Very medieval chivalry.
She struggled to keep her eyes open, but Nathaniel wasn’t wearing his boots, and a quick look proved that his eyes were closed. She snuggled closer to him, feeling warm and safe with not a set of medieval numbers in sight.
She drifted off and couldn’t bring herself to fight it.
•••
Shewoke to darkness and panicked until she realized she was lying on her couch covered in a blanket, not sprawled in the MacLeod dungeon covered in goo. She sat up, her head spinning, and it occurred to her that maybe that tea hadn’t been just tea.
She considered, then dragged her hand through her hair. She could credit Nathaniel MacLeod with quite a few things, but knocking her out was not one of them. She had been exhausted, and she suspected he’d felt the same way. What he was probably doing was snoozing peacefully in his bed.
She pushed herself to her feet and walked unsteadily over to the window to pull the curtain back. Damn it, it had to be at least nine. She checked her phone and realized it was almost ten.
She walked over to open her front door. Well, her car was still there, which she supposed boded well. It definitely wasn’ttoo early to head to Nathaniel’s and make sure he hadn’t done anything she wasn’t going to like.
She threw on clothes, made sure her stove wasn’t going to burn the place down, then grabbed her gear and left her house.
She drove to Nathaniel’s house, pulled to a stop behind his Range Rover, then got out. She paused as she shut the door to her car. She was hardly a professional at sensing changes in anything, but she couldn’t deny that she felt something... off.
She wondered if she were being watched or, worse still, if something had happened to Nathaniel thanks to someone else’s nefarious intentions. His cousin Gerald came immediately to mind, which left her running up to his porch to bang on his front door.
There was no answer.
She forced herself to breathe normally and not jump to conclusions. He could have been in the shower, or deeply asleep, or off on a walk. Then again, if any of those had been the case, she probably wouldn’t have turned his doorknob and found it unlocked.
She pushed the door open carefully, then reached inside and flipped down the light. Light switches going the wrong way, cars driving on the wrong side of the road, innocent people walking through the forest and finding themselves in a different century—she was starting to wonder if she would ever get used to how things were done in Scotland. The first two were rather charming.
The last one, not so much.
She eased inside Nathaniel’s house carefully, because she never walked into a place without knowing exactly what lay in store for her. She had a look around, very carefully, then realized that what she’d suspected was definitely the truth. Nathaniel wasn’t there.
She would have bet good money on where he’d gone.
She walked into his kitchen and saw something on the table. She picked it up, then swore.
There was a man who loved a woman he couldn’t have
and he did what he had to do...
Tha gaol agam ort
Damn him to hell, he was right. Gaelic didn’t look on paper at all like what it sounded. For all she knew, he’d just told her to get lost.
She went back through his house and looked for medieval gear. There was nothing hiding in his closet, which only stacked the odds against his having dashed up the coast for a bit of hiking. She cursed him as she locked up his house and got back in her car.
It didn’t take her long to consider then discard half a dozen possibilities for what to do next. She could go after him, true, but she had no idea where to look for him or if she would even be in the right time. What if he had gone back a week in time, or two weeks, or however long it had been since she’d been in Scotland, and he had landed in one place while she might land in another and they would never cross paths and she would die in the MacLeod dungeon—
She forced herself to take deep, even breaths and let that thought continue on its way. It didn’t do her any good to allow herself to entertain anything but success.
She considered different alternatives. She could just run into the forest and take her chances, of course, but that was something else to discard immediately. Just running without a plan would very likely do nothing but leave her repeating the same loop she’d already experienced a handful of times.
She considered going back inside Nathaniel’s house to hack into his computer, but given how unwilling he was to even talk about his journeys back in time, she imagined he wasn’t about to keep notes on his computer. His phone was a possibility, but she set that aside as something to perhaps be contemplated later. She would probably have to rifle through his entire house to find it.
Her only other option was to go to James MacLeod’s house and beat some details out of him. She had the feeling that if anyone would know what had happened to Nathaniel MacLeod, it would be that fourteenth-century laird up the way.
She put her car in gear, backed out, then headed down to the village. She supposed she should have eaten something, but she was too wound up to consider breakfast. James MacLeod might have been a medieval laird, but she was the protégé of an MI6 expat. She thought she might be able to do a few things he might not expect.
There was a black Range Rover sitting in front of his castle when she got there, along with a red Porsche. The Range Rover was Patrick’s, but she had no idea who owned that other thing. Perhaps it was a meeting of medieval guys who routinely gave out bad advice to men who weren’t from their time period and should have been taking care of business in the present day.
