No wonder Patrick MacLeod was going to find it hundreds of years in the future.
Nathaniel didn’t want to entertain the thought that perhaps Patrick might be digging up his bones as well in that same distant future.
He considered the condition of his potential final resting place and decided he just didn’t care for it. A pity he hadn’t wound up in the MacLeod dungeon. It was definitely a step up, as far as dungeons went, and he would certainly know. He’d spent a day or two in that place whilst Malcolm decided if it was possible to have sired such a handsome bastard as he himself was. Blessing his own mother for having instilled a love of Gaelic in him from birth, he had spent that time fine-tuning his accent and trying to accept where he’d found himself.
He had also, at the time, been congratulating himself on having listened fairly well to those rumors that went round down the pub about those MacLeod men up the way.
Time travel. What bollocks.
Of course, it had been a bit dodgy here and there and he’d lied his bloody arse off at the time to convince his new MacLeod friends that he was neither a demon nor a witch of any stripe, but a man did what he had to do to survive.
He wasn’t sure any of that was going to serve him at present.
It didn’t seem exactly fair, he mused, that he should have been attempting to come to an understanding with Father Time about a certain dark-haired Yank only to have his good intentions land him in a pit. He supposed it could have been worse. He could have been a Fergusson clansman and doomed to live out his days with the lot upstairs.
He continued to hold out hope that he might manage to get himself free. He had done his best to continue to exercise his muscles as much as his shackles would allow. He’d eaten what he’d been given, though he’d considered the very real possibility of plague infesting those meals. There hadn’t been anything to do about that, because he hadn’t had a plague vaccine, and it was a bit difficult to get to the local surgery for the same at the moment.
He should have taken Emma and fled to Paris.
He shifted against the wall and contemplated his life, mostly because he had nothing else to do. He tried to count the days he’d been sitting where he was and decided that perhaps he had misjudged them. It must have been at least a week. During that time, he had learned the voices of the guards upstairs, timed the changes of those guards, and learned more than he cared to about the plans the Fergussons had for the MacLeods to the south of their keep.
That last bit was nothing he wasn’t familiar with, though, and he’d heard nothing new, so he’d basically dismissed it. Then again, they never came up with anything new. He was just surprised by how many lads they always seemed to have ready to sacrifice for whatever madness they contemplated. He wondered if they ever tired of it.
He thought he just might be tiring of it, which was reason enough to put a stop to the whole madness of his visits to the past.
He supposed if he’d had any sense before, he would have taken a few days and grilled Jamie about his experiences with popping into different centuries. The man certainly had morethan his share of experience with the same. He’d been planning on it, actually, in the back of his mind as they’d been sitting in Jamie’s study, talking about things that shouldn’t have existed outside the realm of nightmare. Then Emma had asked him to stay and he’d spent the rest of the evening trying to keep his hands off her, because he knew he would have to let her go.
Of all the things he’d experienced since his time-traveling madness had begun, short of losing his parents, the thought of losing her had been the worst.
And so he’d made a decision. He had planned to simply wrench time to his own purposes. Jamie had obviously been back and forth to various centuries more than once and apparently each time managed to keep what he wanted.
Why not him?
Well, apparently because he was a stupid arse, but perhaps that could be debated later, after someone dug up his bones several centuries in the future and did a little DNA testing to make sure it was him.
He would have dragged his hands through his hair, but his hands were shackled to the wall and he couldn’t bring them to his hair. Hence the new home for his rodentish friends.
The problem, he decided in a leisurely fashion, given that all he had to hand was a leisurely amount of time in which to decide such things, was that he wanted it all. Especially ifallincluded himself, Emma Baxter, and his Lamborghini, all in the same century.
That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?
He hadn’t thought so, which had left him deciding at the last minute that he would march off not to his front door but to Emma’s gate into the past, present himself at its gaping maw, and demand that it take him where he wanted to go. And where he wanted to go was not to the point in time where he’d first seen Emma so he could do the sensible thing and avoid her.
That, he supposed, had been the problem. He hadn’t wanted to go to the spot where he’d first seen Emma, he’d simply wanted to go back and somehow break the loop time seemed to be putting him through. He hadn’t even been all that clear about exactly what that place looked like or when it found itself, which had resulted in his current locale.
That had obviously been badly done.
And now he was definitely in a place where he was going to be of no use to anyone. Not himself, not Emma. His grandfather would have him declared dead and confiscate all his assets. The thought of that crotchety old bastard driving either of his cars was almost more than he could think about without gritting his teeth.
He listened to the hall begin to settle down for the night, but that somehow wasn’t as comforting as it should have been, because he heard booted feet coming his way. The grate was pulled back and two men jumped down into the hole with him. The torchlight almost blinded him, truth be told. When he could open his eyes again and squint at the two men facing him, he could hardly mask his surprise.
Well, at least his surprise over the identity of one of his visitors. The man on his left was Simon Fergusson, currently the laird of the clan Fergusson, a man as ruthless as he was unpleasantly determined. And the man on Simon’s left?
Gerald MacLeod.
His cousin.
He supposed he could have outed his cousin right then, but he supposed that such a declaration would only result in unpleasant things for himself. Either Gerald would deny it and tell Simon to put the prisoner to death before his madness infected the entire keep, or Simon would turn on Gerald and slay him, then decide that Nathaniel should be slain as well beforehismadness infected the entire keep.
