“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 wishingthat 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.
•••
Hewalked 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.
