Choosing the Highlander Read Online Free Page B

The cloth cut across cheeks the color of a rosy sunset and had worked its way between lips that refused to be tamed.
    Her protests rose on the air, no less scathing for being muffled. If the situation hadn’t been so dire, he would have grinned at the lass’s spirit.
     In contrast, the one Wilhelm had thought an urchin hung unresponsive, with face downturned and hair dangling over small breasts. Now that the guards weren’t obscuring his view, he noticed the prisoner’s swollen belly. Och, a woman with child. She was terribly undernourished. How long had Ruthven kept her locked away?
    Ruthven spoke again, but Wilhelm heard naught save the pounding of rage in his ears like war drums and a fierce wind.
    It comes upon me again.  
    Some ca mayhap, like his lled it bloodlust, but ’twas nothing so simple as a mindless urge to maim and kill. His mother called it berserker rage. She claimed it came from the fey blood in her family line.
    Wilhelm did not doubt the origin lay outside the usual order of things, but he tended to credit his gift to God. He believed himself called as a warrior for justice. Even as a lad, he had devoted himself to protecting the weak and cutting down evil. ’Twas in his blood every bit as deeply as his urge to one day rule his father’s barony.
    When the holy rage came, strength welled inside him until he felt he could tear down castle walls barehanded. That strength filled him now. He could no more ignore its summons to act than he could cut off his own arm.
    He looked to Terran. “They are innocent.” He knew this, because his rage wouldn’t have come if the women deserved what was about to happen.
    “Aye.” Terran nodded, resolute. His eyes glowed with rage equal to Wilhelm’s. The pair of them had been called the twin blades of Dornoch since they’d matured enough to do battle. They always went together into skirmishes, and they always emerged the other side.
    They both kent they were about to destroy any chance Wilhelm ever had of wielding influence in parliament.
    “Create a diversion,” he told Terran. “I’ll stall Ruthven.”
    For better or worse, they went their separate ways, Terran into the stables and Wilhelm toward the pyres.
     

Chapter 3
    Connie was living a nightmare. Not dreaming. Living.
    An hour ago, she had been anticipating a hearty Scottish breakfast with Leslie. Now, she had been stripped, gagged and bound, and four smelly men were manhandling her onto a stage in a torch-lit courtyard. Despite her ineffective attempts to break free, they were tying her to a stake, of all things, and in front of an apparent audience.
    It reminded her of the historic accounts she’d read of the witch-trials in Salem, Massachusetts when her sister had first embraced Wicca. Connie had a sinking feeling these people wanted to burn her at the stake, a prospect as ridiculous as it was terrifying.
    How can this be happening? Where am I? When am I?  
    Despite oceans of improbability, she seemed to have been transported into the past. By roughly five-hundred years, if her minimal cache of historical knowledge could be trusted. She’d come to this conclusion from her uncomfortable but blessedly warm position across the rump of a horse, where the two men whom she had first encountered had tied her like a sack of supplies. Not only had she overheard them arguing about a James in the context of the crown, but they had also mentioned a Queen Maggie, which must be a nickname for Queen Margaret.
     Connie had briefly studied European history while deciding whether to declare her major in Engineering or Theater. Not having a head for dates, the exact years of the Stuart rulers eluded her, but she recalled that two Queen Margarets had been married to two King Jameses in the late fifteenth century. The only reason she remembered was that she’d gotten the question wrong on an exam.
    All other possible explanations for what was happening to her had fallen away one by one as the evidence pointed