Highland magic.
Well, if that was what they wanted to call it, more power to them. She thoughthallucinationwas a better term for whatever was going on up the way, but she didn’t imagine she was going to want to argue the point with anyone any time soon.
She thought, though, that she might need to make some adjustments to Mrs. McCreedy’s map.
She pulled her coat more closely around herself, but that didn’t help matters much. She was starving, cold, and more than a little freaked out.
The first could be solved easily enough. She locked her car, then headed for the pub farthest away from her hotel, hoping the walk would do her some good. At least there she might find the company of real, live people.
Fifteen minutes later she had ordered herself a decent meal, avoided another encounter with the Terrible Three from Mrs. McCreedy’s store, and was settling into a corner near the fireplace, a comforting cup of tea on the table in front of her.She leaned her head back against the worn bench, closed her eyes, and tried to forget what she’d seen.
“I won’t speak ill of them, but you do what you like.”
“’Tisn’t ill-speaking to speculate,” said another voice stubbornly. “And you must admit, odd things go on up in those woods.”
“Aye, and goodly amounts of money come flowing down from them into the village to benefit the likes of you, so don’t blether on about what you think you know.”
Emma wondered if the present was the proper time to get up and ask if she could have her lunch to go, but unfortunately she was just too tired to move. If that lack of enthusiasm led to hearing a few things that might explain a few other things, well, she wasn’t going to protest. Fortunately for her, the old man prone to blethering seemed perfectly happy to dish with the rest of his buddies, which worked for her because she was perfectly happy to eavesdrop.
Though after a few minutes, she wondered why.
Highland magic was apparently just the beginning of the odd things that went on in the area. Ghosts, bogles, an influx of gold diggers from down south: those were all discussed at length, with judgments passed accordingly.
But then their voices lowered and the juicy stuff was brought out and presented for examination.
Emma listened through a lovely lunch of chicken and veg, though she had to admit after a few bites that she was only chewing out of habit. What she really wanted to be doing was using her energy to make noises of disbelief over the things she was hearing.
Time-traveling lairds? Money dug up from gardens? Murder and mayhem that stretched through the centuries and found itself solved in times and places not her own and with medieval implements of death?
She had to have another gulp of tea. All that was starting to sound more plausible than she would have wanted to believe, especially that last part about swords.
She was actually rather glad she’d already finished her meal because she had certainly lost her appetite. She grabbed her coat and made her way as inconspicuously as possible to the front door. She paused outside on the sidewalk andwondered if she might really be losing her mind. That seemed like the most reasonable thing she’d thought all day, which probably should have given her pause.
She pulled her slicker more closely around herself, gave herself a good mental shake, then walked off back toward her hotel. She wasn’t losing it, she was just tired. She would go back to her temporary home, pretend it was bedtime not noon, and pull her covers over her head.
She would consign her day’s events to the receptacle entitledJet Lag Hallucinations. Then she would take hold of the reins of her life and get back to her very sensible way of doing business. Maybe she would find out who owned that cottage on the loch and see if they wouldn’t rent it to her for a month or so. It would make a perfect home base to use while she put some miles on her rental car and explored the nooks and crannies of the Highlands.
The one thing she was sure of was that she wasn’t about to go near that very strange part of the forest again. Her phone could rot there for all she cared—
Well, she couldn’t survive without her phone, which meant she would have to go back and look for it. She looked up at the sky, which was, unsurprisingly, obscured by clouds. That was comforting, actually, but didn’t do anything for helping her know how much more daylight she might have. The very last thing she wanted was to get lost in the forest because she’d gone looking for her phone when she should have waited until morning. Besides, if she waited until morning, perhaps anything spooky might still be sleeping off a long night spent doing what it did to inspire the locals to greater heights of tall-tale telling.
She paused on the steps leading up to the inn’s doorway and looked back over her shoulder at the garden there. It was a rain-soaked delight with plenty of places where shadows lingered even in daylight. She shook her head, primarily at her own silliness. Her encounter earlier had been nothing but her imagination running away with her. She had worked herself up over the thought of running into a recluse, added to it the odd nature of Mrs. McCreedy’s map, then had a close brush with a river while she’d been driving. It couldn’t reasonably have been anything else. Not Highland magic.
Definitely not the sight of a green-eyed man in a rattykilt that she suspected she would have a very hard time forgetting.
She turned her back on the garden and walked inside the inn. A restorative nap, a decent supper later, and absolutely no more unnecessary venturing into the forest. She would have another look at Mrs. McCreedy’s map and mark the whole area it illustrated as off-limits.
Then she would get to the business she had come to Scotland for without any more undue and unsettling distractions.
She studiously ignored the fact that what she had come to Scotland for were dreams.
Chapter 4
Nathanielstood in the kitchen of his house that overlooked the loch and stared at what lay there so innocently on his table. Well, his sword was there as well, which was perhaps not such an innocent thing, but at least it was cleaned up and awaiting its usual trip into the back of his closet for safekeeping. What he was looking at next to his sword was what gave him pause.
It was a mobile phone.
It wasn’t just any mobile phone. It was a relatively unscathed, Scottish-flag-encased mobile phone that someone had quite possibly dropped in the forest earlier that morning before she had made a hasty trip back to wherever she’d come from. He’d already spent part of the afternoon trying to unlock it with no success whatsoever. Frustrating, but hopefully not a portent of things to come.
