The Making of a Highlander (Midnight in Scotland #1) - Elisa Braden Page 0,31
a cloak, eh?” Her grin weakened his knees.
“You’ll need a dressmaker,” he called, his voice embarrassingly rough.
“Nah.” Her chin went up. “Nothin’ a dressmaker can do that I cannae do cheaper.”
A small smile tugged at his lips. “If cheap were the aim, Miss Tulloch, I’m certain you’d be champion.”
She laughed. Not a chuckle or a giggle, but a full, rich laugh that rang in harmony with the water. “Ah, ye’re amusin’, English.”
He strode toward her, plucking up his coat along the way. “What if it rains tomorrow? Or snows?”
“Then, we’ll begin my lessons.” She cast him a sidelong glance as they started down the castle trail. “Ladies are indoor creatures, aren’t they?”
His mood darkened at the reminder. Annie Tulloch changing herself into a watercolor miss indistinguishable from any other woman felt wrong. Her reasons for doing so felt worse, like destroying a vivid Goya painting to sell a common gilt frame.
They passed the churchyard as the trail curved south. Annie slowed. “Do ye intend to restore this as well, English?”
He frowned at the tangled, crumbling mess of weeds and gravestones, old arches and toppled gates. “Not much to restore, really.”
“Aye, I suppose that’s true.” She sniffed and stepped over a root. But her gaze, he noticed, remained on the old church. “’Tis haunted, anyhow. Ye wouldnae wish to disturb the spirits.”
He sighed.
“I’ve told ye already, English. This glen is hummin’ with ghosties.”
“Right.”
“Didnae Wylie ever tell ye about the bats?”
“Yes. He told me.”
“Aye, well, they were real. And the damage was considerable. Gives me the shivers.”
“You know, bats do occasionally take up residence in old structures. No spirits required.”
She shot him a sharp, blue glare. “Ye’re mockin’ things ye dinnae understand.”
He shrugged on his coat and offered his hand to assist her over a fallen log.
She ignored him and managed on her own.
“Miss Tulloch, I’ve been to many places.”
A snort.
“Everywhere I went, people believed with great certainty in things no one can see but which must be real. Realms beyond my imagination exist, they told me. Places where creatures of myth and magic dwell. Ghosts and ancestors. Angels and demons. Shapeshifting mule women and impish sprites who will clean your laundry if you leave them a bowl of fruit.”
“Well, that sounds daft. ’Tis milk that pleases them most.”
“When you’ve heard a thousand of these stories without seeing a single impish laundress or, for that matter, your spectral grandfather returning from the grave to reveal where he stashed the good cognac, one does begin to question whether it’s all a lot of rubbish.”
She went quiet.
He watched her hips and noted how her neck had stiffened. “I meant no insult.”
“Nah, of course not.”
“I’m merely saying every culture I’ve encountered has similar tales. And none contain the slightest jot of proof or rationality.”
Spinning to face him, she raised her chin and countered, “Have ye ever asked yerself why ye hear the same tales over and over, John Huxley? Hmm?”
He frowned. “People need stories to explain things they don’t understand. Why a flood happens, for example. Or why a crop fails and a village starves. They want misfortune to make sense. But it doesn’t. It just … happens.”
She huffed and shook her head. “So, ye ken everythin’, and all these people ye’ve met in all these places ken nothin’. Is that it?”
“No. That’s not what I—”
“Aye, we rustic sorts are no cleverer than the dirt we muck about in.” She kicked a clump of said dirt. Half-frozen leaves flew.
“I never said—”
She stomped toward him, poking his chest with an angry finger. “Or perhaps we’re all mad,” she hissed. “And ye’re the only sane one.”
He captured her hand. “If I asked you to believe in some outlandish thing you’d never seen, for which there was no proof apart from superstition, would you do it? Would you leap from the top of the waterfall if I promised wings would sprout from your shoulders?”
She blinked. Slowly, her eyes lost their fire. “Unlikely.”
“Indeed,” he murmured, stroking the back of her hand. She really should have a cloak. Her fingers were like ice. “That would not make you right or wrong. Merely sensible.”
Her eyes lowered until he couldn’t see the blue any longer, only gingery lashes against creamy skin. “Fair enough, English.”