She hadn’t even bothered to wake him to tell him she was going anywhere, though he supposed he hadn’t needed her to. He’d known the moment he’d woken and realized he was on her couch and not in his bed and the only lamp lit was a very small one geared not to waken sleeping idiots. He’d cursed himself thoroughly as he’d rolled to his feet.
Damn her to hell, she was going to shatter his heart long before a lifetime of loving her managed to do the same thing.
He’d found Alex’s notes laid out very carefully. It hadn’t taken any special powers of observation to mark how the handle of Emma’s spoon was pointing to some event in the MacLeod annals that had occurred in 1387.
He should have known, even in his sleep. He’d felt the gate between centuries open, but the truth was, he’d thought he was having a nightmare and he’d gone right back to sleep.
He’d thought he might be tempted to shout at her when he saw her, but once he’d been trailing her in the past—again—he found that all he could do was continually try to put himself between her and danger. In the end, she had pushed past him and tried to do the honors herself of taking out that Fergusson clansman who had come at them. Nathaniel had watched her sweep that man’s feet out from him, then leap toward him.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t counted on a clansman’s ability to never lose his dagger. It had been nothing but dumb luck that he’d managed to pull her aside and send her attacker speedily into the afterlife.
The only other notable difference had been that instead of losing her previous meal, she’d concentrated on looking around herself, as if she was looking for someone in particular.
He understood. He’d been looking for Gerald as well.
He hadn’t thought he could speak without shouting and she hadn’t seemed particularly interested in conversation either, so they’d made the journey back to their proper place in time in silence. It occurred to him as he’d seen her house there, hiding behind a bit of a mist, that they were damned fortunate they always came back to their proper place in time. He didn’t fancy a trip back to eighteenth-century Scotland, or any time other than his own, for that matter.
He was beginning to wonder if there might be a purpose to all the madness in truth.
He had then sat in her kitchen as she’d showered, then insisted that she come with him to his house so he could remove the medieval grime from himself. All of that had left him exhausted, with too much to think about. He suspected Emma was in the same condition.
He wasn’t sure what to do with her short of handcuffing her to him and keeping her with him at all times, but that would mean that if he were forced into the past, she would have to go as well, without it being her choice.
There was in truth no good solution.
He poured two mugs of coffee, then walked out onto his deck. He set the mugs down on the table in front of the chairs, then collapsed into his own place. He looked at the woman next to him, wrapped in blankets, staring out over the water. She sighed, then looked at him.
“Hi,” she croaked.
He supposed there was no reason not to be blunt. “I thought you weren’t going to do that again.”
“Did I say that?”
He wasn’t sure what tempted him more: bursting into tears or brandishing his sword and threatening to . . . well, he never would have been able to do damage to her and she knew it as well as he did. He sighed and opened his arms.
“Do you want me to stab you or come sit with you?” she asked hoarsely.
“The latter, assuredly, for then I won’t have to make so much of an effort to shout at you.”
She sighed, got up, then moved to sit with him. She unwrapped her blanket as she did, then pulled it over the two of them. He closed his eyes as she put her head on his shoulder and wrapped her arm over his ribs.
“You’re trembling,” she said quietly.
“I’m tired,” he said.
She only nodded. He suspected she knew it wasn’t just weariness and he imagined she felt the same way.
Something had to change. Soon.
“You can’t follow me into the past again,” he said finally.
“I didn’t follow you into the past,” she said. “I went first.”
“Emma—”
She lifted her head and looked at him from haunted eyes. “I was trying to save you, Nathaniel.”
He wasn’t going to weep. He considered swearing, stomping about, cursing her thoroughly, but he absolutely wasn’t going to weep.
She leaned over and brushed something from his cheeks. He caught her hand, kissed her palm, then shifted so he could put his arms more fully around her. If he didn’t protest when she rested her chin on his shoulder, well, who could blame him? That way at least she wouldn’t be looking at him as he indulged in a stray tear or two.
“Sentiment makes me uneasy,” he admitted.
“Which is why you long to be a poet, obviously.”
“My poems are epic rants full of bloodshed and mayhem,” he said. “Too violent for a woman’s delicate sensibilities, to be sure.”
She laughed a little. He would have elaborated on just how gory and bloodshed-filled his yet-to-be-written poetry could be, but his text alert interrupted them both. He looked at his phone sitting there so innocently on a footstool near the edge of his deck, then looked at her.
“I don’t want to look,” he said.
“I’ll look.”
“I don’t want you to look, either.”
She rolled her eyes at him, then unwrapped herself and got up to fetch his phone for him.
“Password?” she asked.
He took a deep breath, then gave her the appropriate numbers. She entered them, then checked his text message. He thought he was being thoroughly discreet by not mentioning how relieved she looked. She handed him his phone.
“Car dealer. They want to make sure you’re happy with your purchase.”
