Free Heart of the Highland Wolf by Terry Spear Page A

endanger humans—and no humans wandering about, she felt safe in the woods. She was alone except for a couple of Scottish crossbills feeding on pinecone seeds, one a red male with dark wings and tail feathers, and a couple of others calling excitedly to one another and sounding like they were speaking with a Scottish accent.
    The cocky trill of a crested tit added to the forest sounds, and she looked up to see the perky bird sitting on the dead stump of a pine, the feathers on his crown standing straight up like a Mohawk haircut. A golden-ringed dragonfly flittered beside her and vanished, and butterflies fluttered about.
    The feeling that she was in primeval woods, transported to the long-distant past, made her imagination run free. She envisioned a clan chief’s daughter dashing away from an enemy clan, seeking shelter in the castle beyond the woods, and praying she’d reach it before she was caught.
    But places like this that seemed unspoiled and serene now could have harbored dangerous men throughout the ages, creating a perilous situation for any who passed through the area. Or clans who fought with one another, and if her envisioned chief’s daughter had been from the enemy clan, she’d be in deadly trouble.
    She patted her pocket where the script map, a hasty sketch that her grandfather had drawn from memory and given her, had been. She’d taken it out and left it back at the cottage, in case she was detained for trespassing and searched. What would they make of the map? Maybe that she knew where the secret entrance was and planned to break in. That’s why she’d left it back at the cottage.
    Only now she couldn’t remember exactly where her grandfather had thought the entrance was. She stalked toward the castle walls to get her bearing but kept to the woods. At the easternmost corner tower, she would skirt around it to the eastern wall. Somewhere along there at the edge of the woods the hidden entrance was located.
    Like the mob of curly, white sheep suddenly appearing before Maria and her on the road, the castle unexpectedly loomed across a moat through the screen of trees in which she now stood. Her jaw dropped. The golden sandstone castle walls and the castle inside were spectacular, overwhelming, and impressive, the very tops of the towers disappearing into the fog and giving the illusion they reached for the very heavens.
    She glanced to the east, saw the round easternmost tower, and headed deeper into the woods to stay out of sight. But when she finally reached the area along the eastern wall, she could find no sign of a secret entrance. Maybe as a wolf she could locate it with her nose to the ground, smelling any traces of human wanderings or, better than that, any hint of an underground tunnel system by the cooler air seeping out of the edges of a trapdoor or the dampness within an earthen dwelling by its cavelike musty smell. The other option was locating the postern gate, or back door to the castle—the one that had been used by pedestrians or tradesmen and was located on the south side. If she could discover it, that might be an easier way to enter.
    Even if she’d had a written invitation to explore every square inch of the castle—which she didn’t and knew wasn’t forthcoming—she felt driven to find a more covert way in. She imagined that was due to her innate sense of adventure, her family’s ties to the land, and her unconquerable imagination, which dreamed up worlds of romance, mystery, suspense, and adventure.
    This was the ultimate adventure.
    Truth be told, no way was she going to get an invitation inside the castle. Beyond that, no one would give her blanket permission to search for the hidden cache her family left there centuries earlier.
    With her heart beating hard from the exercise and her rush to avoid being caught if someone was hiking through the forest, she traversed the area, back and forth, searching, looking for any sign of