“I’m not going to do anything,” she said seriously. “Are you crazy? I’m going to stay right here and watch as many versionsofPride and Prejudiceas I can find. Come back for breakfast.”
“Emma—”
“Here’s your coat, lad,” she said, shoving the same into his hands.
She all but shut the door on his arse, which he supposed he deserved. He found himself standing outside her door, in the cold, with his coat in his hands. He frowned, waited until he’d heard the lock click shut, then slowly made his way to his car. That woman was up to something. He couldn’t believe that she would actually go back to the past now that she’d seen what it had to offer, but what did he know?
He decided the only reasonable course of action would be to go home and get a decent night’s sleep, then find himself a decent spot in the morning from which to watch her house.
He didn’t dare do anything else.
Chapter 17
Emmalistened to the sound of Nathaniel’s car fade into the distance. She washed up the tea things not because she was interested in a clean kitchen, but because she needed to be doing something that felt like it belonged in the current day. She dried her hands off, then turned around and leaned back against the sink.
There were strange things going on in the forest.
She suspected that if she’d had any sense at all, she would have gone to bed and hoped to wake up to a different reality. Or, actually, her regular reality. A reality that didn’t now include the knowledge of how to sayI’m not a demonin Gaelic.
She made a last stab at pretending nothing had changed. Her recent experiences had been a bad dream. Sleepwalking. A crisis brought on by a lack of American junk food. After all, she had been under an enormous amount of stress in Seattle before she’d even gotten on a plane to escape to an entirely different country. It was possible that all that pressure had taken its toll, leaving her vulnerable to something small and insignificant pushing her over the edge.
The truth was, her life was complicated. She was being stalked by a grown man who was actually a ten-year-old boy with keys and a checkbook. She didn’t imagine Sheldon had the courage to actually get on a plane and confront her in person, but she’d been surprised by his actions before.
Then there was what she’d experienced so far in Scotland. Hadn’t she spent that first day listening to those old-timers down at the pub really hitting their stride with their storiesabout strange things happening in the woods? Hadn’t those stories included time travel, ghosts, bogles, and recluses with fancy cars and gigantic bank accounts?
Well, she knew that last item was actually just an accurate description of her very handsome neighbor who had killed someone dressed in a filthy kilt, apparently to save her life—
She forced herself to take a series of deep, even breaths before she went to find a piece of paper to make a list. Lists made her feel better, even if she only scribbled them in leftover spaces in her sketchbooks, then ignored them. She grabbed her book, sat down at the kitchen table, then started with a fresh page on the off chance good sense returned and she decided to chuck it in the fire before anyone saw it.
She began with everything she’d heard from those grandpas down at the pub: time travel, creatures from nightmare, guys hiding in the woods, lairds not born in the right century. She added Mrs. McCreedy’s bit about Highland magic, but she couldn’t remember if the woman had said anything else.
On the other side of the page, she put down everything she knew about Nathaniel MacLeod and his handsome, secretive self. She had to add a little something about his ability to cook, his fondness for golf, and his willingness to offer comfort apparently without expecting anything in return. Oh, and he made her laugh.
There was a big space between those two columns that she filled in with her experience, which consisted of seeing someone who looked exactly like Nathaniel MacLeod darting in and out of a medieval battle scene, her own raging hallucinations about being in a medieval dungeon, and the fact that she had a third of her wardrobe apparently either stashed in a garbage can or hiding behind a shrubbery, thanks to its state of ruination.
She studied each column again, adding doodles that contained several poisonous substance symbols, a zombie in a straitjacket, and Bigfoot peeking out from behind a tree.
She looked off thoughtfully into her little sitting room and considered what she’d laid out. She didn’t want to believe the picture it was painting, mostly because it was just too fantastical to be believed. Men didn’t travel through time, the forest near her home wasn’t a portal into a different century, and she wasn’t caught up in what felt like the middle of both.
If she’d had any sense, she would have forgotten everything she’d seen right along with all the tall tales she’d heard and gone straight to bed. She could have gotten up in the morning, texted Nathaniel, and invited herself over for tea and conversation as if nothing unusual was going on.
Or she could do a bit of very careful investigating.
The thought left her feeling as if she didn’t quite have enough of herself to fill her body and what she had left was absolutely terrified. Unfortunately, she just didn’t see any other way to put the doubting of her sanity to rest once and for all. For all she knew, she might be of some help to someone.
Nathaniel MacLeod, perhaps.
She banked her fire, because it gave her a reason to stall for a bit, then stood in her kitchen and dithered. Real spies didn’t dither, or so she’d always heard Bertie say, and she was beginning to understand why. Too much time spent thinking was not at all good for the nerves.
She walked into her bedroom, changed into black leggings, a black sweater, and a black slicker, slipped tools for the picking of locks into a passport belt she had converted into something entirely different, then left her house. It was black as pitch outside, but she supposed her eyes would adjust in time. She stashed a key under the tire of the car Patrick had loaned her, then made her way toward the forest.
It was odd how normal everything felt. The longer she walked, the more she realized that things felt different from the other night. She paused by the tree where she’d first leaned while watching who she now knew to be Nathaniel fighting for his life against medieval clansmen, and she felt... nothing. No tingle, no unsettling vision, no feeling of the world splitting down its center.
She considered that until she realized she was cold, then she turned and retraced her steps to her house. She picked the lock to get inside, just for practice’s sake, considered the fact that hiding a key under a tire was overkill, then went inside to give things a bit more thought.
Whatever had been going on before was definitely not going on at present. She thought back over the events of the past several days, looking for something that seemed off. The only thing that came to mind was their experience with that dagger in Edinburgh. Well, that and his reaction at—
At Cawdor Castle. She looked around herself frantically for her guidebook only to remember that she’d set it down on a side table and never picked it back up. Then again, she’d been concentrating on getting Nathaniel to his car, not stockpiling items for use in future time traveling. It was too bad she hadn’t managed to slip Mr. Campbell’s dagger into her backpack.
