Highlander Avenged: A Scottish Time Travel Romance Read online

  Highlander Avenged

  A Scottish Time Travel Romance

  Rebecca Preston

  Illustrated by

  Natasha Snow

  Edited by

  Elizabeth A Lance

  Copyright © 2020 Rebecca Preston

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Natasha Snow

  Edited by Elizabeth A Lance

  Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  VIP Reader Club

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  About Rebecca Preston

  Also by Rebecca Preston

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  Chapter 1

  “I don’t understand.”

  Bethany Cortland tried to calm herself down. The anger she was feeling had been a problem of hers for a long time — longer than she’d been in the military, longer than she could even remember. Every time she thought she had it under control, it seemed to find an excuse to flare up again… and like any wildfire, once it got burning it was very, very difficult to get back under control. At least by this stage in her life, she’d figured out what caused it. It wasn’t the kind of anger that flared up in response to getting cut off in traffic or stubbing her toe… no, those situations weren’t anyone’s fault. The really dangerous anger — the reckless anger, the wildfire anger that made her do stupid things — that came from being given orders she didn’t agree with.

  She’d always hoped that joining the military would beat that out of her. Basic training had been an eye-opener — she’d loved every minute of it, pushing her body to the absolute limit, pitting her willpower against her muscles and seeing which one was going to give out first. Her drill sergeant had been amazing — tough as old boots, with a steely gaze that brooked no disagreements. And as much as she’d hated the orders he’d given… especially when it came to getting up in the middle of the night to train after barely any rest … she’d understood them. They’d made sense to her. Everything Sergeant Davis had told her to do was in the interests of making her stronger, so why would she disagree with them?

  But basic training had been a long time ago. Sometimes she missed it — it had certainly been a lot simpler than an actual military career. Sometimes, she wished she’d just stayed as a rank-and-file soldier, worked her way up through those ranks. But the routine testing of the recruits had revealed that she had too sharp a tactical mind to be wasted on basic soldiering. So her career as an intelligence officer had begun. Not that she was disappointed — quite the opposite. She’d been thrilled to be offered the opportunity to do such important work, to use her quick mind to serve her country as well as her body and will.

  But what she hadn’t expected was being stuck in Europe playing stupid games when she was sorely, sorely needed elsewhere.

  Clearly oblivious to her racing mind, the man sitting at the desk in front of her narrowed his eyes. He was a bureaucrat, through and through, whatever his military rank may have been — Bethany could spot a pencil-pusher from a mile off. Her father had always hated this kind of person… the kind of person who let systems and paperwork be more important than actual human lives, the kind of guy who prioritized ticking a box over doing what was actually right. That was this guy, and he narrowed his eyes at her now, clearly annoyed that she was still in his office.

  “I fail to see what you’ve misunderstood, Cortland. Your request for leave has been denied. Return to your post.”

  “I don’t have a post, sir,” she said through gritted teeth. “The exercises don’t start for another three days, like I said, and my role is —”

  “Then return to your bunk. Do I have to micromanage you?”

  “Sir, all due respect —” technically not a lie, she didn’t personally feel that this man was due any respect at all, so she was giving him all the respect he was due — “but this is a family emergency. My sister is missing in —”

  “Whatever the reason for your request, it would have been taken into account when it was considered, and it has been, as I said, denied. Don’t make me repeat myself a third time, Cortland.”

  “Sir, I understand that these war games are important,” Bethany said, trying to unclench her jaw and focus on her breathing as her desire to flip this man’s desk over grew stronger and stronger. “I’m fully onboard with the need to practice covert operations, and I truly wouldn’t ask for emergency leave unless it was something important. My sister never does this kind of thing. She’s an academic, it’s not like her to impulsively disappear overnight —”

  “Cortland, I won’t enter into the reasons for your request. It’s been denied. Your place is here, where your command — and your country — needs you.”

  She gritted her teeth, biting back hard on what she actually wanted to say to that — which was that war games were hardly an emergency. Yes, they were good practice, yes, they were good for giving people practical, hands-on experience of the kinds of operations they’d maybe need to pull off for real one day, but in the grand scheme of things, it was just a glorified form of training. And if she needed time off training for a family emergency, it would have been granted.

  “Sir. My country can do without me for a week while I go and find my sister —”

  “Dismissed, Cortland.”

  “Sir —”

  “I said dismissed.” He fixed her with a steely gaze.

