Page 76 of Highlander's Wild Lass
Anthony boosted Celestia into the saddle, holding onto her hand longer than he should have. She tried to tug it free, but he held on.
“Anthony, what—”
He reached up and left a kiss on her knuckles. “Be careful...please.”
Celestia flashed him a quick grin. “I will.”
* * *
Celestia let out a long stream of curses in the back of the storeroom. “Jacob!” she roared, hands on her hips, pieces of her braid falling into her face. “Where are the barrels for the Mr. Brodie’s order?”
Her question was met with silence.
“Jacob!” she called out impatiently. Nothing had gone right since the moment they showed up at the distillery. The barley delivery was delayed, and a few customers had come in demanding where their whisky was, saying that the delivery cart never showed up.
“I found it!” Jacob finally yelled back from the other side of the storeroom.
Celestia let out a sigh of relief, finally, one thing had gone right today. She found him swiveling the cask from where it sat, rolling it up onto a pushcart.
“How many casks again?” Jacob said with a grunt.
“Three.”
Together they rolled the next two casks onto the pushcart and transported them outside to the delivery cart. Celestia looked around for Robbie, the man she hired exclusively to make deliveries. He usually sat outside against the wall of the storeroom smoking a pipe.
“Is Robbie makin’ a delivery?” she asked, looking from one end of the property to the other.
Jacob shook his head. “He should have been back by now. I sent him on his way as soon as we got here.”
It was either wait for Robbie or do it herself, and she would be damned if there was another complaint about a missed delivery. “Lock up and we’ll deliver this one.”
Jacob didn’t contest her, he simply pulled out his spare key and locked the front door, pulled the huge barn door closed on the storeroom, and together they attached the cart to the horse and were off.
They made their way through the streets of Inverness, busy like it always was. They needed to head east to Mr. Brodie’s pub which meant they would be passing by Ryder Koll’s distillery.
“It will take us half a day to get there, Celestia, and it’s already past noon,” Jacob said.
“I ken,” Celestia said with the horse’s reins in her hands. “We’ll pay for an inn and stay the night if we must.”
“That’s all fine, but we’ll be on the road till well into the night. Yer husband will rip my throat out if anythin’ happens to ye while I’m with ye,” Jacob told her.
“Did he threaten ye?”
“Nay, but he has that look about him.”
Celestia laughed. “I doubt he would truly do anythin’ like that to ye. We’ll be fine, Jacob. Ye have yer dirk.”
They crept closer to the stretch of the road where Koll Distillery was; Celestia wanted to hurry the horse past it, but something was telling her to slow down. The horse was in a slow trot as they came upon the building.
It was far smaller than McLean’s, but the pagoda-like stacks made it recognizable as a distillery. Koll had painted them a horrible deep red color and they stuck out strangely against the blue sky.
Jacob threw an arm across her, pointing. “Look!”
“What?” she said, her heart had leaped into her throat at his abrupt exclamation. She turned and saw a cart parked past the stone perimeter wall. “Oh my...that’s our cart.”
They could both plainly see the McLean emblem branded on the side of one of the barrels.
“Take the reins, Jacob,” she ordered, pushing them into his hands.
