“I’ll find my way home easily enough.”
“I imagine if you don’t, no message you leave me telling me as much will last.”
“Not over four hundred years of rain, ye daft lad.”
He squeezed her hand, then released her and stepped back. He said nothing more and she couldn’t find anything in any of the languages she knew—including her very poor Latin—equal to the moment.
“What do you say in your tongue as farewells?” she asked.
“’Ta-rah,’” he said with a faint smile, “if you’re a Birmingham lad.”
She pointed her finger at him. “You have things to explain.”
“If we had time,” he agreed. “Or you could just settle for a pleasant, ‘cheers, ducks.’”
“That’s vile.”
He smiled. “Maybe, but that’s England’s problem, not ours.”
Not ours. The only reason she didn’t break down and weep was because she never wept. Put her chin up and soldiered on, ragedagainst the injustices of it all, but weeping? Never. She took a step backward, because she had no choice.
“Ta-rah, then,” she managed.
He smiled very faintly. “Cheers, me lovely ducks.”
She blushed, because he was ridiculous, but so had become her entire life. She turned and walked into the equally absurd circle in the grass, because she could see her sheep in the distance and hear her hound barking his bloody head off. She stepped out of the circle and refused to look over her shoulder.
Well, she looked over it once, but there was nothing there but fall grasses and the view of mountains in the distance that kept them safe from dastardly McKinnons and all manner of other things.
Perhaps not the Future, apparently, but that was something to perhaps think about while she was keeping herself warm in the kitchen, not sleeping through the night.
She hoped what she’d just been through didn’t show on her face, because it had certainly ruined her wits given that she was vastly tempted to take her courage in hand and skip across the centuries again very soon, though she had no idea to what end.
Perhaps to have one more glimpse of a man who had called her lovely when she so perfectly didn’t deserve the same.
Nine
There came a time inevery man’s holiday when he had to admit that he had strayed a bit too far from the programme and needed to refocus his energies on the mission at hand.
And if that mission was to burn through a bloody self-care manual as quickly as possible so he could return with equal swiftness to his normal life where he had a computer and things to do that had nothing to do with wondering how the hell it was a woman four hundred years older than he was could possibly be so charming as to trouble his thoughts late into the night, so much the better.
Oliver snuggled down into the beautiful simplicity of that, carefully avoiding any encounters with his thumb or perfectly pitched nursery rhymes. That clarity of purpose was also why he had crawled out of bed at an unseemly hour, indulged in another endless shower just short of boiling, and was currently walking purposefully down the meadow, forcing himself to ignore the utter improbability of watching a vintage Highland miss step through a gate in the grass whilst fretting over the fact that he hadn’t been able to see her properly home. As an afterthought, he wondered if he might be arriving too early at the modern-day incarnation of the MacLeod keep for a quick bite of breakfast and a nose through the castle’s library. That he couldn’t decide was telling.
He would have blamed the length of his holiday for his lack of decisiveness, but he honestly couldn’t remember how many days he’d been in Scotland. Five? Six? A brief eternity? Too long, by any count, but nae worries, as Patricia MacLeod would haveannounced before informing him, no doubt, that she could clear her schedule at any time if he needed questing help.
Hard to argue with a seven-year-old willing to make those kinds of sacrifices for a decent adventure.
He suspected Mairead MacLeod had been that sort of lass at seven, but that would have been somewhere during the 1560s, so he suspected it might be well to pick up the pace a bit, trot swiftly down to Jamie’s hall, and throw himself on the mercy of the writer in residence and beg for something distracting to read before he thought any more about any early Renaissance Highland lassies. With any luck, the book might be so enthralling that he also wouldn’t have time for any more trips to that damned faery ring up the meadow, thereby avoiding potentially jumping on it as if it had been some sort of daft, cosmic trampoline until it bounced him into a time period not his own.
He pulled himself back to a walk when he reached the hall, took a few deep, even breaths, then walked up to the front door and hoped there was at least someone inside who was an early riser.
The door opened before he could knock and the laird himself stood there with a pleasant expression on his face.
“Ah, Ollie lad,” he said cheerfully. “Come for a bit of exercise this morning?”
“It would be an honor,” Oliver said sincerely, “but I’ve actually come to see if I might borrow something to read. Something fictional,” he added, because he’d heard about the things that made up James MacLeod’s library and he was on holiday after all. “If your wife might lend me something.”
“I imagine she would,” Jamie said, opening the door fully and waving Oliver inside. “She’s upstairs staring off out the window which I’ve come to learn means she’s working out plot issues, not that she’s learned to nap with her eyes open.”
