He couldn’t help but a smile a bit. He started to make a list of all the things about her that he was very fond of, but he was interrupted before he even began by the chirping of his phone. Well, Patrick MacLeod’s poached phone. Mairead waved him on to his business, so he wasted no time popping up and going to the kitchen to liberate Patrick’s phone from where he’d hidden it under his book of torments, certain it would be the last place anyone with the brilliant idea to come steal it from him would ever look. He pulled up the message and read with hardly a flinch.
Oliver, it’s Zach. I’m at Patrick’s.
Oliver considered. That was an interesting wrinkle he hadn’t dared put into his starched plans. He had questions Zachary Smith certainly would have answers to and if Zachary were at Patrick’s, he could give those answers without James MacLeod standing there scowling over the same. He sent back his most pressing concern.
Privacy?
Bring your sword.
Oliver swore, stuck the phone in his pocket, then looked at his lady. “Care for a little walk to see your uncle?”
She rose and smoothed down her skirts. “Will they—”
“Absolutely,” he said without hesitation. “They will want to see you because first, you’re family, and second, you’re charming. You may be offered a few opinions about why, when I manage to get you here in a different guise, you might want to make certain you haven’t limited yourself to your current dating possibilities, but I suggest you ignore that bit.”
She smiled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
He certainly hoped she would. He grabbed his sword, opened the door and looked out to make certain there were no stray Renaissance thugs in the vicinity, then stepped over thethreshold and waited for Mairead to follow him. He pulled the door shut behind them and walked with her to Patrick and Madelyn’s castle.
He had scarce knocked before the door was opened and they’d been welcomed inside. He watched Mairead be welcomed without hesitation into that loving family circle and found himself questioning not Patrick’s consideration for his guests, but rather the condition of his flues. Damned smoky interiors were going to be the death of his poor eyes.
“Shall we?”
He jumped a little when he realized he wasn’t standing there alone, though he was grateful Zachary Smith had only asked the question quietly instead of bellowing it in his ear. He shot Mairead a smile, had a happy one in return, then followed Zachary out to Patrick’s garden.
“You didn’t bring a sword,” he managed.
“I was giving you an excuse to rush right over,” Zachary said innocently. “Besides, I figured you would just want to chat, not have a beating.”
Oliver snorted, though he’d seen Zachary with a sword in his hands and been happy to have a good reason to be loitering in a different part of the man’s castle. Still, there was no sense in leaving that challenge unanswered.
“I’ve been training with Robert Cameron,” he stated, patting his sword that he’d propped up against the wall.
“And I trained with Robin de Piaget.”
Oliver considered. “I hear he’s good.”
“He would be extremely offended by the watered-down nature of that compliment,” Zachary said with a smile. “My father-in-law was, I think I can safely say, the best swordsman of his generation and quite possibly several other generations as well. Now, what do you need? Actually, what do you already know?”
“About your 1600s adventure?” Oliver asked. “The basics, but what I’d like are details about what happened when you tried to go back and rescue that girl.”
Zachary made himself more comfortable atop the dry-stone wall. “Well, the first thing of note is that I arrived twenty-four hoursafterJamie and I had originally walked into their little village initially.”
“And you couldn’t have controlled your landing more tightly than that?” Oliver asked, surprised.
“It wasn’t for a lack of trying, believe me.”
“Sorry,” Oliver said, waving him on to the retelling of the disaster. “I’m still working on that part, so tell me all so I’m properly terrified.”
“You should be,” Zachary said frankly. “It was a nightmare trying to keep myself out of sight from my first me, which I didn’t manage to entirely do—well, let me rephrase that. I stayed out of my own line of sight, but someone else saw me.”
“Jamie?”
Zachary shook his head. “No, and I didn’t stop to find out who it was. That was definitely a mistake because that person almost got us—my first incarnation and Jamie—burned at the stake right after that poor girl who in the end still met her fate.”
“Brutal,” Oliver managed.
“Extremely,” Zachary agreed. “Jamie and I—the first me—managed to get ourselves home, but it took the second me almost two weeks to get the gate to open back up. I’m not exaggerating when I say New England winters are not anything to mess around with.”
