Highlander 04 - Some Like It Kilted (2010) by Allie Mackay

Saracen beauty could be temperamental. “I’ll no’ have her moods ruining the high fettle of the others. Folk dinnae come here for intrigues and mayhem.”
     
“As you wish.” Saor couldn’t quite keep the smile out of his voice.
     
Bran knew his friend had a weakness for the dusky-skinned temptress, with her raven locks and exotic perfume. The speed with which Saor turned and flew back up the stairs, taking them two at a time, proved it.
     
Bran frowned.
     
There’d been a time when he, too, would have raced to Serafina’s side.
     
Indeed, he might have knocked Saor out of the way to get there.
     
Now . . .
     
His scowl deepened and he flicked his fingers. Not to conjure a beef rib—though he was still mightily famished—but to snatch a brimming cup of ale from the kitchen’s cold, smoke-tinged air.
     
He quaffed the frothy brew in one quick gulp.
     
He should help himself to an entire ewer of ale. Or perhaps a bracing swig of uisge beatha . The fiery Highland spirits would surely banish the gooseflesh that was beginning to prick his nape. Uisge beatha was, after all, Scotland’s cure-all for every ill known to man.
     
But he, Bran of Barra, prided himself on taking matters into his own hands.
     
He didn’t need to toss down a bolt of firewater to bolster his courage.
     
A Barra MacNeil feared nothing.
     
So he swiped a hand across his mouth, ensuring that no ale flecks clung to his fine red beard, and then prepared to do what he’d never done before.
     
Take a peek at modern-day Barra.
     
Even if the thought soured his stomach and was as appealing as tumbling, naked, in a patch of stinging nettles.
     
He was anything but a fool and he’d sifted himself in and out of other Highland locales often enough over the centuries to know that keeps like his didn’t fare well through time. Almost all once- mighty abodes lost their roofs. Many saw good, solid walls crumble and sag. And some were reduced to shameful piles of rubble.
     
Praise God, he knew through Mindy Menlove’s appearance that his tower yet stood.
     
An American tourist wouldn’t be interested in an out-of-the-way place like Barra otherwise.
     
Even so, if three MacNeil chiefly ghosts and Mindy sent-to-tempt-him Menlove had all pierced the carefully wrought shields he kept around his beloved fourteenth-century keep, it followed that great activity must be going on in Barra of modern times.
     
Bran put back his shoulders and took a deep breath.
     
It was his duty to discover what was amiss.
     
Eager to be about it, he closed his eyes and concentrated on sifting himself into his bailey. But not the bustling courtyard of his own day, a colorful, noisy place he knew and loved so dearly that it sometimes hurt his heart just to stride across its cobbles.
     
Nae, he sifted himself to whatever was left of his bailey in Mindy Menlove’s time.
     
He knew he’d made it when he could no longer feel the cobbles beneath his feet.
     
He was standing on grass.
     
Bran swallowed. His heart began galloping. He wasn’t quite ready to open his eyes, but the chill, briny air comforted him. Also familiar was the sound of the wind churning up the sea beyond his curtain walls. They were noises he knew and loved and that meant home.
     
It didn’t matter the century.
     
Or that his courtyard had lost its cobbles somewhere in the long passage of time.
     
A buffet of wind tossed his plaid, reminding him of why he’d come here. So he drew another deep breath and opened his eyes. Unfortunately he saw nothing but blowing mist and—if he wasn’t mistaken—a few straggly clumps of heather.
     
Whatever remained of his walls was hidden behind the drifting sheets of mist. Chills sped down his spine and for one maddening moment, he wondered if he’d sifted himself to the wrong place. But the cold, damp air was so thick with the smell of the sea, and the ground—with or without cobbles—was his.
     
That, he knew to the roots of his soul.
     
It