  Bethany knew a lost cause when she saw one. Grinding her teeth, she snapped off her curtest salute and left the office, her anger seething as she strode down the drab hallways of the shitty hotel they’d taken over as a base of operations. That hadn’t gone well at all — and worse, it had been her last shot. She’d applied for emergency leave the minute she’d gotten the news from home about her sister Delilah had going missing. And she’d only gotten the news three days after she’d actually gone missing. That meant Delilah had been gone for almost a week, and Bethany hadn’t been able to do a single thing about it.

  The maddening thing was that she was actually closer to the site of Delilah’s disappearance than anyone else in her family. She’d been dragged overseas to France for this stupid international war game. As an intelligence analyst, she’d been asked to be a part of things, but the focus of these games, it had become clear, had much more to do with giving the special forces an opportunity to flex their muscles than it was about actually giving the intelligence officers something to do. There was no real role for her in the
game… the whole trip was an enormous waste of time, as far as she was concerned. So when the news had come through from home that something was wrong and that her sister hadn’t called in days, she’d thought it would be easy enough to take advantage of some emergency leave to go and check it out.

  But that wasn’t the case, apparently. She headed for the crappy hotel room that she’d been assigned, trying to grind out some of her anger by taking long, aggressive steps, driving her boots hard into the old carpet in the hallways. It wasn’t helping. The frustration was burning out of control now. What good was she doing here, really? She felt like a prop in a play or something. Her brother was the creative one in the family, not her. Her job was solving puzzles, finding patterns, analyzing potential outcomes from specific situations… and all the outcomes she could see here were pretty dire. It wasn’t like Delilah to go missing, that was all she could think.

  It also wasn’t like her father to call her. That had been a surprise. She’d been heading back to her room after a long day of extremely tedious briefings about exactly what form the war games were going to take — there was very little information they could actually be given without giving the game away, so it was a lot of repetition and not much content. She’d almost gone insane — the only thing that had kept her going was a book of super-hard sudoku puzzles that she’d hidden inside her briefing notes. Rebellious, maybe, and not a great look for her career if she’d been caught… but at this stage, Bethany was just about ready to quit her whole career and find something else to do with her life if they kept making her do these tedious games. What was the point? Back home, she’d been doing real work — actually conducting analysis of real information, not stupid hypotheticals like this war game somewhere in the middle of France. What was the point of sending them all out here, spending all this money on what was effectively a glorified live-action roleplaying game?

  So when her phone had gone off and she’d seen it was her father, she’d been curious. Anything was better than this stupid activity. But her father’s voice had been strained. He wanted to know if Bethany had heard from Delilah at all in the last few days.

  “Delilah? Isn’t she in Ireland or something? She got that grant to go do research for that book of fairytales she’s writing —”

  “Folklore, not fairytales, and Scotland, not Ireland,” her father had said tautly. “Yes. She was. But nobody’s heard from her in three days, and when I called the hotel she was staying at the woman in the office said she hadn’t been seen since she checked in.”

  “Have you called the local police?” Worry began to prickle at Bethany’s stomach. Her big sister had always been so diligent about her safety, so careful about checking in with Mom and Dad when she was away. Ever since the divorce, she’d been much more careful about maintaining her relationship with both parents than Bethany had. Bethany was much closer with her mother than she was with her father — which was why a phone call from him had been such a surprise. When the divorce had gone through, Bethany had been very young, barely understanding what was going on. She’d stayed with her mother, as had their brother Michael. But Delilah had always gotten on better with her father, so she’d gone with him.

  “Of course. But they didn’t find any sign of her. All her things were still in her hotel room… all that was missing was her phone.”

  “That’s something. Phones can be traced.” She was pacing back and forth in her room, her mind ticking. “Do the Scotland police have a cyber security division? They might be able to run a trace on her phone —”

  “I don’t know any of that,” her father said testily. “You don’t have to take over the investigation, Beth, I just wanted to know if you’d heard from her.”

  “Obviously I haven’t heard from her, Dad, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Bethany said irritably. “Are you or Mom going to go over there?”

  “Your mother’s on her way. Doctors say I can’t fly.”

  Bethany ground her teeth. “Why didn’t Mom call me?”

  “Wasn’t sure if you’re somewhere classified.”

  Technically she was, but her father didn’t need to know that. “I’ll take emergency leave and go meet her. I might be able to help with the investigation.”

