Free Night Visitor by Melanie Jackson Page B

lightheaded horror behind and her stranded in the middle of a nightmare.
    Taffy bent over at the waist and took some calming breaths. She absolutely, completely, and utterly rejected her stomach’s suggestion that she empty the remains of her supper onto the forest floor. But as a precaution, she removed the heavy belts of ammunition that were pressing on her chest. She took a few deep breaths.
    Malcolm looked at the apparition—nay, the lass! —and felt some of the strange and awful power that had flooded his body folding back in on itself.
    “Ye are real,” he muttered, for human she certainly was, and doing poorly. Her face was pale rather than the pink it should be from their run, and she looked to be on the verge of gut sickness.
    “Are ye ill, lass?” he asked gently, running his eyes over her slender form to see if she had been hurt from the Campbell’s claymore. For one with even a hint of faerie blood, the simplest wound from cold iron could sometimes prove fatal. “Are ye wounded?”
    “No.” She swallowed and straightened valiantly. “Just…just…tired. I’ve had a busy day, shooting people, running through the woods.…”
    Malcolm forewent a smile; such a mettlesome reply deserved better than teasing. Gently, he tucked her straying hair behind her lovely pointed ears. The expression on her face was one of confused disbelief and wariness.
    He didn’t know what aspect he himself wore. A strange but giddy mix of euphoria and desire beat at his temples and drove his blood fiercely through his pounding heart. Not all of the heady new power had left his head, though, and he made an effort to throttle it before it frightened her. Despite her brave attack upon the Campbells,he kenned that this lass was tenderly made.
    “Ye’re a MacLeod,” he said softly, not terribly surprised. He put his other hand beneath her chin and tilted it up. “Of course, they would send someone tae me who shared the cousin-red.”
    She looked confused. “Cousin-red? Oh. Blood.” She swallowed again. Color was beginning to flood her cheeks. Too much of it. “Yes, I’m a MacLeod. At least, my mother was.”
    “And what are ye called?”
    “Taffy. Tafaline, really, but I prefer Taffy.” She peered at him in the deepening twilight. Her breathing had not slowed and she was showing some signs of alarm at his fingers, which remained tangled in her hair and beneath her chin.
    “Taffy,” he repeated, tasting the syllables. He wasn’t surprised by her words. They were as his inner dream had predicted.
    “And you are Malcolm, the piper, aren’t you?” It was just barely a question. “And this is really Scotland in sixteen-hundred and forty-four—and those were Campbells chasing us.”
    “Aye. You kenned that, did ye?” He reached out and caught a second tuft of her golden hair. He stared, mesmerized as it curled about his blistered fingers. He tugged experimentally and then started to wind the tress about his fist in the manner of a distaff.
    “Yes. I saw their banner and—Malcolm?” She stepped forward a pace as he wound her hairtighter. This was no fairie, no apparition that had come to aid him. Unable to resist, he bent down to take a tiny taste of his beautiful, human savior.
    As he suspected, she was sweet. She was also very near collapsing now that the battle rage had worn off, so he contented himself with only the smallest of touches before releasing his hold upon her. His body ached to do more, but Malcolm fought his baser impulses down.
    “My gratitude tae ye,” he whispered, suddenly thanking the still-folk for more than just his life.
    Taffy knew that at various times in history, kissing had been used as an ordinary mode of casual salutation, rather than any special endearment between lovers. But she felt sure that wasn’t the case in seventeenth-century Scotland, where Puritans had outlawed kissing, even between mother and child. A single look at Malcolm’s face assured her that the piper was feeling