Scottish Highlands, Modern Time

Sam pulled the draw cords of her hood tighter, squinting against driving rain. She shivered and willed her legs to move faster. Even in the northern latitudes, it got dark eventually during what passed for summer, and the light was definitely fading. She stumbled, and one foot sloughed into a hole. Cursing roundly, she yanked it out, pissed that the mud added what felt like ten pounds to her tired leg. Going on a ramble—as the locals called it—by herself seemed like a good idea earlier in the afternoon. Now she wasn’t so sure. Hours had passed since she’d seen another soul.

The air felt heavy—and threatening, somehow.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she scolded herself. “My imagination’s off the clock, working overtime.”

A flash toward the river was followed almost immediately by a rumbling crash. The sky lit again, casting the wet greenery and surrounding mountains in a macabre glow. Thunder exploded, so loud it made her ears ring. The next lightning flare sparked off a rock not twenty feet away. Unrelenting rain pelted her.

Sam’s heart sped up. She stared at the mountains ringed about her. Why wasn’t the storm up there? Lightning was supposed to be drawn to high points, not meadows saturated with water.

As if determined to prove her wrong, another flash struck the ground off to her left. She threw her hands over her ears, but the thunder reverberated in her brain, loud and scary. Shaking her head to make her ears stop hurting, she set off again.

Lightning struck inches from her feet. Sam lurched to a stop and blinked to clear the afterimage. Even as wet as it was, the air felt electrified, thick with sharp edges. She could almost see marauding electrons reaching for her, hungry little bastards with their mouths wide open.

Fear raced along her nerve endings, making them jangle as if she’d downed half a dozen double espressos in a row. Breath whooshed out of her, and her head spun crazily.

The storm’s trying to kill me.

Oh, please.

Sam hated her tendency to engage in two-way inner dialogue, but she’d done it all her life.

An excruciating twenty minutes and half a dozen lightning strikes later, she thought it might be safe to move. It continued to rain like a son of a bitch, but after striking a circle around her, the electrical part of the storm departed as precipitously as it arrived.

Guess the storm gods didn’t want me, after all.

Why should they? No one else does, and now I’m dumped and drenched.

Sam giggled. Dumped and drenched held a kind of alliterative twang, but her next chortle skirted the edge of hysteria. Shit, could she possibly be any wetter? Weather in the British Isles had been particularly wretched this summer, at least according to the locals. She suspected it always sucked.

“Yeah, sort of like the rest of my life,” she muttered as she tried to assess if she’d be better off staying on the track or cutting cross-country toward where she thought a roadway was.

Resolutely, she struck out for the road and promptly stepped into calf-deep water. It ran over the top of her boot and soaked her thick, woolen sock before she could jerk her foot back to solid ground.

So much for that idea. The drenching rain had turned the ground on both sides of the track into a bog. She’d never seen one before this trip to Scotland. They were hideous. Miles of saturated ground with water deep enough to reach her knees in some places.

Sam glanced at her watch and groaned. She’d been walking for close to five hours. No wonder it was getting dark. The village she was aiming for shouldn’t be far away. In fact, she should’ve already been there. About to tuck her watch back under her sleeve, she took one last look at it and realized the second hand had stopped. She tapped the crystal but nothing happened.

Crap! Wonder when it quit? Must be the damp.

Yes, another less pleasant voice piped up. It also means I have no idea how long I’ve been walking.

Peering through mist-shrouded countryside, she looked for signs of Beauly Village, but all she saw were sheep.

Sam kept walking. It wasn’t as if she could take a break and sit to consider her options. Everything dripped water. Her jacket and pants, which had always provided sufficient protection from the elements back in the States, were wretchedly inadequate here. She was afraid to pull out her cell phone. Electronics and water definitely weren’t compatible. Just look what happened to her supposedly waterproof watch.

Dark thoughts crowded her mind, and her efforts to squelch them failed.

Why had she thought it would be romantic to spend a year in Scotland?

An inner voice—the nasty one—sneered a reply. Clint. Pretty man at first, but more like a pretty con man after I scratched the surface.

Sam awarded her resident maven a point for accuracy. Clint, with his spiffy Scottish intonations, dreamy blue eyes, and red-blond curls, had sweet-talked her into bankrolling a trip to his home. Between his ever-so-broad shoulders, washboard abs, and nice, tight ass, she was so infatuated they’d barely left her bed for a month. She was head over heels in lust. And hoping desperately this time it would lead her to the altar.

Eager to grant her prince whatever he wanted, she readily agreed when he talked longingly of going back to Scotland for a while—before they got married. He wanted her to meet his family and arrange things with his parish priest. Except he had a personality transplant practically the second they landed in Glasgow. In the month-and-a-half since they arrived, she’d scarcely seen him. He was always off with his mates, as he called them, drinking or climbing. There were weeks when he hadn’t returned to their rental flat in Inverness at all.

No sign of his family. Certainly no parish priest. Though she didn’t want to admit the truth, it snuck in anyway. He’d never had any intention of introducing her to anyone, let alone marrying her.

When she took a good hard look at his mates, she wondered if he might be gay and asked if he swung both ways. Rather than answering, he’d twisted away and slammed out of the house, his blue eyes like chips of ice.

She hadn’t seen him since. Probably a good thing, but it didn’t hurt any less.

Water ran off the bill of her hood. Some of it dripped into one eye. “Oh to hell with it,” she snarled. “I’m catching the first plane out of here—without him.” She cursed her stupidity, feeling sad and angry by turns. Clint wasn’t the first man who’d taken advantage of her. As soon as they found out she was heiress to a whiskey fortune, they promised her the moon and then fleeced her for everything they could get.

She’d gotten pretty cagey in the years between sixteen and her current twenty-five, even renting a modest apartment in Seattle and pretending she lived there when she met someone new.

Eventually, though, when she thought a guy might be different, she took him to the Capitol Hill mansion she’d more-or-less inherited after her parents relocated to one of their many other homes. No matter how promising a relationship looked, the truth of that rambling mansion spelled the beginning of the end.

Her mother had talked her into coming to Zermatt the previous year, luring her with a promise the men were simply amazing. After five frustrating weeks, Sam booked a ticket on the first departing plane that had space and fled.

Granted, she only dated a handful of guys in those few weeks, but she’d met enough to discern that Swiss men were insufferably straight-laced. Until they got her alone. Then they were all over her. And not in a good way. Even after she sidestepped their advances, they still told her how much they looked forward to being a part of her rich family, and went home. No cuddles, no endearments, not so much as a what nice tits you have, my dear…

Sam blew out a frustrated breath. All it did was rearrange the water dripping down her face.

“Goddamn it,” she muttered. “I hate this place. Those Scots are a hardy bunch of bastards. If they weren’t, they’d all have committed suicide centuries ago.”

Lights flickered ahead, and Sam forced herself to hurry. Beauly Village. Finally. She’d been considering digging through her small backpack for her iPhone—and holding herself back. As it was, it hadn’t liked the damp climate at all and became increasingly cantankerous after she dropped it in a puddle the previous week.

Even if I got the phone out, who the hell would I call? Do they even have a 9-1-1 system here?

Sam felt foolish—and angry with herself. Being lost scarcely qualified as an emergency. She peered through the murk at the lights and kept going, except they didn’t get any closer.

Lots of reasons for that.

It’s the fog.

My sense of time is distorted because I’ve been out here so long.

No matter how many reasons she came up with, an uncomfortable sensation lodged in her throat and refused to leave…