Chapter 10
Nathanielstopped in front of Emma’s house and turned his car off. Perhaps coming to see her so soon after having encountered her in a compromising situation might be considered ill-advised, but it had occurred to him as he was washing medieval grime off himself earlier that morning that it would behoove him to keep Emma’s focus on him confined to the present day.
He thought if he told himself that often enough, he might just manage to believe it.
There were odd things afoot, he would be the first to admit that. First that madness at Cawdor, then the journey back to 1387 whilst suffering a colossal headache, then seeing Emma standing in a place she most certainly shouldn’t have been able to get to—
Oh, and realizing that someone was watching him.
It wasn’t the usual gaggle of hens in high heels and short skirts. This was something entirely different. He couldn’t say exactly what led him specifically to that conclusion—perhaps too many years in a different, more dangerous century—but he couldn’t deny what he knew:
That someone was sinister.
He knew he should have set aside everything else in his life to investigate that, but he honestly had nothing left in reserve to even attempt it. What he needed was a day or two to simply sit with the events of the past week to see if something significant came to mind. Even if all he did was breathe withoutwondering what was going to send him careening into a time period not his own, that might be enough.
The truth was, if he didn’t find a solution to his situation soon, he was going to go mad. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life feeling as though his life belonged to someone—or, more to the point, something—else.
He wanted a handful of days where he didn’t have to encounter any numbers that he knew would indicate a journey to a time not his own. He wanted more than a handful of days where he could simply live the same sort of life a normal bloke got to live. He’d never taken the trouble to determine exactly how far away from his house he had to get before the past stopped calling him, though he’d thought about it on the way over to Emma’s cottage. New York was far enough, as was London.
Inverness was apparently not.
But Edinburgh might be. He was willing to give it a try. Daft as it might have sounded, he wanted to give it a try with Emma.
He knocked on her front door, then waited. He’d seen lights on, but that might have meant nothing more than she’d left them on behind her before she’d gotten lost again in the past. He had hardly dared believe his eyes when he’d seen her run into the midst of a battle earlier, but there’d been no denying it. He’d done the first thing that had come to mind, which was to shove her back into the future and hope she went.
The door opened suddenly and he jumped in spite of himself. He jammed his hands in his pockets, damned grateful that he was in a time period with pockets, and wondered how it was he could be so full of his thirty-five years yet feel as if he were approximately fourteen years old, looking at his first pretty girl and daring to think she might be willing to go have a coffee with him.
“Good morning,” he said politely.
She looked fairly shattered. “Same to you,” she said quietly.
“I was thinking to make a journey to Edinburgh,” he said carefully, “if you’re interested in coming with me. Separate rooms, of course.”
She was watching him—too closely, if anyone was curiousabout his opinion. He tried to look as respectable and modern as possible.
“Of course,” she murmured. “I wouldn’t think anything else.”
Well, he would have suggested quite a few other things if he’d been in his right mind, but he was trying to be on his best behavior.
“Just a pair of days,” he said with as casual a shrug as he could manage. “Just to get away.”
“I’m just on a tight budget,” she added slowly, “so I have to be careful. I’ve already imposed too much on Lord Patrick—”
“Lord Patrick will survive,” Nathaniel said without hesitation. “Rich as Croesus, so I understand.” He leaned against her doorframe, partly because he was exhausted and partly because there was something about her that he thought he might like to sit down and study whilst at his leisure. “I think I can afford a pair of rooms in the big city.”
“Oh, but I couldn’t let you do that,” she demurred.
He looked at her earnestly. “I need a change of scenery and don’t want to go alone. Edinburgh is a lovely place. There’s a whacking great castle there, you know. There might be other interesting things as well. Can’t remember at the moment—”
“There’s the Camera Obscura,” she said without hesitation. “And Holyrood, the Tolbooth—oh, and ghost tours. That’d be interesting, don’t you think?”
With the number of things he had seen over the past five years—corporeal and not-so-corporeal—he thought he just might have an opinion on that.
“I could be persuaded to go on a ghost walk,” he said.
She looked terribly torn. “I can’t tell you how much I want to say yes.”
He couldn’t bear to tell her just how much his heart hurt at her enthusiasm. Bloody hell, the woman was going to be the death of him.
