Highlander's Portrait by C.A. Szarek

Author:C.A. Szarek [Szarek, C.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
Publisher: Paper Dragon Publishing
Published: 2016-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

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“I know tha’. Whereabou’s?” The elderly man’s demeanor was gentle.

But maybe Ashlyn needed kid-gloves at the moment. She blinked. He couldn’t have just—

Wasn’t he surprised? Eoin grandfather’s statement was the last thing she’d expected. “Uh…”

How to answer him? He might’ve heard of the US, considering the colonies, but he wouldn’t know what Texas was if she drew him a map.

Angus was looking at her expectantly. His eyes weren’t the least bit clouded with age.

Eoin nudged her shoulder with his and she jumped.

She should yell at him, but Ashlyn couldn’t muster anything intelligent. She hadn’t been a fan when he’d put his chair so close moments before—or more accurately, she’d disliked the awareness that’d shivered down her spine—but she couldn’t shift away without running into his grandfather’s rocker. She was trapped between the two men.

She should be furious with him. She was, right?

“Texas,” she whispered to Angus finally.

The old man leaned forward in his rocking chair and slapped his kilted thigh. “Texas?” he exclaimed.

“Texas mus’ be a popular place ta leave,” Eoin mumbled.

Ashlyn looked at her kidnapper, then at his grandfather and back. “What?”

The men exchanged a look, then the laird took an audible breath. “Ye…ye arena tha first lass ta come here from tha future.” He looked at his grandfather again, and the elderly man gave a nod.

I didn’t come here. You brought me here. But she couldn’t say that; she didn’t want to get snarky in front of Angus. For the sake of manners and all that. “Okay…and?” she pushed out instead.

“From Texas,” the laird said.

“What?” She cocked her head to one side, as if she had a hearing problem and the gesture would help. Wrong. Ashlyn gripped the arms of the chair and leaned forward.

As if it was possible, her current…situation…had just gotten more surreal.

They both started talking at once, but Eoin deferred to Angus, and the older man launched into a story full of magic, multiple instances of time travel, and the Fae—flippin’ fairies. There was also information about the Faery Stones, the portal they’d used to come here.

The Faery Stones were the stalagmites with the unusual crystals on top of them in that cave. They’d looked unnatural because they were. Fae-born, not from what the old man called, the Human Realm. Evidently, Eoin used the Stones a lot in fulfilling his duties as Guardian of the Faery Flag.

Her instinct was to say, ‘No freaking way,’ but she was sitting next to a big hearth where peat moss burned brightly, in a castle in Scotland, next to two oversized men wearing kilts. Then, there was also the 1755 part of her new reality.

Ashlyn’s head started spinning when Angus mentioned his aunt and her sister, and his wife all had been from the future—the first two specifically, from Texas. A few other MacLeods were either Fae, or were from centuries other than the seventeenth or eighteenth, as well.

Oh, then the part that his mother had been a Fae Princess.

Like, an actual fairy—or, faery, as it was in Scotland.

“So, you’re…not human?”

“I’m a halfling, as they say.

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