by Lynn Kurland
“Very kind.” He shifted, then sighed. “I feel approximately eighty years old.”
“Well, you don’t look a day over fifty.”
“Don’t mind me, then, if I succumb to my years and snooze again in this glorious bit of sunshine.”
She suspected he would, and she wasn’t surprised when he did. She stole the occasional glance at him, but that only left her shaking her head. He was hard to look at, but she supposed she could make the effort in order to draw him properly. Taking one for the team, as usual.
She was altruistic like that.
The trip back to Benmore was easy driving, and while Nathaniel’s Range Rover was definitely bigger than what she’d gotten used to, it drove like a dream. She glanced at her passenger occasionally, but he didn’t stir. She supposed that was enough of a stamp of approval for her.
He woke as she was turning onto the road that led to both their houses.
“I’ll drop you at your place,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I’m sorry for this. I’m not usually so enfeebled.”
“I can walk,” she said. “It isn’t that far.”
“But ’tis pouring with rain and you’ll catch your death,” he said, rubbing his hands over his face. He smiled faintly. “Thank you, Emma. I’m not sure what came over me.”
“Bad eggs?”
“Well, if they were, they weren’t yours,” he said with a sigh.
She turned for her house, then stopped in front of it and turned off the car. She looked at him. “Thanks for the help with my rental.”
He looked at her quickly, then put his hand briefly over his eyes. “Sorry,” he managed, “I completely forgot about it. I should have had you stop at Patrick’s to pick up what you said he’s loaning you.”
“I don’t need a car for the next couple of days,” she said with a shrug. “If I do, I’ll walk.” She paused. “I don’t think I can actually take him up on the offer, but I’m not sure what else to do. I don’t think there’s any way Sheldon would have my credit card number, actually, but who knows?”
“Is your father’s under-chauffeur tossing in his lot with your ex, do you think?”
“Not a chance in hell,” Emma said without hesitation. Bertie lifted his eyebrows over her other boyfriends often enough in the past. That his eyebrows had disappeared under his cap the first time he’d met the illustrious Master Cook should have told her all she needed to know. “No, Bertie wouldn’t be aiding and abetting him. There’s something else going on.”
“Your former lad must have interesting friends.”
She smiled without humor. “He doesn’t have friends; he has acquaintances who put up with him. I imagine he stormed down to the bank and talked the manager to death until the poor guy told him what he wanted to know just to get him to shut up.”
“Not exactly legal, that.”
“That’s never stopped him before,” she said, “though he doesn’t usually find much success with that tactic.” She smiled briefly. “He’s a lawyer, you know.”
“I am utterly unsurprised,” he said, “knowing quite a few of those sorts myself. The good ones are worth their price.”
“Like your friend in London?”
He nodded. “He’s eye-wateringly expensive, but worth every pound—and believe me, he only deals in pounds, not pence.” His phone beeped at him and he swore faintly. “Please tell me this isn’t a text from him telling me I’m being assaulted from the south as well. I don’t think I can bring myself to read it.”
“Want me to read it for you?”
“My life is an open book.”
She took his phone and looked for his message icon. She checked for the most recent message.
“It’s from Geoff Segrave and says, Call me.”
“Wonderful,” he muttered. “Is that it?”
“Nope,” she said cheerfully. “You apparently owe him money for what it cost him to send a flunky over to the car place.”
“How much?”
“Ah, thirteen pounds and eighty-seven, well, what do you call them? Pence?”
He caught his breath. “Aye.”
“Maybe you can just chuck a twenty at him?”
He unbuckled himself and took his phone back. “Let’s sort it later, shall we? I think I need to get home.”
“Sure,” she said in surprise, but he wasn’t there to hear it. He had already gotten out of the car, grabbed her stuff from the back, and was depositing it on her porch.
She got out of the car and walked up to her porch slowly, somewhat surprised by how eager he seemed to get her keys out of her hand and into her door lock. He opened the door, flicked on the lights, then set her stuff just inside. He smiled, though she imagined he didn’t know how cross-eyed with headache pain he looked. His hands were shaking.
“I need to get home,” he said quickly.
“I think you do,” she agreed. “You still don’t look so good. Are you sure—”
“I’m sure,” he said. “Let me ring you when I feel more myself, then I can run you to Patrick’s.”
“Oh, there’s no need, really,” she said, facing off with the Aga and wondering if she might manage to win the battle this time—
“Emma.”
She realized she was only half paying attention to him, but the seriousness of his tone surprised her. “What?”
“I think it’s going to pour with rain,” he said. “Stay in the house, aye?”
She looked at him in surprise. “What?”
“Stay in the house,” he repeated carefully. “Please.”
All right, so Definitely Up had morphed suddenly into Past Weird. Nathaniel MacLeod had gone from someone who looked absolutely green to someone who looked almost frantic. It was possible, she supposed, that that was his usual reaction to his lawyer’s phone calls.
Or maybe it was something else entirely.
“Okay,” she said. She nodded, because he was obviously taking great pains to nod at her. “Are you sure you don’t want me to make you some tea before you go?”
“I need to deal with this, ah, lawyer thing right away,” he said, looking as if what he really needed to deal with was a straight path right to bed. “Stay inside where it’s warm.”
