Laird’s Darkness (Highlander of the Isles #2)

Chapter One

Rose MacFinnan perched on the arm of the sofa and stared at the bit of paper in her hand. Stark black letters stared right back at her, cold and formal. How had it ever come to this?

Her eyes scanned the letter for the umpteenth time, even though she could recite by heart every single word printed on the page. A heavy feeling formed inside, like she had a bowling ball sitting in her stomach. This was it. It was over.

“That’s the last of them! Thank the Fates!” said a bright voice, snapping her back to the present. Her younger sister, Elise, walked into the living room, and Rose hastily stuffed the paper into the back pocket of her jeans and forced a smile.

“That’s great. Thanks for helping me out today.”

Elise shrugged. “Can’t think of a better way to spend a Sunday morning than helping my big sister brew up cough mixture.

” She frowned, screwing up her face. “Oh, wait. Yes, I can.” She began ticking things off on her fingers.

“Sleeping late. Going to a coffee shop. Binge-watching something on TV. In fact, pretty much anything else.”

Rose raised a sardonic eyebrow. “Yet here you are anyway.”

Another shrug. “What can I say? I must be a sucker for punishment.”

Rose shook her head, a smile curling her lips. “Yeah, that must be it.”

She felt a swell of affection for her little sister.

Elise was the wild child of the family, with her pink hair and free-spirited ways, but she had a heart of pure diamond, no matter how hard she tried to hide it behind flippant remarks and sarcasm.

To be honest, Rose envied her. She’d never been able to emulate her younger sister’s confidence or easy charm, the strength or presence of their elder sister, Sarah.

When they’d lost Sarah to cancer, Rose had tried her best to fill the hole she left behind, to become the big sister Elise needed and the wise aunt that Sarah’s daughter, Jenna, needed, but she had a nagging feeling she’d never quite managed either.

Like with most things in her life, Rose had fallen short.

Elise wiped her hands on a tea towel and dropped into a chair, pushing her pink-tipped hair out of her eyes. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Rose said quickly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Dunno. You seem a little… distracted. You’ve barely said a word all morning.”

Rose waved a hand. “Just tired, that’s all.”

Elise snorted. “That’s hardly surprising, is it? You’ve been running around all summer treating summer colds, measles, chicken pox, and Fates-alone-knows what else. You’re not as young as you used to be.”

Rose gave her a flat look. “Elise, I’m thirty-seven. I don’t need you wheeling me to an old-folks’ home just yet.”

Elise grinned. “You know I’m only kidding. But seriously, you work too hard.”

Rose sighed. How many times had they had this conversation? “Elise, I’m a MacFinnan spellweaver. It’s my job to help people.”

“We are both MacFinnan spellweavers,” Elise corrected.

“And yes, it’s our job to help people, but it is not our job to drive ourselves into the ground doing so.

When was the last time you had a holiday?

Heck, when was the last time you even took a day off?

” The mischievous grin was gone, and Elise looked serious all of a sudden.

She leaned forward and took Rose’s hand.

“I’m worried about you. You’re driving yourself too hard.

If Jenna were here, she’d say the same thing. ”

“But she’s not here, is she?” Rose snapped. “And with her gone, it’s even more important that I keep on top of things.”

Jenna, their niece, and fellow MacFinnan spellweaver had lived nearby until recently, just on the other side of the lake behind Rose’s house.

But she’d just got married and now lived all the way over in Scotland.

And several hundred years in the past to boot.

Rose tried not to think about that. It made her head hurt whenever she did.

Elise sighed. “Has anyone ever told you how stubborn you can be?”

“Yes. You have. Many times. It must be a family trait.”

“Touché,” Elise replied with a smile. She climbed to her feet. “Just think about what I’ve said, will you? You can’t keep putting everyone before yourself, Rose. You deserve to be happy too. Especially with what you’ve been going through this past year.”

Rose opened her mouth and closed it again. She didn’t have an answer to that.

Elise put a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

Rose caught her hand and squeezed it. “Thanks, Elise.”

“Don’t thank me. I’m just looking out for myself. I don’t want you driving yourself to exhaustion and leaving me to do all the work, do I?”

She gave another lazy grin, then sauntered out the front door, letting it bang closed behind her and leaving Rose alone in the echoing house.

For a moment, she stared at nothing, mulling over Elise’s words, then she took a deep breath, gave herself a mental shake, and hauled herself up.

Her soft shoes made no sound on the polished boards as she went into the kitchen.

The counter was filled with small brown bottles, each carefully labeled and dated.

The smell of the cough syrup she and Elise had spent the morning brewing—honey, lemon, and various herbs—filled the kitchen with its heady aroma and brought back memories of when their mother had taught them the recipe when they were just girls.

