“Okay, I give up.” She could play along with the crazy reenactor guy. He clearly spent his weekends tossing cabers and eating venison he'd skinned with his own hands. Talk about taking his scholarship seriously. “Why a
MacColla costume? I mean, everyone knows James Graham was the one you'd want to dress up as. He was the great hero.”
The man bristled, so she just bit back a grin and went with it. “But you, you were just kind of a sidekick, right? Graham was the handsome, smart one. Weren't you more of the brawn- not-brains variety? Although” - she scanned her eyes up and down his body - ”you do have the right look. You've got kind of a big-lug thing going on. I can't see you in the fancy velvet waistcoats.”
She met his gaze again and something looking like satisfaction played on his features. He couldn't possibly think she was checking him out, right?
“ Whatever, Mister Alasdair MacColla.” She rolled her eyes.
“Why don't you just tell me where you're taking me?”
Her mind whirred. She needed to figure out what was going on. He had to be another Celtic scholar, but what was he playing at? “Come on, tell me. What's your dissertation on?”
He'd surely seen the gun. She'd put money on it. “Look, if this is about the gun, we can claim the find together. Just let me go.”
His eyes narrowed.
That's it. He'd seen the gun, dated it, realized it belonged to Graham, and, putting two and two together, had decided to scare her out of the equation. Anyone who'd take the name of such a famous - and famously brutal - hero of old had to be all kinds of crazy with his obsessions.