“I can drive anything.”
He smiled. “Can you indeed? Where did you learn?”
“Same place I picked up the accent.”
“Are you going to tell me where that was?” he asked.
“When you stop moaning every time you breathe, sure,” she said easily. “Wouldn’t want to give you any reason to express surprise and admiration when you can’t give it your best effort.”
He smiled in spite of himself and was extremely grateful when she drove carefully enough not to cause him any added distress. It only took him a few minutes before he realized that she was indeed as competent a driver as she’d claimed. His poor head agreed thoroughly.
It did, however, take him until they were well past Inverness before he managed to stop wheezing, but that seemed to be enough for her.
“One of my father’s under-chauffeurs is former MI6.”
He opened his eyes and hazarded a glance at her. “You’re not serious.”
“Oh, I am,” she said with a brief smile.
“I’m not sure if I’m more surprised by the lad’s former employer or that your father has an under-chauffeur.”
“Life is strange.”
He started to shake his head, but suspected that wouldn’t go all that well for him. He reached for her hand instead and squeezed it briefly.
“I want the details,” he managed, “but you’re right about my potentially not enjoying them properly right now. You could give them to me tomorrow perhaps, after I’ve recovered enough to cook you breakfast with things Patrick MacLeod will no doubt continue to provide.”
She glanced at him. “You sound terrible.”
“I feel worse. Thank you for the hasty exit.”
“No problem.” She paused. “That tree was odd.”
“Aye,” was all he could manage.
That tree had been odd, but odder still had been his reaction to that date. He swallowed with more difficulty than he would have liked, but he felt as if his body were utterly deserting him. He had never swum through molasses, but he thought he might be able to describe the sensation well enough just the same.
1372. He had never been so far back in time, never had any but his usual numbers come up and tap him on the shoulder. It had begun with 1382, of course, a number he’d seen on a receipt for a pub tab his uncle had stuffed into his golf bag. At the time he’d been rummaging through those clubs for clues, he’d been appalled to realize his father’s brother had spent well over a thousand pounds on one bottle of whisky in one afternoon. It hadn’t occurred to him until later that he and his uncle had been holding on to that bag together as they’d bolted for cover.
He’d discovered eventually that time had marched on in the past apace with how it proceeded in the future. What 1372 boded for him, he absolutely couldn’t say.
All he knew was that he had to get home, and quickly. Or, rather, he had to get Emma home, then himself back to his house before things spun out of control. He had never, not once in his five years of the madness that was his current time-traveling life, felt anything akin to how the world had just shifted.
Just what in the hell had he done?
Or had time taken note of Emma?
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the truth of it. He just knew he needed to solve it, and quickly.
Chapter 9
Emmahad thought there were strange things happening just on MacLeod soil. After her midday stroll through Cawdor Castle, she was starting to think the whole of Scotland was a hotbed of paranormal activity. Maybe it was time to meet the whole thing head-on and go on a ghost walk, just to see what the country really had to offer. A guided walk, though. She wasn’t about to just venture off into the wilds and see what sort of paranormal activity she ran into on her own.
She suspected she might be sitting next to enough of it as it was.
She put that thought on hold for a moment or two as she negotiated the road through a small village. Nathaniel’s SUV wasn’t new, but it drove well and boasted a first-rate navigation system. All she had to do was follow directions and remember what side of the road to drive on.
But once they were again on a road that wasn’t quite so congested, she realized that her passenger was asleep and she had nothing else to do but use all that free time for what it was designed for, namely poking her nose into mysteries that definitely weren’t her own.
