She took a deep breath, flexed her fingers briefly to bring some feeling back into them, then reached for her phone and checked her messages.
Text me if you like.
She wasn’t sure what she liked. She wasn’t even sure if she trusted herself to do anything but stand and shake inside a kitchen that belonged to people who had been kind to her for no reason besides their own generosity.
Highland magic?
She looked at her phone and wondered just what in the hell she was supposed to say to Nathaniel MacLeod. Thanks for the rescue? Nice seeing you in native dress?
She laughed. Well, she tried to laugh. It came out as something that sounded not just slightly unhinged, but completely unhinged. It was ridiculous, the past twenty-four hours she’d just experienced. Maybe it had only been twelve. It was daytime outside and she had walked into the forest the evening before. It was sort of hard to pin down the precise length of time spent in hell, but maybe that was something she could work out later. The one thing she knew was that she would never look at a blade the same way again—
She attempted a scoffing noise. Of course she would continue to look at swords and daggers, because she liked the way light danced against metal. What she had been through was a complete hallucination brought on by the experiences of the previous handful of days. She nodded to herself over that, then forced herself to stop nodding before she made herself dizzy.
She had been in a castle for supper and all that history had somehow gotten inside her head and she’d gotten lost in some sort of vivid dream. Sleep paralysis and that sort of thing. Her nighttime troubles were nothing more than mentally wandering around places that felt real but hadn’t been.
Unless she had stepped into a kind of crazy that was so far past any reasonable amount of crazy that it found itself in some sort of alternate dimension.
Highland magic...
She had to have something normal happen to her. Maybe that normal would happen in Nebraska. She’d been born in Nebraska, or so she understood, though her parents had only been there long enough for her father to settle his grandfather’s estate and make off with as many spoils as possible. Maybe she needed to get back to her roots.
She picked up her phone, considered, then made a decision.
I’m packing.
The return text was swift.
Breakfast instead.
The negotiations had begun, apparently, but he had tried to give her a big kiss-off, so she wasn’t sure she wanted to concede any ground. Then again, he’d also rescued her from whatshe suspected was a medieval dungeon, so that might earn him at least a bit of leeway. She considered, then texted him back.
Need normalcy.
The reply was instantaneous.
Understood.
There was a pause, then another one came through.
Shopping at Harrods?
She would have smiled, but she thought she might rather weep. She should have taken him up on his offer, then cost him buckets—only the man had buckets of cash, so she imagined she wouldn’t be able to stomach all the shopping it would require to make him wince.
Something closer,she replied.But normal.
Be right there.
She sighed and went to find her coat only to realize that her coat was sitting on her front porch, covered in a layer of goo. She opened her door and looked out at the pile, trying to reconcile what she was seeing with what had happened to her and where she was currently standing.
She thought her brain just might split in two.
She was starting to have some sympathy for the man pulling to a stop in front of her house in his very expensive sports car. The speed of his arrival made her wonder if he’d been lurking just around the corner.
Watching over her.
He got out of his car and walked up the one step to her porch. He came to a stop on the other side of the pile of clothes, looked at them for a moment or two, then looked at her.
“Ready?” he asked pleasantly.