“I’m thrilled,” he said with a grimace. “I’ll be even more thrilled if you don’t use the damned thing to run me over so you can be off and doing things you shouldn’t.” He pulled her back onto his lap, set his phone on the deck, then leaned his head back against the chair. “We could take a little drive this afternoon.”
“How far away do you want to go?”
He understood what she was getting at. “Farther than Inverness, apparently. I would say moving back across the Pond would do it, but that doesn’t seem to have been far enough, does it?”
“It doesn’t,” she agreed. “Edinburgh doesn’t seem to do it, either.”
He had to agree, though he did so reluctantly.
“That dagger we saw,” she added. “I won’t say the date. That was a bit odd, wasn’t it?”
“Very,” he agreed, then he wrestled with whether or not to keep his mouth shut. He decided that perhaps it was best she heard things from him before she decided she needed to don her deerstalker and be off on yet another hunt for clues. “The dagger is mine.”
She leaned up so quickly, her head clipped the edge of his jaw. She stared at him in shock. “It isn’t.”
“It is,” he said carefully, “and yet it isn’t.” He paused. “It’s sitting in my closet at the moment.”
She frowned. “While also sitting in Mr. Campbell’s glass case in Edinburgh, only that one is hundreds of years old.”
He supposed it might not be useful at the moment to enlighten her about Stephen de Piaget’s texting him to tell him that the dagger had been found in the dungeon of the old Fergusson keep.
Truth be told, that was something he was trying to forget.
“It’s almost like time is folding back on itself,” she mused.
“That’s one way to look at it,” he agreed.
“Have you noticed anything odd about it? You know, apart from the obvious.”
He opened his
mouth, then shut it. He had to pull himself together for a moment or two before he thought he might be able to speak. “I must confess I haven’t.”
“You’re sounding very Etonian today.”
“Those crisp British consonants make me feel more in control.”
“I’ll just bet they do.” She stared out over the loch for a bit, then looked at him again. “What if that’s really what’s happening? Time folding over itself, I mean.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Well, it seems to be the same experience every time, doesn’t it?” she asked slowly.
He considered, then shook his head. “I’ve been there for five years. It’s never repeated for me.”
“No pattern at all?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “Good lord, woman, you should get a job with those spies over here.”
“What I should do is call my father’s under-chauffeur, but he would go back to the past and render everyone there unable to make any more trouble. I think we’ll have to make do with just us.”
He didn’t want her to think she was going to be making do with anything, particularly anything to do with his madness, but he supposed she wasn’t going to take kindly to being told what to do.
But the thought of her lost in the past . . .
“Do you always go back to 1387?” she asked.
“Nay I started in 1382, why—” He shook his head. “It hasn’t always been 13 . . . well, you know. It started five years ago, but that was five years ago then as well.”
“So time has been passing at the same rate in both places?”
He started to say that was definitely the case, then realized he honestly couldn’t say for certain. He looked at her and frowned. “I haven’t marked the dates on a calendar,” he said, “but I would say aye.”
“This entire time?”
“Aye,” he said. “Until . . .”
He stopped speaking. She was only watching him carefully, which he might have appreciated if he hadn’t been so busy trying not to ignore what she was implying.
That things had changed when she’d come to the village—nay, that wasn’t exactly true. He had continued to go back to his accustomed time and place. Things had changed when he’d gone to Cawdor and heard the date of 1372.
But the truth was, he never would have gone to Cawdor if Emma hadn’t been there with him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to face the possibility of her having been the catalyst for something, but he was beginning to think he didn’t have a choice.
“Let’s go for a drive,” he said, helping her off his lap and pushing himself to his feet. “I’ll take you shopping.”
“I don’t want to go shopping.”
“Then you can take me shopping. I love to spend hours admiring myself in the mirror.”
She smiled. “You don’t.”
“I don’t,” he agreed, “which is why my wardrobe is limited to three business suits and a handful of moth-ridden jumpers. We’ll take your car.” He looked at her seriously. “I need a bit of distance.”
She took a deep breath. “I understand.”
He imagined she did, but he couldn’t bring himself to discuss it in any more depth than that. There was something almost comforting in knowing he wasn’t carrying his secret by himself, but that was balanced out very nicely by wishing that the person he shared that secret with wasn’t the woman he was currently following into his house.
All he knew for certain was that he had no intention of seeing her back in the past ever again. Not unless he was dead, which he thought he might want to make sure Fate didn’t think was an invitation.
• • •
He walked along the shore with her at sunset after a lovely, leisurely drive up the coast. It was such a normal thing to do, to stare out over the sea washing up endlessly against the shore, but it gave him a sense of timelessness that he wasn’t altogether sure he cared for.
“Think it looked this way before?”
He looked at her. “I would guess so, but I’ve never been this far north whilst . . . well, you know.”
“I know.”
He stopped and turned to her. “I have to solve this.”
