“My name is not spoken,” she replied
with a great deal of haughtiness.
“More than a hundred years it has not gone
upon men’s tongues, save for a blink.
I am nameless like the Folk of Peace.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
Catriona
Driving without Google maps yielded unexpected benefits. To save on data charges and avoid her mother, Anna kept her phone turned off and used the directions she had hastily written down to navigate. That combined with intermittent bucketloads of rain, and the confusion of driving on the left, led her to make five wrong turns that cost her at least an hour. On the other hand, it was impossible to stay depressed when something surprising and delightful popped out at her everywhere she looked.
She was finally here.
The reality of being in Scotland thrilled her all over again. This was Outlander country, Braveheart country, the home of heroes like Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy MacGregor. The stuff of Aunt Elspeth’s stories, Sir Walter Scott’s books, and Robert Burns’s poetry—along with every adolescent dream Anna’d ever had of men in kilts.
Not that she was likely to find men in kilts or bagpipers piping out the tune to “MacGregor’s Gathering.” But Balwhither, where Anna’s mother had grown up and Elspeth still lived, had always been MacGregor land, the place where Rob Roy himself lay buried. Anna wanted to take in everything on the way, experience everything. Unfortunately, her eyes kept trying to close, and her stomach growled with growing insistence.
She tried singing to keep herself awake.
She opened the window.
She stopped for coffee and an onion-laced meat pasty in Callander at the border of the Highlands. The food only made her sleepier.
Meanwhile, the road grew narrower. She drove more slowly, squeezing over to make room whenever faster cars whipped around her shoebox-sized Chevy rental. By the time the odometer advised her that the cutoff for Balwhither Glen was coming up, she was traveling at a turtle’s pace. Even so, she would have missed the turn if she hadn’t spied the black-and-white signpost for Rob Roy’s grave and slammed on her brakes.
In the glen itself, a single-track road led past scattered farms and houses, past the ruined church and the cemetery where Rob Roy’s tombstone read, “MacGregor Despite Them,” showing the same defiance with which he’d lived.
According to Elspeth, Anna’s own family had been MacGregors, too, before the name had been banned for almost two hundred years. Since then, they’d used the name of Murray, and all of them were buried in that graveyard. The thought sent goosebumps over Anna’s spine, but ignoring the impulse to stop, she drove on toward the loch that began at the end of the tiny village.
Calling it a village was a bit of a hopeful overstatement. Together with a handful of white houses, a smattering of businesses each did double duty: The Last Stand Inn and Tavern, Grewer’s Sweets and Groceries, and a face slap of a pink building with a sign that proclaimed it was the Library and Tea Room. Beyond those, the long opalescent strip of Loch Fàil unfurled, more spectacular than Anna could have imagined. The last spun-silk rays of sunset pierced the clouds and turned the water gold and red as it faded into a diminishing rank of hills.
Seen like this, Anna could almost believe that the legend about people seeing images of their true loves reflected in its waters at the Sighting was more than a romantic bedtime story. But she had little opportunity to admire its beauty.
Alongside the loch, the road gave up any pretense of being paved. Or free of obstacles.
Rounding a bend, Anna found a flock of black-faced sheep milling across the puddle-soaked gravel beneath an overhanging rowan. She wrenched the car to the verge to avoid plowing into them. They scattered, half of them running in front of her, and it took her fifty yards before she got back on the road. The sheep didn’t seem to care. According to the rearview mirror, they were all back in the road again, half of them turned in her direction, watching her taillights fade.
Lights.
A flash of headlights hit her head on, and a car barreled at her around a second bend. She jerked to the right before she remembered she was supposed to be on the left—not that there was much of a left or right; the road scarcely offered room for a single car. Anna yanked the wheel over and caught a bump—a rock or wretched log—and, flustered, missed the brake and jammed the accelerator.
Her car shot toward the loch. Adrenaline tightened Anna’s chest. She fought a skid. The car fishtailed and finally slid to a stop some twenty feet off the road.
Hands strangling the wheel, Anna sat gulping air and wondering how deep the water in the loch was in front of her—and whether her rental insurance would have covered submersion through stupidity. On the bright side, if she’d drowned herself, at least she’d have been out of her misery.
Which was not a cheerful thought. Hadn’t she promised herself that she’d be more optimistic?
Forcing her lips into a smile and the car into reverse, she mashed the gas. Mud and grass spat from beneath the tires, and she turned to look back over her shoulder. It was only then that she noticed the tall, muscled figure approaching behind her.
The man jumped aside, swearing. Anna didn’t hear him, but she didn’t need to. By the glow of her taillights, the gesture and the facial expression that marred what was otherwise a handsome face were clear enough. To remove all doubt, he pounded a fist against the driver’s window as he stooped beside it.
Anna fumbled with the power controls.
He’d stopped knocking by the time the glass slid down, but his hand still hovered in the air. He stared at her, his blue eyes narrowed beneath wiry dark hair, as if she’d shocked him.
Anna felt just as stunned. With the sunset behind his shoulders, he shimmered, all gold and gleaming around the edges, like a hopeful memory. The impression vanished the moment she blinked, but then disbelief set in. Because she recognized him. Throughout most of their teenage years, her sister Katharine’s bedroom had been plastered with posters of his face, and Katharine had obsessed over every bit of tabloid speculation when he’d disappeared after the accident that had killed his wife.
“Aren’t you Gregor Mark?” Anna barely managed to keep the surprised squeak out of her voice.
“The hell I am,” he snapped in an accent decidedly more Scottish than Gregor Mark’s cut-glass British accent, “and what do you think you’re doing, driving like an idiot on this road? Or off the road, to be exact. My daughter’s in the car. You could have killed us both.”
