“Oh, there’s no need, really,” she said, facing off with the Aga and wondering if she might manage to win the battle this time—
“Emma.”
She realized she was only half paying attention to him, but the seriousness of his tone surprised her. “What?”
“I think it’s going to pour with rain,” he said. “Stay in the house, aye?”
She looked at him in surprise. “What?”
“Stay in the house,” he repeated carefully. “Please.”
All right, so Definitely Up had morphed suddenly into Past Weird. Nathaniel MacLeod had gone from someone who looked absolutely green to someone who looked almost frantic. It was possible, she supposed, that that was his usual reaction to his lawyer’s phone calls.
Or maybe it was something else entirely.
“Okay,” she said. She nodded, because he was obviously taking great pains to nod at her. “Are you sure you don’t want me to make you some tea before you go?”
“I need to deal with this, ah, lawyer thing right away,” he said, looking as if what he really needed to deal with was a straight path right to bed. “Stay inside where it’s warm.”
She lifted her eyebrows, but couldn’t bring herself to commit to anything else, not that it would have mattered becausehe was no longer there to see it. She leaned against the doorframe and watched him hurry to his car, hop in, and drive off. She stood there, motionless, until she heard the noise fade into the distance.
There were some extremely strange things going on in Benmore Forest.
She went inside her little cottage and shut the door thoughtfully. She locked it for good measure, because she wasn’t quite sure what she was thinking at the moment. She brought her stove back to life, congratulated herself on at least that small victory, then made herself some tea. She went to sit by the window that looked into the forest and tried to relax.
That was a strange place, that forest.
She stared at it until it seemed less strange than it did unsettling. She rose and paced around her house restlessly until she finally gave up trying to walk herself into serenity and instead unearthed the yarn and needles she’d also bought earlier that morning.
She only succeeded in eventually realizing—after several rows, of course—that she hadn’t cast on enough stitches to make a hat for anyone who was older than three. She ripped everything out, then looked at the sketch pad she’d left sitting on the kitchen table. She opened it and looked at the portrait she’d done of Nathaniel as he’d stood next to his car.
Odd that she’d dressed him in a rather rustic-looking kilt with a sword by his side.
She opened her front door and looked out into the late-afternoon gloom. She imagined it would be fully dark in an hour, so maybe if she wanted to get out, she should do it sooner rather than later.
Stay in the house...
She frowned. Those numbers, 1387. Those were the same numbers she’d seen on her phone in his house on that morning when he’d thrown her out with as much enthusiasm as he’d just used in dropping her off at her house. What was that all about? Was his bookie calling him with what he owed? Was £1,387 the minimum balance his bank account could fall to and seeing it freaked him out? Was someone in the village telling him how many seconds he had until a socialite from London came hunting him?
She took her coat off the hook by the door, grabbed her keys off a different hook, then stepped out onto the porch before she allowed herself to think about what she was doing. She pulled the door shut behind her and locked it, then looked out into the darkening forest.
The rain had let up a bit, which she supposed was a fairly useful thing. Surely there was no harm in a walk. It wasn’t like she was going to catch pneumonia from a little rain. Besides, she wasn’t planning on going far and she wasn’t going to venture into the forest.
Well, at least not too far.
She shoved her keys in her coat pocket, made sure her phone was in her back pocket, and stepped off her porch.
There was something about walking that cleared her head and left her wondering why she didn’t do it more often. She tended to get caught up in her thoughts probably more often than was good for her. She spent so much time working with her hands, even when she was drawing something in particular, that it generally left her with a great amount of mental space to speculate on all kinds of things she might not have normally. But at the moment, she had a limited amount of things to wonder about, so she indulged before she could talk herself out of it.
So Scotland felt magical. It was a spectacular country. Even the most jaded and cynical of tourists would probably have to admit that. She’d been expecting quite a bit thanks to Bertie the under-chauffeur who had filled her very impressionable mind with all kinds of historical tales about swords and heroes and battles. Add to that Mrs. McCreedy’s odd little map, her own rampant speculations about the unusual recluse in the woods, and that hallucination she’d had of someone stepping from the mist...
Well, it was no wonder she had begun to think Highland magic was a real thing. Her imagination had run away with her to a paranormal sort of place where all kinds of unusual things probably felt most comfortable—
Or so she told herself until she heard the shouts and ringing of swords.
She didn’t think, she acted. She bolted to her left, because her natural instinct was to go to her right and Bertie the former super spy had suggested to her more than once that if she werefaced with a dangerous situation she should do what she wouldn’t be expected to do.
She supposed she should have taken five seconds to think that through, but by the time that thought occurred to her, she was already twenty feet into the woods, and that was apparently twenty feet past the line where reality ended and hallucination began.