“We,” she said firmly. “We have to solve this.” She looked at him seriously. “What you’re not saying is that things were rolling along as usual until that afternoon I saw you in the middle of a battle.”
He nodded, but he wasn’t sure he could give voice to any of the facts. The truth was, whilst her arrival in Benmore had changed his heart, their journey to Cawdor had changed things in a way he honestly couldn’t put his finger on.
He was beginning to wonder what encountering his dagger in Thomas Campbell’s shop in Edinburgh had set in motion.
“Nathaniel?”
“I will solve this,” he said, dragging himself back to the conversation at hand, “whilst you stay in your lovely cottage and look at your board for clues. Paris calls for us to visit it in the future, and if you’re not with me, I won’t go.” He looked at her seriously. “What if I lose you somewhere in the weeds of the fourteenth century?”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to rob the world of its freshest poetic voice,” she said thoughtfully.
He had the feeling she had no intention of doing anything but exactly what she wanted to do, which he knew should have alarmed him very much indeed.
“Very sensible,” he said. “Speaking of sensible, I called James MacLeod and made an appointment for tomorrow.”
“I wondered what you were doing,” she said with a frown.
“Likely marching into a battle I haven’t the skill to fight,” he said grimly. “I’ve been instructed to bring my sword.”
“Do these guys do anything else?”
“I suspect not, and I imagine they assault life with the same sort of enthusiasm they pour into their swordplay. What was it you called that sort of rubbish?”
“Patterns,” she began, then she pursed her lips. “Mock me all you like, but you have to admit there’s truth to it.”
“There’s more truth to it than I want to acknowledge,” he said honestly. “I have the feeling our good Laird Jamie conducts his life now just as he did hundreds of years ago. He doesn’t seem to have given up using a sword to make his point, as it were.”
She smiled faintly. “He’s in the right place for it, I guess.” She walked with him a bit longer, then looked at him. “Can he help, do you think?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
She nodded, but said nothing else. He understood, for there was nothing else to say. Either James MacLeod would have answers for him or he wouldn’t.
He could only hope when he heard those answers, they would be ones he could stomach.
Chapter 25
Emma supposed, thinking about it as the sun was dropping toward the west the next afternoon, that whether or not James MacLeod could help them or not wasn’t the only thing they’d found out.
She sat on a bench pushed up against a castle wall with a blanket as a cushion and a water bottle keeping her warm under another blanket and watched absolute madness going on there in front of her. Patrick MacLeod was a civilized gentleman compared to his brother when it came to swords. James MacLeod was . . . well, she didn’t know what to call him. Ruthless, maybe. Dangerous, possibly.
Medieval, definitely.
If she hadn’t seen his birth date, she might not have believed it—well, actually she would have believed it without hesitation. The man was as intimidating as any other medieval clansman she’d encountered so far, only he took it to a level she almost couldn’t believe.
Chief of the clan, and rightly so.
She had to admit that Nathaniel wasn’t doing poorly with the business of swords. Jamie probably could have had him for lunch, but it wouldn’t have been an easy meal to choke down. Nathaniel was tall, st
rong, and fast. That, and he seemed to have an extensive vocabulary of medieval insults that left Jamie grinning ferally every time Nathaniel pulled one out and flung it at the laird of the hall.
She was in trouble. Very big trouble.
By the time the sun had set, those two crazies had put up their swords and were chatting amicably about things she didn’t pay attention to. She was too busy looking at a medieval laird and his new friend.
She was starting to think her life was as weird as Nathaniel’s.
Jamie tucked his sword up against his shoulder as if he’d done the same thing thousands of times—which she suspected he had—and held out his hand.
“Mistress Emma,” he said. “I hope your afternoon was passed most pleasantly.”
“I’m still trying to recover.”
Jamie laughed and reached out to clap Nathaniel on the shoulder. If Nathaniel winced, she couldn’t blame him. He didn’t look much worse for the wear, but she supposed that might have been because he’d been putting off meeting the laird of the hall up the way for five years, and getting that out of the way at present had to have been a relief.
“He showed well,” Jamie said. “I’m not saying I couldn’t wrench a bit more finesse out of him with the proper time and attention, but he’s done well all on his own.”
“He’s saved my life,” Emma said honestly.
“And that, lass, is something we should talk about. My wife and bairns have deserted me to make mischief in Her Majesty’s little village down south, so I’ve nothing but time on my hands. We’ll have supper tonight, then investigate this situation at our leisure.”
Emma slipped her hand into Nathaniel’s as they walked and didn’t meet his eyes. There was nothing to be said about their situation and there was absolutely nothing to be said about the way his hand was trembling. She didn’t blame him a bit. If she’d had to face that maniac James MacLeod over swords, she wouldn’t have been trembling slightly, she would have been in hysterics.
She squeezed her friend’s hand and walked with him back to the great hall, very glad she was going to be keeping to the upper floors of the MacLeod keep for a change.