Anna winced at the tone of his voice and at her own stupidity. “I’m sorry. It was the sheep—”
“The bloody sheep are part of the reason it’s daft to drive that fast through here.”
Daft? Hold on. Even the sheep had practically laughed at how slowly she’d been driving. Why was it that no one gave her the benefit of the doubt lately, not for a single second? Not Mike, not her boss, not even her own darn mother. Yes, she’d made mistakes, but was it necessary for everyone to overreact?
“I wasn’t even close to speeding,” she said through gritted teeth, “and I already told you I was sorry, so you don’t have to yell—”
“You think this is yelling?”
“I can hear perfectly well that it is, so go back to your daughter, and let me get my car back on the road.”
“Best of bloody luck to you if you want to try. You’ll only dig yourself in deeper.” The man straightened and shook his head. A muscle ticked in his cheek. “Look, sorry, but since you’ve already managed to splatter me in mud, I’d be grateful if you’d at least wait until I’m out of range before you try again. Meanwhile, I’ll go phone for someone to come and dig you out.”
The dark mud had blended into the dull green waxed jacket he wore open over a well-tailored white shirt and jeans, but it stood out on the lighter clothing. Anna hardly had time to register the mess before he’d turned away to stalk off on long, angry legs.
Even the way he crossed the boggy ground made her think of how Gregor Mark had used to stride across a movie screen, claiming the landscape and every inch of attention. Not that the resemblance was perfect. His Rudeness’s hair was shorter and darker, not Gregor Mark’s famous windblown style, and Gregor had always been clean-shaven or with a light scruff of five o’clock shadow. His Rudeness’d also had more of a chiseled-out-of-rock sharpness to his features. Of course, who knew what Gregor Mark would look like now? Even though his blockbuster films were still all over the television, the newest were a decade old. His disappearance had simply frozen him in time.
Unable to help herself, Anna watched the stranger until he’d reached the silver Audi station wagon that stood with its driver’s door open and dome lights shining. From the passenger side of the car, a small pale face strained to look around him in Anna’s direction, but the man swung himself onto the seat, slammed the door, and drove away.
Anna threw her own door open. Beneath her feet, the grass was torn, and cold mud squelched into her loafers while she slogged around to check her wheels. It didn’t help that His Rudeness had been right: the rear tires had burrowed down three inches. That wasn’t insurmountable. If she was careful, she might still be able to ease the car out and get back onto the road without having to subject herself to additional humiliation. She’d had enough of that for one day, one week—one lifetime, for that matter—hadn’t she? The universe couldn’t be this cruel.
Except, it could. Back in the car, she alternated between forward and reverse, but the harder she tried to rock the Chevy out of the mud, the deeper the wheels dug in. That left her the choice of searching for a tow truck to pull her out in the dark, or abandoning the car there and hiking the last mile to the house with her suitcase and carry-on bag. The thought of trudging that distance, when all she wanted to do was flop into a comfortable bed, made her want to scream.
Head buried in her hands, she almost missed the first flash of headlights on the road. By the time she looked up, more lights had pierced the darkness and cars were pulling up onto the grass behind her, doors slamming as people got out. Then a man in a kilt—an actual kilt—black military-style tactical boots, and a well-worn leather jacket strode up, grinning. His mop of wavy chin-length hair fell deeply auburn across his forehead, and his cheekbones were as sharp as knives above a white flash of teeth.
Anna wondered whether she’d hit her head on the steering wheel and was, in fact, hallucinating or dreaming, or whatever it was one did when one was unconscious. Or was Scotland naturally full of gorgeous men? Which would figure, because a man of any kind was the very last thing she needed.
The new arrival reached her window and leaned down, grinning more broadly. “You’ve gotten yourself into a wee pickle, haven’t you?” he said in a Scottish burr even lovelier than her Aunt Elspeth’s. “Himself phoned the house, and your aunt rang me, and here I am to help—along with half the village. I was down at the pub, mind, so you’ll have quite the welcoming party here in a minute.”
“Himself?” Anna blinked at him.
“Connal MacGregor. The laird—the one you ran off the road.”
“I ran him off the road? That’s rich since I’m the one sitting here in the muck—also he was rude.”
“Well, he would be, wouldn’t he, with you coming to help with the festival?” The man laughed, a deep rumble in his chest. “I’m Brando, by the way. We’ve all been expecting you.” He glanced behind him to where an ever-larger crowd was emerging from their cars. “Elspeth’s that excited about your visit. She’s talked of nothing else since the moment you agreed to come; she’s missed you so much these past few years.”
Anna swallowed an automatic twinge of guilt. Between Mike and her workload, she’d missed going home the last three Christmas holidays, and it had been ages since she’d seen Elspeth. Still, she pushed the guilt aside. She’d earned enough of that on her own lately without dwelling on things beyond her control. It was time for a New Year’s resolution, even if it was two days before April Fools’ Day. No more gratuitous guilt.
The oddly-named Brando wasn’t waiting for her to acknowledge what he’d said. He’d turned to shout instructions to the people straggling toward them while simultaneously warding off a huge golden retriever who lunged at him with muddy paws and an ecstatic bark. Then a sturdy middle-aged woman in a dull-green sweater and her more handsome husband came to haul the dog away, and a man in a Royal Mail truck started rounding up the sheep along the road. A little gnome-like man with merry blue eyes gave Anna a shy tip of his cap before he sloshed through the churned-up mud to attach a chain from the back of her car to the back of Brando’s Land Rover.
Still more people arrived, and in the resulting slurry of introductions and car-extricating activity, Anna had little opportunity for guilt or even embarrassment. With their smiles and a bit of gentle teasing, the villagers of Balwhither managed to make her laugh at the situation and feel genuinely welcome.