Master of the Highlands Read online

Page 2

 

  He would submit to no man. And, as his father’s before him, his men were known as the sons of the hound.

  Chapter 2

  Scottish Highlands, Present Day

  Lily exhaled sharply as she dug her thumb along the muscle in her forearm. She hadn ’t done any drawing in years and she wasn’t about to let a cramp stop her now. Working on her sketches consumed her; already she had spent an entire morning vigorously rubbing and blending pastels in an effort to capture the land around her.

  It was a nice change from the night before, which had ended badly. It ’d been a full week since she had arrived at her rented croft and, save for the occasional curious wave from a friendly passerby, her only company had been the shaggy Highland cattle who spent their days grazing on the clumps of verdant green amidst the purple heather and gray rocks of the glen. Lonely for a little fun, she ’d made the drive to Inverness and decided to brave one of the local college hot spots complete with rowdy boys, heavily made-up girls, and a loud band. All in all, she thought it would be a fun place to disappear while checking out what constituted nightlife in the Highlands.

  After ten minutes pressed up against the bar hoping one of the bartenders would notice her, she began to regret her decision. Annoyed, she thought she could see why the local girls got so dolled up. How else to get a little service in this joint?

  She turned to leave but was stopped by a hulking and very drunk young man. What he lacked in height, the kid made up for in width. With a too-tight black T-shirt stretched over his biceps, he clearly imagined himself a buff physical specimen. Too bad, she thought, he didn’t pay the same attention to his stomach muscles, which were well hidden beneath his considerable beer belly.

  “Excuse me, ” Lily whispered, lowering her eyes and trying to dart underneath his outstretched arm.

  “Oi, it’s a Yank! ” the kid bellowed. He stank of whisky and vomit. Lily decided it was time to get out of there. By getting to know the locals, she definitely hadn ’t been thinking of drunken college boys. What had she been thinking anyway? She should be back at her serene little cottage, watching a movie, with a sinful midnight snack as her company.

  “Yes, um” —Lily gave a half smile in an attempt to brush off his interest and again tried to duck out—“excuse me. ”

  “Not sso fast, lassie, ” the boy slurred. “Is it true what they say about Americans?”

  Lily tried again to escape, definitely not wanting to know what he was referring to. The band was between sets and the bar suddenly seemed eerily quiet. Lily felt an uneasy electricity in the air—the kind, she thought, that must precede a bar brawl.

  “Please let me by. ”

  “Aye, please let me by, ” the boy singsonged in a falsetto voice. By that time, a couple of his buddies had sidled up next to him to watch.

  She felt her temper rising. While some women might have tried to diffuse the situation, Lily fought with fire, refusing to shrink from anyone, muscle-bound or not.

  “Oi, ” Lily mimicked. “Now let me by. ” She walked headlong into his chest to move him aside, but to no avail.

  “Look you drunken imbecile, I ’m leaving. ” She knew that this was the wrong way to handle the situation, but it was clear that none of his buddies were interested in cutting short that evening’s entertainment, so she would have to stand up for herself.

  She noticed a handful of twentysomething girls huddled at her elbow, looking on sympathetically. A flame-haired girl flashed her a lopsided smile in show of support, and Lily found new reserves of bravado.

  “Cretin,” she spat, and tried once again to duck out.

  By that time the bar was silent and everyone had their eyes on the American who appeared to be in over her head.

  Lily fumed. She had simply wanted a night out, to be left alone, to check out a local band and maybe do a little people watching.

  “Come on, luvvie,” the boy mumbled. The smell of his breath was starting to make Lily ill. “Just give us a quick snog, aye?”

  She had only meant to slap him, but somehow her fist ended up connecting with his jaw. Some of the college girls got in on the action and, rooting Lily on, tossed their beers in the boy’s face.

  Beer sprayed on his friends. Then the girls were doused. Then their dates got involved. And, before Lily knew it, she ’d started an all- out pub fight. She had slipped out a side door to the sound of crashing beer bottles.

  Lily had always prided herself on not being one of those timid, shrinking violet types, but inciting a pub brawl was beyond the pale. Studying her sketchpad, she thought with more than a little dread that she would need to return to the bar sometime to apologize to the owner for the ruckus. She tossed the pad aside and, knotting her unruly pale blonde hair into an impromptu braid, marveled anew at the scenery. She had always heard tales from her grandmother about the grandeur of the Highlands, but no words could capture the vastness, at once beautiful and bleak. She looked around, awed by the contrasts. Wind howled and ripped tendrils of her hair loose from her braid, yet the coarse plants that dotted the moors barely moved, hovering low to the ground in an angry tangle with the purple and white of heather and thistle. Mean, scrubby little plants pronouncing to the world, what, this little breeze? Much, she imagined, like the Highlanders themselves. Strong, impermeable, and quick to understate a bad situation.

