Not learning Gaelic.
She suspected that she wouldn’t have had to even learn very much of it. All she needed was to be able to sayI’m not a witchin the local vernacular. If she ever had a do-over of her life, she would insist that Bertie Wordsworth, chauffeur and international spy, teach her teenage self more than just a few swear words to use in London. Hell, she suspected the man could curse in a dozen languages with absolutely no effort at all. Surely he could have drummed up a few Gaelic slurs for her.
None of that was of any use to her at the moment. All she could do was try to keep up with the guys in kilts who didn’t seem to have all that much patience for her. She stumbled to a halt, though, in spite of herself. The sun was coming up over the mountains and it was highlighting the castle that sat in a meadow in front of her.
The men said something, pointing at her as they did so. She was relieved that they hadn’t done anything worse to her than shoot her suspicious looks while making what she had to assume were gestures to ward off any evil she might be about to lay on them, but perhaps her good fortune was about to end. Before she could decide which way might provide the best escape route, one of the men had taken her by the arm and—after crossing himself repeatedly—started hauling her toward the meadow.
She thought it wouldn’t be inappropriate to indulge in feelings of alarm. The suspicious looks she was getting were turning into something entirely different, something that said she was absolutely not going to be welcomed into the castle with open arms. She only would have been surprised if she hadn’t been tied to a stake and surrounded by kindling. She wondered if things could possibly get any worse.
She reminded herself that that was a terrible question to ask.
Her escorts stopped and a pair of them pointed across the meadow. Emma strained to see what they were looking at, then regretted it. She was so tired and frightened and desperate to convince herself that she was trapped in some sort of hideous night terror that all she could do was stare dumbly at the figure sprinting their way. She had no idea where he’d come from, though she wouldn’t have been surprised to find that he’d brought a box of matches with him.
He joined the group without delay and was greeted with backslaps and friendly sounding ribbing. That was definitelya step up from how she’d been received. He was obviously a popular guy.
He was also none other than Nathaniel MacLeod.
There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that it was him. He was ignoring her, though she couldn’t say she blamed him for it. She had shut a door in his face, and that after having given him a very chilly shoulder through dinner and after-dinner conversation the night before. He’d deserved it, the jerk. At the moment, though, she decided he deserved a friendly thank-you before she hightailed it out of Scotland. She needed to get across the border before she found herself caught up in another similar nightmare.
But she wasn’t sure she was going to have time for that.
She didn’t manage to catch her breath before two men had taken her more securely by the arms and were escorting her toward the castle. Nathaniel, or the man playing the Nathaniel MacLeod part in her nightmare, had still not looked at her, though he was certainly having himself a decent chat with a man who looked to be the head of a raiding party.
Maybe he was indeed indulging in a little payback by having a little joke at her expense with his buddies. They would get inside the castle and he would break character. For all she knew, she had just become an extra in a movie.
She really should have dressed the part.
Unless her part waswoman being dragged into a castle and summarily dumped into a dungeon. For that, she was apparently dressed just fine.
She realized that was the case only after she’d landed in the castle’s dungeon, having gotten there by way of a hall that definitely wasn’t boasting electricity or a good cleaning service. She had to admit that Nathaniel had made a few feeble protestations as the trapdoor had been opened, but he’d backed off with surprising alacrity and let her be tossed into that pit. The floor was squishy, which she didn’t want to think about, and it smelled like a sewer, which she couldn’t help but think about.
She realized she was in shock. Maybe that should have been clearer to her much sooner, but as she stood in that freezing hole, up to her ankles in muck she didn’t want to examine, she realized she was on the verge of hysterics. If she could have caught her breath long enough to have hysterics, that was.
All she could do was stand there and hyperventilate.
She did that for a very long time.
In fact, time ceased to have any meaning for her. She thought someone might have tossed food through the bars of the grate above her, but she wasn’t sure and she wasn’t about to go digging for it. She stood where she’d been dropped, with her arms wrapped around herself, and concentrated all her energies on not screaming.
•••
Thesounds of the hall above her were things she learned to identify as time wore on. Laughter, the barking of dogs, the occasional ring of swords. At one point, she began to wonder if she had simply lost her mind. She had been out for a walk, but it had been dark. Maybe she had given herself a lobotomy on a branch and she just hadn’t noticed.
Maybe she was hallucinating. After all, she had had dinner in Patrick MacLeod’s medieval-looking castle the night before, never mind that it was definitely a smaller place than the one she was in currently. Maybe someone had shot her up with something and she was in a full-blown, drug-induced stupor.
Or maybe she was trapped in some sort of sci-fi time warp where men dressed in medieval clothing, there was no central heating, and gorgeous neighbors wandered in and out of her reality as if they didn’t find anything wrong with the same.
She tried to cling to the nightmare explanation, but that became increasingly hard to buy into as the day wore on.
All she knew was that if she ever got back home, she was going to get the hell out of Scotland.
She paused and gave that a bit more thought. Perhaps she needed to get out of the UK entirely. England had Stonehenge, Ireland had leprechauns, and heaven only knew what Wales had going on. She needed to get herself somewhere where nothing unusual happened, like Ohio. Somewhere in the middle, where she would be safely far away from anything but bucolic farmland and maybe a few raw dairies.
Oh, butChildren of the Corn. Where had that been filmed? If she were going to find herself being sucked into virtual reality movie sets, that was definitely one she didn’t want to be visiting. Kansas was out as well, so maybe flyover territorywasn’t the place for her. Maybe Hawaii was the place for her. Nothing odd happened in Hawaii, did it?
She realized she was babbling inside her head, but she figured that was better than babbling out loud, though she wasn’t sure she wasn’t doing that as well. She gritted her teeth to stop that and wondered if she might be losing her mind for real.
Scotland. What in the hell had she been thinking?
