Free The Highlander's Dark Seduction (Secrets of the Darroch Clan) by Joanne Rock Page B

fear crawled up her back in an icy scuttle. Had something happened to him? Was there someone else out there?
    She stuffed Lily’s fallen letter back into her reticule, hands trembling. Should she step out of the carriage to see what was the matter or would that be entirely foolish? Her heart slammed against her ribs as she reached for the door. She couldn’t stand not knowing what was out there. Especially if her aunt’s trusted driver was hurt and needed her assistance.
    Twisting the handle, she pushed the door until a shaft of unnatural gray light filtered inside the carriage, as if the moon had suddenly broken through the tree cover. Perhaps she dreamed. Elizabeth debated giving herself a pinch when the door was wrenched the rest of the way open.
    “You must come now,” a man’s voice barked at her even as hands reached toward her, a voice nothing like the ancient Londoner Lawrence who drove her carriage.
    Her eyes could not seem to focus, the scene before her was so strange. For a moment, surprise trumped fear as she spied the forest transformed under a sudden trick of moonlight. Every tree branch and moss-covered rock sparkled with a silvery glow as if each surface had been sprinkled in moon dew or fairy dust.
    Surely she dreamed.
    “What is this place?” she whispered, half afraid to break the beautiful spell of this enchanted spot, not that there appeared to be anyone to hear her. Her driver was nowhere in sight. “Have I died? Is this heaven?”
    “It’s the Highlands, lass. But I’d call it a slice of heaven, myself.” The thick brogue of a Scotsman reached her ears as a huge, half-dressed Highlander in a tattered kilt stepped directly into her view. Muscles bulged in places she’d had no idea men possessed muscles. And although she’d once dreamed of a tall man to sweep her off her feet, she had no idea that men could actually be so tall. So large in general.
    Fear stifled her scream before she could voice it, her throat raking over silence. A strangled mewing sound emerged from her lips as she shrank back into the carriage.
    Oblivious, the man only scowled before he continued, “Heaven or no, these
sidhe
bastards lurking at the edge of the clearing would rather eat yer soul for breakfast than sing an alleluia. We’d best hurry.” He held out a hand to her as if to help her from the carriage.
    Or drag her from it by the hair, perhaps.
    “Who are you?” She scooted away from his outstretched fingers, her voice shaking as it returned. “What have you done with my driver?”
    The man canted back as if he’d been scalded.
    “What have
I
done?” The Scotsman glared at her from under thick, dark eyebrows. His eyes were light but she could not determine their color as he glowered in the moonlight. He crossed powerful arms over his chest, his shoulders so square they might have been hewn from a quarry. A navy plaid draped around his waist and chest did not cover all that it should, providing her with a distracting lesson in male anatomy at a time when she should be defending herself. He carried a sword at his hip. An honest-to-God sword.
    She swallowed hard, responding carefully.
    “Lawrence does not answer when I call him,” she clarified, sitting up straighter, trying to hide her fear the same way she would when meeting a fierce hunting dog or a spirited mount. “Where is he?”
    The dark gloom around them seemed to deepen, the silver mist on the trees glistening brighter in response. What caused that strange glow?
    “Your driver stopped to answer the siren’s song of some soulless she-devil in the wood.” The stranger threw his hands in the air as if the very idea disgusted him. “If you aren’t careful, you’ll go moony-eyed for a poetry-spouting spectral yourself, so hurry lassie, before one of them kisses the sense right out of you and you’re turned into a wood nymph to plague me for the rest of my days.”
    “Excuse me?” Her heart pounded faster. He ranted nonsense like a lunatic.