She smiled, remembering. Sarah, calm and authoritative, Elise, a brat likely to throw a tantrum if she didn’t get her own way, and herself the rule follower who listened closely to everything their mother told them and obeyed her instructions to the letter. Happy memories.

She ran a finger along some of the bottles, checking the stoppers were in tight.

It was September, and already the days were starting to cool.

She and Elise had made the cough syrup in preparation for the maladies that winter inevitably brought and the people who always sought her help—usually those without the money to pay for medication.

When they turned up at her doorstep with coughs and colds, she’d give them the syrup and tell them to take it three times a day, and they would leave happy, thinking it was the mundane ingredients of the syrup that healed them.

In fact, it wasn’t, it was the MacFinnan magic that she and Elise wove into each and every bottle, but people didn’t need to know that.

There were fewer and fewer believers these days, and so she’d had to come up with increasingly inventive ways to mask her gifts.

Satisfied that the syrups were all in order, she crossed to the kettle and filled it. As she waited for it to boil, she pulled the piece of paper from her back pocket and read it again. The words printed across the top stood out starkly, broadcasting Rose’s failure.

Decree Absolute.

It was done. Over. She was no longer married. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to feel about that. Relieved? Upset? Angry?

But all she felt was empty. Numb. She had wanted to make her marriage work, she really had.

It was a wry joke in her family that MacFinnan spellweavers were usually too much for any normal man to handle and this had been borne out in the case of her parents and her elder sister, all of whom had gotten divorced, but she’d been determined to buck the trend.

Why couldn’t she be both a spellweaver and a wife?

Why couldn’t she live both her magical life and a normal one?

She’d been so determined she could have it all.

She’d been wrong.

She and Dennis had gradually drifted apart, and for the last year, the only times she’d seen him had been in the lawyer meetings they’d both been required to attend.

It had been amicable, without animosity on either side, and there were no children involved, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear.

She sighed, Elise’s words ringing in her head. You can’t keep putting everyone before yourself, Rose. When was the last time you took a holiday?

She couldn’t remember. Five years? Longer? She crumpled the bit of paper in her fist. It was probably not since she and Dennis had gone camping for their honeymoon—all they’d been able to afford.

Dropping the paper into the bin, she spun on her heel and marched resolutely into the study.

Seating herself at her antique computer, she fired it up and opened the internet.

She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, so she typed in, great holiday vacation spots.

A huge list of hits appeared on the page, too many to take in at once.

She scrolled until something caught her eye.

Italy.

As she clicked on the link, images of vibrant-blue seas, crumbling castles, and olive groves filled the screen.

Oh yes, that looked like her kind of place all right. She had a bit of money from the divorce, so why shouldn’t she follow Elise’s advice and take some time for herself? A bit of time to de-stress and think about what she wanted to do with the next chapter of her life?

Her finger hovered over the book now button, but she hesitated. What would happen to her patients while she was away? What if Mrs. Carlton’s bad leg got worse? What if Michael Chapman’s gout came back?

She shook her head, imagining what Elise would say if she could hear her thoughts. Just book it! They will be fine!

Her finger was just about to press the button when a sound caught her attention, pulling her head around to look through the window.

It sounded like splashing and was coming from the lake behind her house.

This was not unusual, of course, as numerous youths liked to swim in the lake during the summer, but this sounded different.

To Rose’s highly tuned senses, this sounded like somebody in distress.

She rose from her seat and rushed out the back door, taking the steps down from her porch two at a time. Hurrying along the path, she pushed through the little gate and all but ran down to the lakeshore.

Sure enough, when she arrived, she found the surface choppy and disturbed, as though something had been thrashing around in it recently, but she couldn’t see any sign of a person.

No. Wait. There. Over on the jetty. A woman was sitting on the edge of the platform, legs dangling over the side. Her arms were wrapped around herself as if she were cold and her long hair was plastered to the sides of her head.

Rose hurried around the shore towards her. “Hello!” she called, waving a hand. “Are you all right?”

The woman didn’t respond.

Rose padded along the jetty, the boards making hollow thumping noises beneath her feet, and crouched by the woman’s side.

“Is everything okay?”

The woman slowly turned to look at her. Rose gasped. The woman’s skin was as smooth as alabaster, with full lips and a straight nose. But this wasn’t what had made Rose gasp. It was the woman’s eyes. They were pure silver, with no iris or pupil at all.

Rose scrabbled backwards. Now that she was closer, she could feel power emanating from the woman in waves. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

The woman smiled, revealing perfect white teeth. “My name is Lir, goddess of the sea. And I need yer help.”