Chapter One
Glasgow, Scotland
September 2016
His lips brushed across hers, restrained yet hungry. Rousing a kindred need in her unlike anything she’d ever experienced. Passion coalesced with tenderness. Not simple lust, but aching desire that burned deep within. Not just tenderness, but poignant emotion that stirred a sweet ache in her heart and brought hot tears to her eyes. Her throat tightened, fighting back a sob, yet at the same time she wanted to sing with joy.
Beneath her roaming hands, hard muscle bunched in his broad shoulders beneath his smooth, hot skin. He held her tight, flesh against flesh while his lips moved against hers, searching and exploring. Touching her soul. He tasted of heaven and promise. She wanted to beg him to never stop, to let her remain forever in the circle of his arms.
He lifted his head and brushed the hair back from her temple, curling a lock of hair around his finger. His dark gaze, warm as caramel, melted into hers. “I love you,” he whispered, a wealth of emotion weighed the words. “My God, how I love you.”
Her heart burst with happiness even as a single tear slipped down her cheek. “And I lo…”
Mikah Bauer woke with a start to the incessant beeping of the alarm she’d set on her cell phone. Reaching out, she swiped thedismissbutton on the screen and lay back against the pillows with a sigh, trying to entangle herself once more in the sensual tendrils that had ensnared her moments before. But the dream was gone.
“Come back,” she whispered aloud, her voice quivering with longing, her body still thrumming with unfulfilled desire forhim.
The dreams were getting worse…or better, depending on how one looked at it. For almost her entire life, Mikah had dreamed of this man time and again. However, the innocent dreams of her childhood had taken an erotic turn during the past week. Now they conveyed deep sensuality, passion more intense than anything she’d ever experienced. More consuming than any she’d thought herself capable of imagining.
But imagination it must be, for emotions so powerful were not part of reality. Real people weren’t capable of the depth of love that she encountered in these dreams.
That she had sensed from him.
No man had ever told her he loved her that way, as if the words were wrenched from his very soul. Was it any wonder that she wanted nothing more than to sleep forever and lose herself in her dream man?
But he was gone and Mikah didn’t know when he would come again.
Rolling over, she squinted against the sunlight beaming brightly through a narrow gap in the drawn curtains of her hotel room. The heated ardor that had invaded her heart yielded to the chilling sorrow of lost love. Hopeless fantasy. “Damn,” she whispered into the silent room.
Stepping out onto the street outside the Carlton George Hotel in Glasgow an hour later, Mikah was again suffused by heat, but of a different sort this time. The autumn day was a hot one and humid to boot. The normally clouded skies clear, allowing the sun to beat down on the pavement—and her—with unseasonal fervor.
Forget walking, she thought as she waved a cab down. Chalk it up to global warming or whatever, but she’d always heard that Scotland wasn’t supposed to be hot, even in the summer. Yet summer was long gone and it wasscorching.
Pulling open the door of the taxi that stopped in front of her, she held out hope that there might be an air conditioner running in the car. She was sadly disappointed to find the cabbie sitting inside with only the windows down for ventilation. “Where to, lassie?” he asked.
“Queen and Ingram,” she answered, patting at her damp forehead with the back of her hand. She had spent only a few moments on the curb, yet already her silk blouse was clinging to her back. “GoMA.”
“’Tis only a few blocks walk away, lass,” the driver pointed out, meeting her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Are ye sure ye dinnae just want to walk it?”
“Very sure,” she answered, mentally willing him on with wild hopes that he would build up enough speed during the short trip to create a breeze.
The cabbie just scoffed and muttered something under his breath she couldn’t understand, though the wordAmericanleapt out at her. He accelerated into the busy traffic in a way that seemed the norm in the UK but terrified her. Gripping the armrest tightly, Mikah held on as he broke speedily into the noontime traffic. Thankfully his alarming velocity stirred enough of a breeze in the vehicle to momentarily provide some relief from the heat.
Everyone she’d talked to since arriving in Scotland had insisted that the current weather just wasn’t normal. The heat wave was causing fits and starts all across the country, where the average September temp was typically in the high fifties Fahrenheit with cloudy skies. When she’d packed her bags for this trip, Mikah had packed accordingly with those norms. A selection of cardigans and wool jackets. But it was in the nineties now and the sun was roasting the town—along with Mikah in her black silk blouse and charcoal pencil skirt. She didn’t even have the tiniest pleasure that might be taken from an open-toed shoe.
Even back home in Milwaukee, with the continual breeze off Lake Michigan, it didn’t normally get this hot. Especially in September.
Only once in her life could Mikah remember being so hot. She’d been about six years old and sick with the flu. Feverish, she’d been kept home from school. While napping on the couch with her head in her father’s lap, she’d woken dazed and delirious. She’d become aware of the movie that her dad was watching on the TV through the haze that surrounded her. Nothing of the city-set scenes had interested her and she’d been just about to drift off to sleep once more when the scene changed to a rocky landscape that caught Mikah’s attention. She didn’t listen to what the characters were saying, but focused on the backdrop. Even when the men broke into battle—their swords ringing against one another and their shouts loud and awful—her gaze remained on the lone mountain in the background.
“I know that place, Daddy,” she whispered drowsily.
“Mikes, I thought you were sleeping,” Sean Bauer scolded, using the remote to pause the movie.
“I know that mountain,” she slurred, still staring at the television. “I’ve been there.”
Mikah’s father looked back at the still frame of a dramatic pyramid-shaped mountain that back-dropped the initial battle scene between Connor MacLeod and Victor Kruger in the movieHighlander.
“I’m sure it’s just your imagination,” he said. “This is too grown up a movie for such a little girl to have watched.”
