Charming The Highlander

He was a rich man, he decided as he looked at all seven of his children, not one blessed son in the lot.

Now all he had to do was find them husbands—modern, intelligent, gentle, but strong men who would cherish his daughters without dominating them.

Men also willing to change their names to MacKeage.

Pocket Books

Proudly Presents

LOVING THE HIGHLANDER

Janet Chapman

AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK

MAY 2003

FROM POCKET BOOKS

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Loving the Highlander…

Sadie Quill was still in awe of her luck. She was actually being paid to do what she loved most—hike and kayak through the beautiful forest of Maine. She’d gladly given up her job as a meteorologist in Boston to return to Pine Creek and the mountains she’d grown up in to map out landmarks for a proposal for a park. These last ten weeks had been a pleasant dream she never wanted to wake up from.

Well, most of the job had been a dream, except that some of her work was being sabotaged. But having her trail markers stolen was more of a nuisance than a setback. The orange ribbons were nothing more than a visible tool for her project. She had the coordinates written on the large wall map back at her cabin, and she could map them into her GPS to find the trails whenever she wanted.

Now she was cataloging the flora and fauna of the valley, noting in her journal points of interest and areas of animal activity that future hikers would want to see.

Sadie stifled a chuckle and raised her camera, pointing the long lens through the honeysuckle bush where she hid on the shore of a small lake. The scene unfolding before her was priceless, and exactly why she loved her job so much.

At the urging of its mother, a young moose stepped into the shallow water of the protected cove. Sadie depressed the shutter on her camera, captured the shot, and advanced the film. No noise betrayed her position, thanks to her father’s ingenious skill in making the mechanics of the camera silent.

She and her dad had walked these woods for years, taking pictures as she was now, and Sadie’s heart ached with sadness that he was not here with her today. It had been Frank Quill who taught Sadie the fine art of moving silently among the animals, and had instilled in her not only an appreciation of nature, but a respect for it as well. And now she was thanking him by the only means she could find, by helping to build a park in his memory.

The mother moose suddenly lifted her head and looked toward the open water of the lake. Sadie used the telephoto lens of her camera to scan across the calm lake surface. And there, on the opposite shore, she saw the movement.

Something was swimming toward them.

Sadie leaned forward to get a better view. The mother moose heard her, whipped her head around and stared directly at Sadie. For a moment, their eyes locked.

There wasn’t much in these woods that worried a full-grown moose, but a mother had to be more cautious of the vulnerability of her calf. Sadie’s presence and whatever was swimming toward them was apparently more than the mother moose was willing to deal with. She gave a low grunt of warning and stepped out of the lake, pushing her baby ahead of her.

With a sigh of regret for scaring the moose, Sadie turned her attention back to the lake. Whatever was swimming towards her was too small to be another moose and too large to be a muskrat or otter. Sadie sharpened the focus on her lens and watched, until finally she saw the rise and fall of arms cutting a path through the water.

Arms? There was a person swimming across the lake?

Sadie settled herself deeper into the bushes, making sure she was well-hidden as he moved ever closer.

Yes, she could see now that the swimmer was male. And that he had broad shoulders, long, powerful arms, and a stroke that cut through the water with amazing ease. The swimmer moved with lazy, rhythmic grace, right up to one of the boulders in the cove Sadie was hiding in. He placed two large hands on the rock and pulled himself out of the water in one powerful, seamless motion.

Sadie blinked.

She tore her eye away from the viewfinder. She didn’t need the vivid clarity of the telephoto lens to see that the man was naked.

She looked through her camera again and adjusted the focus. Yup, as naked as the day he was born. He sat on the boulder, brushing the hair from his face and wringing the shoulder-length mane out in a ponytail at his back.

Well, heck. The guy’s hair was almost as long as hers. Sadie pushed the zoom on her lens closer, aiming it at the top half of the man. She almost dropped the camera when he came into focus. He was huge, and it wasn’t an illusion of the lens, either. His brawny shoulders filled the viewfinder, and when he lifted both hands to push the water away from his forehead again, his chest expanded to Herculean proportions.

Sadie noticed then that the guy wasn’t even winded from his swim. His broad and powerfully muscled chest—which was covered with a luxurious mat of slick, dark blond hair—rose and fell with the steady rhythm of someone who had merely walked up a short flight of stairs.

Who was this demigod of the woods?

Sadie zoomed the lens of her camera even closer, on his face. She didn’t recognize him from town. She’

d only been back in the Pine Creek area for a few months now, and had only gone into town six or seven times for supplies since returning, but she would have remembered such a ruggedly handsome face on a man his size. She definitely would have remembered such startling green eyes framed by such a drop-dead gorgeous face. His jaw, darkened with a couple-day’s growth of beard, was square, stern, and stubborn looking. His neck was thick, with a leather cord around it that dangled an odd-shaped ball of some sort over his chest.

Sadie zoomed the lens out again until his entire body filled her viewfinder. His stomach was flat and contoured with muscle. He had long, powerful looking thighs, bulging calves, and even his feet looked strong. He was turned away just enough that his modesty was barely intact.

It wasn’t every day she was treated to such an exhibit of pure unadulterated maleness. And despite her own sense of shame for being a blatant voyeur, Sadie wished he would turn just a bit more toward her.

She was curious, dammit, and made no apology for it.

She liked men. Especially big ones like this guy. Sadie was six-foot-one in her stocking feet, and she usually spent most of her time talking to the receding hairline of the men she knew. Since she had hit puberty and shot up like a weed, Sadie wished she were short. Like the heroines in the romance novels she loved to read, she wanted to be spunky, beautiful, and petite. And she was tired of falling short of the three by at least two of those traits.

About all Sadie could say for herself was that she did possess a healthy dose of spunk. She may have come close to beauty once, but a deadly house-fire eight years ago had ended that promise. And no matter how much she had willed it, she hadn’t stopped growing until her twenty-third birthday. She was taller than most men she met, and every bit of her height was in the overlong inseam of her jeans.

She’d bet her boots that the guy on the rock had at least a thirty-six inseam, and that he wore a triple-extra-large shirt he had to buy from the tall rack.

The vision in her viewfinder suddenly began to fade, and Sadie had a moment’s regret that it had all been a dream.

Until she realized that the viewfinder had fogged up.

Well, she did feel unusually warm. And she was breathing a bit harder than normal.

Wow. Either she was having a guilt attack for being a Peeping Tom, or she was experiencing a fine little case of lust.

Sadie didn’t care which it was, she wasn’t stopping. She used the back of her gloved right hand to wipe the viewfinder dry before she looked through it again.