Nathaniel felt his mouth fall open. “How do you know that?”
Patrick looked at him evenly.
He shut his mouth and groped for something to say, some sort of excuse or explanation or lie to get himself out of the land of crazy and back to the reality where he belonged. Unfortunately, nothing useful came to mind, so he conceded the battle.
“And here I thought I was being so discreet,” he managed.
“If it eases you any, ’twas my brother to poke his nose in your affairs and his purpose was to save you pain if he could.”He shrugged. “Once a laird of the clan MacLeod, always a laird of the same, I daresay.”
Nathaniel would have asked what Patrick meant by that, but he imagined he didn’t need to. He supposed he could pull up any genealogy of the lairds of that MacLeod castle up the way and find out just who was who. It wouldn’t take long. He looked at Patrick carefully.
“And you don’t worry about being discovered?”
“As what?” Patrick asked blandly. “I’m a simple writer, enjoying my lovely home, my stunning wife, and my sweet bairns.” He looked at Nathaniel. “I have no idea what you’re getting at.”
Nathaniel nodded. “I deserve that.”
“Indeed you do, lad. A bit more work?” Patrick asked politely. “Do you want to see if your lady cares to go inside first? She looks cold.”
“I will go ask.” Nathaniel pushed himself back to his feet. He started to limp away, then stopped. He turned and looked at Patrick MacLeod. Any sensible soul would have labeled him a modern man with a passion for medieval things. If he’d had any sense himself, he would have left it at that and escaped inside with Emma to seek out a hot fire.
But he apparently didn’t have any sense.
“1300,” he guessed.
Patrick pursed his lips. “1285.”
“Impossible,” Nathaniel said, with one last, desperate grasp at denial.
Patrick smiled, then nodded toward Emma. “See to your lady. I’m not going anywhere.”
Nathaniel nodded, then walked away. He thought Emma looked less cold than gobsmacked, but then again, perhaps not after the things she’d already seen. Those were things she would never see again if he had anything to say about it. The sooner he convinced her to find a different place in Scotland to stay, the happier he would be.
He supposed it would take many, many times of repeating that before he believed it.
Chapter 19
Emmasat on a rock wall and watched Nathaniel MacLeod coming toward her from the far end of Patrick MacLeod’s garden. The garden was lovely. The man walking over it was... well, he was beautiful in a way that she wasn’t quite sure how to describe.
Very easy on the eyes.
Extremely hard on her heart.
She pulled the coat he’d bought her more closely around herself not so much to ward off the mist or to save herself against the breeze, but because he had given it to her. He had wrapped a blanket around her as well, which she appreciated. She closed her eyes briefly. She was cold and she suspected it had less to do with the weather than it did the things she had seen that morning.
Ghosts were certainly one of those things. She’d been a bit startled by conversing outside with a piper whose plaid seemed to swirl thanks to a wind she couldn’t feel, but she’d managed to deal with that fairly well. Finding another pipe-smoking, geriatric geezer in front of Patrick’s fire when she’d ducked inside earlier for a trip to the bathroom had been equally unusual. Having him instruct her to simply call himThe Glumhad certainly taken things to a new level of odd, but she’d been okay with it. She supposed that if things really got out of hand, she could simply pretend that she was losing her marbles again.
But seeing Nathaniel MacLeod with a sword in his hands, facing a swordsman of Patrick MacLeod’s obvious mettle? Shewasn’t sure she was going to be able to consign that to anything but hard truth any time soon.
Nathaniel stopped and looked at her. She had a hard time reconciling the man she was looking at with the man who dressed in a plaid and used a sword, but it was hard to deny. Not now.
He shoved his sword into the ground with an unthinkingness that, to her surprise, was quite possibly the worst thing she’d seen to date. She had tried to ignore what she’d seen. She’d gone only once to see the clothes Nathaniel had apparently dumped in the compost heap behind her house. She’d come so close to chalking everything up to a massive bout of delusory dreaming.
That sword jammed into the ground ten feet away from her, though—that was too real to relegate to nightmares.
She pushed herself off the wall, then walked unsteadily over to where Nathaniel had stopped next to his sword. She reached for his hand and turned it over to look at the calluses there. She ran her finger over them on the off chance her eyes were deceiving her.
He shivered.
