Spell of the Highlander by Karen Marie Moning Page A

passed it earlier, there’d been no lights on. Didn’t he have a life? What was he doing here so late?
    Was nothing going to go right anymore?
    Great, just great. This was just what she needed: Mark running off to tattle to anyone who would listen that not only had she crossed police lines and gone into the professor’s office, but she’d made off with a priceless, mysterious artifact. If the police did the least bit of checking into things, they would discover that what she’d taken was what the (murdered) deliverymen had delivered to the (murdered) professor.
    And she would be oh-so-incriminatingly on the lam, nowhere to be found, last seen in the company of a tall, dark, kilt-clad stranger, “stealing” the fabulously expensive black-market relic that three people had already died over.
    Without getting the slightest chance to tell her side of the story and point out that somebody’d tried to murder her too.
    As if anyone would believe her anyway.
    Shit, shit, shit. When all this was over, she really wanted to be able to finish her degree at the university where she’d begun it, not via correspondence courses from jail. That kind of stuff just didn’t look good on a resumé.
    “Oh, for crying out loud, Mark, it’s two in the morning!
What
are you doing here?”
    “I believe I just asked you that.” Close-set brown eyes behind rimless glasses darted from her to the half-naked, towering man toting the mirror, and back to her again.
    What could she say? Dredging her mind, she drew an empty net. Try though she might, she couldn’t think of a single excuse for her current circumstances—convincing or otherwise. She would have been grateful even for an absurd one, but apparently her brain was done for the day.
    As she stood there, staring at him like the biggest idiot, Cian MacKeltar took care of the problem.
    “You will go back in that room from whence you came, and remain in there, silent, until well after we’ve gone. Now.”
    Mark turned and cantered dutifully back down the hall toward his office without so much as a neigh of protest.
    Wow.
Jessi blinked up at Cian MacKeltar.
    “Hmm,” he murmured softly, staring after the retreating grad student. “Mayhap ’tis only her.”
    “‘Her’? Do you mean me? What me?” Jessi said expectantly.
    “Puny little man,” he scoffed, as Mark obediently closed the door.
    Was that it? Was that why Mark had slunk off—because he was puny and Cian MacKeltar was so big and forbidding?
    She tipped her head back, eyeing him. At six and a half feet, and a good two-hundred-plus pounds of pure muscle, he dwarfed people. With those wild dark braids tangling halfway down his back and those wicked red-and-black tattoos licking across his chest, up to the edge of that whisker-shadowed jaw, he looked downright primeval: an ancient, deadly warrior stalking the halls of the university. She supposed his mere appearance might have been enough to make Mark decide he clearly wouldn’t be winning any arguments with this man, so there was little point in beginning any.
    How nice it must be to have such an impact on the world! If reincarnation was the way of things, she wanted to come back as Cian MacKeltar. She’d like to be the asshole man, for a change, rather than subject to asshole men’s dictates. And if she were going to be the asshole man, she’d like to do it up right and be the biggest and baddest.
    “That was amazing,” she said fervently. “He is
such
a pain in the butt. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I could get him to just go away like that. Like he had no choice but to obey me, or something.”
    “Come, Jessica.” Cian MacKeltar closed a hand around her upper arm. “We must away ourselves.”
    They awayed.

8
    An hour later they pulled under the canopy of the Sheraton in downtown Chicago.
    Jessi had wanted to go home and get a few things, but Cian MacKeltar had immediately, vehemently vetoed that.
    The next assassin could already be awaiting