A pity there were so many men standing there, apparently keeping watch.
“We’ll use the cottage door,” Oliver murmured.
She didn’t argue. She turned and slipped into the forest with him, grateful beyond measure that she’d spent her life escaping various things. The forest was still firmly situated in her day, which made things easier for her at least. She pulled on Oliver’s hand when it was useful, and kept pace with him at his side when he seemed to see a clear path forward.
She saw the croft through the trees, but she didn’t allow herself any of the relief she so desperately wanted to feel. She knew the threshold had worked for Sunshine and Robert Cameron… after a fashion. She absolutely didn’t want to find herself in a far different time from Oliver, not after he’d managed to save her from the fire.
She ran with him past her tree and would have insisted that they stop so she could retrieve her book—and wishing quite desperately that she’d hidden it instead in the loose stone at the back of the witch’s croft—but perhaps it would be a token for someone else to study. For all she knew, it might give another Highland lass hope that she could change her own life.
Oliver threw open the croft door. The inside was completely dark, but she had expected that.
He kept hold of her hand and leapt across the threshold.
The sound of his head striking the stone above the doorway was uncomfortably loud as was the sight of him pitching forward. She felt something slam into her back and wondered if they had healers there in that Future she could see opening up before her.
She thought she might need one.
Fifteen
Oliver woke.
The first thing that occurred to him was that he’d obviously been unconscious. That was alarming, but that was what happened to a man when he was 6’2” and not precisely made to nip in and out of vintage Scottish crofts. He wondered how it was that Cameron who was even taller than he was had managed to get himself inside Moraig’s so neatly, but then again, the man had been sporting a dagger in his back and suffering from half his skull being crushed—
He sat up with a start, clutched his head, then heaved himself to his feet and staggered to the open doorway. He flicked on the lights, grateful than there were lights to turn on, then spun around to look for Mairead.
She was standing next to the hearth.
He wasn’t sure what sort of sound came from him, but he hoped he never had to make the same again. He propelled himself across the cottage at something not quite a dead run and threw his arms around…
Nothing.
He staggered back and looked at her in shock that soon turned to something very close to horror.
“No,” he said, his voice hoarse in his own ears. “Please, no—”
She smiled gently. “It’s all right,” she said, in perfect modern English. “It’s all right, Oliver, my love.”
He continued to stumble backward until he felt his head make contact with that bloody doorway yet again. The pain was almost enough to do him in. Or perhaps that was the shattering of his heart. He wasn’t sure and he didn’t want to know. What he didknow was that the first thing to do was fix what he’d botched so thoroughly—
“Oliver.”
He was halfway out the door before it registered that Mairead was calling to him. He pushed himself away from impulsiveness that he had trained out of himself, then slowly turned and looked at the woman across the chamber from him.
“Build a fire, my love,” she said gently, “and let us have speech together.”
At least she still had her Gaelic accent. He was tempted to ask her to speak it, but couldn’t bear the thought of missing anything. He was the first to admit he was absolutely not at his best, though that was perhaps the understatement of the century. Centuries. He hardly knew how to quantify it, though trying helped him bring his rampaging emotions under control.
He shut the door, locked it out of habit, then forced himself to put one foot in front of another until he’d taken himself all the way to the hearth. He didn’t allow himself to look at the woman he could absolutely see out of the corner of his eye, the one wearing the same rustic dress he’d last seen her in, the one who was standing just beyond where he could have reached out and touched her.
Centuries beyond that, apparently.
He built a fire because it was something to do with his hands. He excused himself to nip in and out of the loo, wondering if things would change if he shaved and showered, then decided nothing so stupid and simple was going to change the fact that he had tried to save a woman’s life by bringing her out of her time and to his.
And he’d failed.
He dragged his hands through his grimy hair, then walked back out into Moraig MacLeod’s little great room.
Mairead was sitting on a hard wooden chair near the fire. He walked over and sank to his knees in front of her.
