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 donher 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.”
