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“He’s a ghost, lass. I canna very well ask him to climb a ladder.”

“Sounds like an excuse to me.”

Jamie laughed, and she smiled down at her bowl as she stirred in the milk. He liked that she’d begun to tease him about the castle as though she expected to be there long enough to see its faults put right. It was foolish to take comfort in such a thing when she’d been asking him how to get home, but he did.

They ate with the fire between them and the glen waking beyond the broken stones. A cart rattled faintly somewhere down the road. A cock crowed from a croft below. Smoke rose from village chimneys in thin blue threads, and rainwater dripped steadily into a bowl Jamie had placed beneath the worst leak. Olivia watched the drip between spoonfuls.

“You need a roof,” she said.

“I have one.”

“Over the places that let the sky in.”

He shrugged. “The bed stays dry.”

“Your standards are tragic.”

“Yet here ye sit, eating my porridge.”

“Someone has to supervise.”

He tore a piece of bread and held it out to her. She reached at the same time, her fingers brushing his. It was a small, ordinary touch, yet Jamie found he’d forgotten what he meant to say.

The bread began to tear between their hands. Jamie let go before they pulled it apart, though he took longer than necessary to draw back his fingers.

Olivia took the bread, her cheeks pink. “Thank you.”

Jamie had accepted thanks from grateful people all his life without making much of it. For some reason, those two words from Olivia left him unable to decide what to do with his hands.

He stirred the porridge, though it didn’t need stirring. He’d nearly kissed her the night before, hidden with her among the rocks while the excisemen searched the road below. She’d had one hand caught in his coat, and when she’d looked up at him he’d wanted nothing more than to close the little distance between them. Then he remembered her dead husband just in time. He owed her better than to press his attentions on a woman still in mourning, no matter how tempting she was. Yet here she sat wearing his plaid, as she argued over the bread as comfortably as if she’d been doing so for years.

He’d known what to do with women he fancied. Olivia was proving rather less straightforward. She liked the heel of the loaf, insulted his porridge, and had already begun leaving her ribbons and pins among his things. He found himself looking forward to every bit of it.

Olivia reached up, tucking her hair behind her ear. Jamie’s fingers twitched against the table. She smiled then, quick and crooked, and it took everything in him not to reach across the table and put the curl back where it had been. When she smiled, he noticed a tiny chip in one of her teeth, which somehow made her even more bonny.

He’d grown used to hearing her boots on the stairs though she’d only been at Dunarraidh a short while. He wondered what she would make of the castle in winter, with snow across the courtyard and the wind finding every crack in the walls. Then he remembered she meant to leave as soon as she could, and reached for his cup before she noticed he’d been staring at her.

He reached for the butter and discovered she had already passed it to him.

Olivia pushed her cup of tea toward him. “You can have the rest of mine.”

“Ye haven’t finished it.”

“I’ve had enough.” She tore a corner from the bread and spread it with butter, though her cheeks were still pink from the moment their hands had touched.

Jamie took the cup. The tea had gone lukewarm, but it gave him something to do while he found a safer subject.

“What would ye do first?” he asked.

Olivia looked up. “If what?”

“If ye reached Boston tomorrow.”

The question quieted her. She glanced toward the broken wall, though there was nothing beyond it but the wet Highland morning. “Go to the pub.”

“To drink?”

“To see my grandmother.” Her smile came and went. “I’d probably walk in through the back because she’d yell if I tracked mud across the front floor. Then she’d pretend she wasn’t worried, feed me something, complain that I looked thin, and ask enough questions to make an excise officer surrender.”