  In the distance there seemed to be another country altogether as birds swooped lazily over one of the Highlands’ innumerable lakes, the water impossibly still. Rugged mountains stood like austere sentinels on the far shore, their jagged silhouettes appearing somewhat softened in reflections on the glassy water. Except for the flickering shadows of gray storm clouds across the surface, the water was dark blue and violet in the morning light, making Lily finally understand why folk imagined lochs could harbor such enormous monsters in their depths.

  She slowly gathered her pastels back into their tattered cardboard box and wondered that before coming to Scotland, years had passed since she had done any artwork at all. She had stumbled straight from an art degree, a passion for painting, and aspirations of arts education for underprivileged kids into an eighty-hour-a-week job in Silicon Valley. No art. No kids. And certainly no underprivileged anybody.

  Touring Scotland had seemed to Lily an ideal opportunity to get some thinking done. To have a little alone time to reflect on where she had been in the last few years. What the haze of late-night hours, stock options, and board meetings had meant, if anything.

  Mostly she came because of Gram. Her dear grandmother who’d left her native Highlands when she was not much more than a girl, eager to see what the rest of the world held in store. Gram, who never did lose her lilting brogue or the youthful light in her eyes.

  She had always said that Gram had done all the heavy lifting, raising her as she did when her biological mother took off when Lily was just in grade school. Sandra, as Lily had insisted on calling her mother, had become infatuated with some third-string minor league baseball player who’d breezed into town for training camp. When the time came for him to breeze back out, Lily’s mom had her bags packed and ready, figuring she had a better shot at romance not saddled with a kid, and while she was still on what she liked to call “the right side of forty. ”

  Sandra rambled back into town some years later. This time she had a balding sixtysomething banker by her side and was thinking to pick up where she left off, eager to fill out her new role of staid suburban wife with a ready-made child. Lily wouldn ’t have it, which didn’t much matter anyway. By that time, Gram and her “wee bonny bàn”—as she had lovingly nicknamed Lily for her outrageously curly white -blonde hair—were inseparable. The old woman was fiercely protective of her granddaughter, and it was only after some cajoling that she allowed Sandra and the new husband even to see Lily.

  And now Gram was gone.

  It had always been easy for Lily to deny just how old Gram was because sh
e’d been so vital, ever obsessing over her crafts and poetry and roses.

  Though she was comforted by the fact that Gram had gone peacefully in her sleep, Lily found no consolation. Rather than celebrate Gram ’s memory, she couldn’t get past a laundry list of regrets. Gram had dropped everything and made endless sacrifices to raise Lily, when she should’ve been playing bingo and touring the globe with her seniors ’ group instead.

  Now that her grandmother was gone, Lily found that instead of pursuing the next big thing in her career, all she wanted to do was escape to Gram’s homeland. To take that

  “one last trip to the Highlands ” that her grandmother dreamt of before she died.

  At the outset, Lily thought it’d be an opportunity for a little reflection. The landscape was so solitary, though, she found she had almost too much time to think.

  Back in San Francisco, she had gotten used to not dealing with much of anything outside of her work. It had started in the 1990s, when her temp job at a small Internet magazine had spiraled into a creative director position as she reached the ripe old age of twenty-four. A number of years, thousands of hours and one soured relationship later, she found herself with nothing but a used luxury sedan, a sizeable nest egg, and a few new wrinkles. Not even laugh lines, those. Just a couple of creases developing in her usually furrowed brow.

  Lily wondered what it had all been for anyway. She had been an artist. And instead of following her dreams, she had ended up arranging layouts for other people ’s photographs of places she’d had no time to visit.

  Maybe it had all been to prove Sandra wrong, to prove that she could get an art degree and not end up panhandling in the street. All she knew was that she surprised even herself when she hit the business world. Lily’s colleagues had thought she was shrewd, viewing the temper that had been a liability in her personal life as a take- no-prisoners attitude. She kept thinking, just one more year of vesting stock options and then she could quit and paint to her heart’s content. But she never did quit.

  Then the technology market crashed. It started out slowly at first: the occasional minor layoffs, management re - orgs. But before she knew it, she was the lone designer among tracts of empty cubicles, left to pack up the pieces of a failed online venture for an anonymous corporate parent.