Charming The Highlander

But for some reason, she no longer cared if there were colonies on Mars within the decade. Sometime over the last several weeks, she’d stopped looking outward to space and turned her attention to what she had discovered to be the real challenge: living and loving and being content here on Earth.

And then there was Grey. He had taught her that there was something much more important than living on the cutting edge of exploration, technology, and modern-minded men. Grey had made her realize that for all of society’s evolution, mankind still needed the ancient values to survive. Men and women still needed to belong to each other. A commitment, a bond, and trust of another were still more important than mere coexistence.

Grace had always known these truths, but she had forgotten them sometime in the last fourteen years, living with people who looked only up and outward, not inside themselves.

“This MacKeage guy,” Jonathan said, walking into the great room of Gu Bràth. “Do you trust him to do as he said? Will he take us to the crash site tomorrow?” He looked at his watch and frowned. “I mean today. Dammit. It’s after midnight. We’ve wasted thirty-six hours already.”

“He will,” she assured him.

He walked to the hearth and held his hands to the warmth of the fire while he looked around the room.

“This is a hell of a place MacKeage owns.” He looked back at her. “I think my last offer of forty thousand was an insult. Where’d he make this kind of money? I’ve never heard the MacKeage name mentioned in the business world. He sure as hell didn’t make this kind of cash living in Pine Creek.”

Grace shrugged and closed the old book she had been looking through. She hadn’t been able to read it; it was written in a language she didn’t recognize.

“You don’t seem very worried about our satellite,” he observed, taking a chair across from her. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees as he stared at her. “What’s gotten into you? The Grace Sutter I know would be pounding the computer keys now, not reading some ancient tome.”

“Why are we doing it, Jonathan? Why are we trying so hard to travel into space? We haven’t even finished exploring Earth yet. Why aren’t we focused on that?”

Her questions seemed to surprise him. “Because it’s where the future is,” he told her. “A hundred years from now, Earth will be a wasteland. If we don’t travel up and out and explore new worlds, we won’t survive.”

“But it wouldn’t become a wasteland if we put all of our energies into saving it.”

He leaned back in his chair, waving that concept away. “That’s environmental bunk,” he scoffed. “And there’s no money in it. The profit is in space, because that’s where people want to go.” He leaned forward again. “And that’s where you and I can take them, Grace. Don’t get all introspective on me just because you’re visiting your childhood home.”

He got down on his knees in front of her and gripped the arms of her chair. “You’re just feeling something every scientist feels when he’s on the brink of a new discovery that could alter the future of the world. You’re worried about the ramifications.”

He brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Don’t be. What we’re doing is a good thing, Grace. Future generations will thank us the same way we now thank Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and the Wright brothers.”

He cupped her cheek and lifted her face up to his. “You’re one of them, Grace,” he whispered.

And then he kissed her.

She didn’t kiss him back. She couldn’t.

He didn’t smell right.

And he tasted like bitter coffee.

Her toes didn’t tingle, and her breath didn’t catch.

It wasn’t the same. Heck, it wasn’t even close.

“I wouldn’t be doing that, girl, if I were you,” Father Daar suddenly said from the doorway of the living room.

Grace pulled back and flushed crimson. Great. She’d just been caught kissing—by an old-fashioned priest, of all people.

Jonathan stood up and faced Daar. “It’s okay, Father,” he said. “Grace and I…well, we have a history together.”

“You’ll not have a future if the MacKeage realizes this,” Daar said, walking into the room and settling into Jonathan’s seat. He dismissed Jonathan in much the same way Grey had dismissed him at her home earlier that afternoon. And, like before, Jonathan didn’t seem to realize the insult or even the threat the priest had alluded to. He simply walked out of the room, back to his computer.

Daar lifted a brow at her, looking at the book in her lap. “Been doing some reading?”

Grace laid the book on the floor by her chair. “No. I thought it might be Scottish, though, and I was looking for the meaning of Gu Bràth.”

“It’s Gaelic, girl,” he said, leaning back in his chair as he gri

Until eternity.” He leaned closer and said, his crystal-clear blue eyes sparkling, “Or until Judgment Day.

The old Gaelic language is hard to pin down exactly,” he continued, settling back in his chair again.

“Words can have many meanings.”

“What do the words mean for Grey and the others?”

He looked back at the fire, absently watching the flames. “The MacKeage gave this place the name Gu Bràth and said this mountain was their home now, forever, and that nothing short of God himself would ever uproot them again.”

Grace wondered what had happened back in Scotland that had forced the four men to build a new life here. Whatever it was, it had been a painful experience for the priest to use words like uproot and for Grey to declare to God that it would never happen again.

“Why do people refer to him as ‘the MacKeage’?” she asked, drawing Father Daar’s attention again.

“What does that mean?”

“The laird of a clan is always referred to by the clan’s name. The laird of the Campbells would be the Campbell,” he said as example.

“Grey’s a laird? A real one?”

“It’s an old title.” Daar set his cane across his knees and fingered the wood. “It’s not used much anymore today. But the title still exists.”

Grace was fascinated. So that was why the others listened to Grey, even though Ian and Callum were older. But she hadn’t thought people still put stock in rank. Not the way the three men seemed to do, anyway.

She wanted to ask the priest more about it, but he suddenly nodded at the cookie tin sitting on top of the mantel. “She’s not in there, you know,” he told her softly. “She’s here,” he said, pointing at her and then tapping his own chest. He waved a hand in the air. “Mary has moved into the energies of our life forces now and is part of the people whose lives she touched.”

“I know,” Grace admitted rather sheepishly, feeling a bit silly for carrying her sister’s ashes everywhere.

“But they’re all I have left of her. And in less than four months, I won’t even have that.”

“Ah, the Summer Solstice,” he said, nodding. “Your birthdays.”

“How do you know that?”

“Mary would walk up the mountain to visit me at least once a week. She told me that you both had the same birthday. Summer Solstice.”

Grace felt her insides get all mushy, and she smiled. “It doesn’t always fall on the same date every year, you know. Mary was born on June twentieth, and I was born on the twenty-first. But both days were the Summer Solstice on those years, and so Mom decided that we should celebrate that event instead.”

“Mary told me you were each born at the exact moment of the Solstice,” Daar said. “Is that true, or was she pulling an old man’s leg? She had that kind of sense of humor.”

“She wasn’t lying. It’s the weirdest thing. All of my half brothers were born on the same day, too. Mom always made a huge celebration of it, and even after they’d left home, my brothers always came back for our birthdays on Summer Solstice. What are the odds of that happening in one family?”

“You consider it a mere coincidence? Maybe not something a bit more magical?” he asked, his clear, steady blue eyes watching her with an intensity that grew unsettling.