  They hadn’t exchanged many pleasantries before hanging up. It was strange that Bethany didn’t get on so well with her father, given that they both had military careers — but she supposed the difference between an intelligence officer and the work her father did was pretty significant. Besides, he’d been retired for a few years before Bethany had signed up, and suddenly having the military in common didn’t mend a gulf overnight that had been growing for years. Oddly enough, it was her kooky pacifist mother that Bethany got on best with. She shook her head, amused despite herself that her mother hadn’t called about her sister. She was always so frightened of breaking the military rules — she had a lot of old-fashioned ideas about what working in intelligence actually meant. The truth was that if Bethany’s work meant her mother shouldn’t contact her, her mother wouldn’t be able to contact her. Sometimes, she suspected that her mother imagined her phone going off in the middle of a covert operation or something. No matter how many times she explained that being an intelligence analyst was worlds away from being a covert operative, she had a suspicion that her mother still thought she was a kind of female James Bond. The reality — that she spent most of her days staring at a screen trying to do complex math in her head — was much less exciting, she supposed.

  Not that I am doing any complex math now, she thought, grinding her teeth. War games were so boring that she was about to lose her mind. And the thought of Delilah going missing in a foreign country… that was worrying. Though she and her sister had grown up separately, they’d always been close. They wrote letters, talked on the phone, did everything they could to stay in touch as much as possible… and though their work kept them apart even as adults, Delilah was certainly one of the people who was closest to Bethany. She didn’t have a lot of friends — her job didn’t really allow for that — just colleagues, and not many of them were the kind of people she got on particularly well with outside of work. It was a lonely life, she supposed… but it was the life she’d chosen.

  And now she was regretting that choice. The more she sat in her room, thinking about the useless conversation with her superior officer, the more the anger grew and grew. War games. What a stupid reason to keep her from her family, to keep her from going to find her sister. How dare they prioritize their hypothetical over her actual? And the more she thought about it, the more the anger grew… and the more the anger grew, the more tempted she was to stop thinking and start acting.

  It was close to midnight when Bethany Cortland slipped out of a hotel in northern France, walking at a steady, easy pace that suggested she had all the authority in the world to be doing what she was doing. She walked down the quiet streets, unremarked in her uniform — the people of the city knew there were military personnel in town from a few different countries and had gotten used to seeing all kinds of soldiers and personnel walking the streets in uniform at all hours of the day and night. She had a gun on her hip, her phone and wallet in her pocket, and not much else. She certainly didn’t look like a deserter… but that was exactly what she was.

  She found a cafe that was open all night on the other side of town, close to a car rental place, and passed the night on her phone, getting familiar with the area of Scotland she was heading for — a tiny town, barely a few hundred residents, where her sister had been visiting the ruins of a castle that featured prominently in her research. Though there was an international airport not too far from the place, Bethany knew better than to fly. It wasn’t likely that her absence had been noticed yet, and it probably wouldn’t be for a little while — but as soon as it was, flight records would be the first thing that got checked. What would be harder to check would be every car rental place in the city — that would buy her some time, especially if she lied on the forms abo
ut where she intended to be driving the vehicle. She was deserting her post, a serious infraction — somehow, she didn’t think that taking a hire car outside of its designated territory was on the same level.

  She paid cash for the rental, her heart pounding as the bored-looking woman behind the desk handed her the keys. A small car, nondescript as she could manage, with a gas tank full of fuel. Thank God for Europe, where you could still drive absolutely everywhere… she jumped in the little red car and set off. It felt strange, after years and years of the military deciding every single fragment of her schedule, to be by herself again, completely free to go wherever she wanted.

  But there was only one place she wanted to be. And that was where her sister was.

  “I’m coming for you, Lila,” she murmured under her breath as she accelerated, her eyes fixed on the horizon as she murmured her sister’s old nickname. “Wherever you are, I’m gonna find you.”

  Chapter 2

  It was a long drive, but she kept the accelerator down, wanting to get where she was going as quickly as possible. Her GPS took care of the directions, so the winding roads weren’t confusing. But she knew it was a bad idea to try to drive under the Channel. Too many checks there — too hard to pull off a bribe to make sure her passage through wasn’t noted in any official capacity. Instead, once she reached the coast, she drove along it until she found a ferry service that looked a little run down. Once there, she was able to find the owner and offer to pay a fee substantially higher than the one they charged — so long as no record was made of her or her car.