She lifted her eyebrows, but couldn’t bring herself to commit to anything else, not that it would have mattered because he was no longer there to see it. She leaned against the doorframe and watched him hurry to his car, hop in, and drive off. She stood there, motionless, until she heard the noise fade into the distance.
There were some extremely strange things going on in Benmore Forest.
She went inside her little cottage and shut the door thoughtfully. She locked it for good measure, because she wasn’t quite sure what she was thinking at the moment. She brought her stove back to life, congratulated herself on at least that small victory, then made herself some tea. She went to sit by the window that looked into the forest and tried to relax.
That was a strange place, that forest.
She stared at it until it seemed less strange than it did unsettling. She rose and paced around her house restlessly until she finally gave up trying to walk herself into serenity and instead unearthed the yarn and needles she’d also bought earlier that morning.
She only succeeded in eventually realizing—after several rows, of course—that she hadn’t cast on enough stitches to make a hat for anyone who was older than three. She ripped everything out, then looked at the sketch pad she’d left sitting on the kitchen table. She opened it and looked at the portrait she’d done of Nathaniel as he’d stood next to his car.
Odd that she’d dressed him in a rather rustic-looking kilt with a sword by his side.
She opened her front door and looked out into the late-afternoon gloom. She imagined it would be fully dark in an hour, so maybe if she wanted to get out, she shoul
d do it sooner rather than later.
Stay in the house . . .
She frowned. Those numbers, 1387. Those were the same numbers she’d seen on her phone in his house on that morning when he’d thrown her out with as much enthusiasm as he’d just used in dropping her off at her house. What was that all about? Was his bookie calling him with what he owed? Was £1,387 the minimum balance his bank account could fall to and seeing it freaked him out? Was someone in the village telling him how many seconds he had until a socialite from London came hunting him?
She took her coat off the hook by the door, grabbed her keys off a different hook, then stepped out onto the porch before she allowed herself to think about what she was doing. She pulled the door shut behind her and locked it, then looked out into the darkening forest.
The rain had let up a bit, which she supposed was a fairly useful thing. Surely there was no harm in a walk. It wasn’t like she was going to catch pneumonia from a little rain. Besides, she wasn’t planning on going far and she wasn’t going to venture into the forest.
Well, at least not too far.
She shoved her keys in her coat pocket, made sure her phone was in her back pocket, and stepped off her porch.
There was something about walking that cleared her head and left her wondering why she didn’t do it more often. She tended to get caught up in her thoughts probably more often than was good for her. She spent so much time working with her hands, even when she was drawing something in particular, that it generally left her with a great amount of mental space to speculate on all kinds of things she might not have normally. But at the moment, she had a limited amount of things to wonder about, so she indulged before she could talk herself out of it.
So Scotland felt magical. It was a spectacular country. Even the most jaded and cynical of tourists would probably have to admit that. She’d been expecting quite a bit thanks to Bertie the under-chauffeur who had filled her very impressionable mind with all kinds of historical tales about swords and heroes and battles. Add to that Mrs. McCreedy’s odd little map, her own rampant speculations about the unusual recluse in the woods, and that hallucination she’d had of someone stepping from the mist . . .
Well, it was no wonder she had begun to think Highland magic was a real thing. Her imagination had run away with her to a paranormal sort of place where all kinds of unusual things probably felt most comfortable—
Or so she told herself until she heard the shouts and ringing of swords.
She didn’t think, she acted. She bolted to her left, because her natural instinct was to go to her right and Bertie the former super spy had suggested to her more than once that if she were faced with a dangerous situation she should do what she wouldn’t be expected to do.
She supposed she should have taken five seconds to think that through, but by the time that thought occurred to her, she was already twenty feet into the woods, and that was apparently twenty feet past the line where reality ended and hallucination began.
And then she saw him.
Him.
She froze in place and gaped, because she couldn’t do anything else. That couldn’t possibly be Nathaniel, surely, but it couldn’t have looked any more like him if it had been him. The only difference between that man standing there and the guy who had been standing on her porch not half an hour ago was that the guy in front of her was dressed in medieval gear, his hair was hanging around his face, and he had a sword in his hands.
He swung his sword suddenly, right at her, and she ducked out of instinct. That was bad enough, but feeling something fall against her back was far worse.
That something was a man.
The Nathaniel who couldn’t possibly be her neighbor pulled her away before the attacker she hadn’t seen coming crushed her under his falling self. She clapped her hand over her mouth when she realized her attacker was falling because he was dead. Her rescuer, whoever he was, pulled her behind him, fought off another guy with a sword and very bad teeth, then took her by the hand and ran with her. She didn’t argue. She couldn’t argue. She was too busy trying to keep from completely losing it.
He pulled her back to a halt at the edge of the forest. The mist obscured her sight of what she knew should have been a faint track leading to her safe and cozy cottage. She couldn’t see it very well at all—
“Go haime, gel.”
She would have told him she couldn’t, but he gave her a fairly healthy shove in the right direction. She stumbled forward, tripped, then went down on her hands and knees. She didn’t stop to assess the damage; she simply heaved herself to her feet and fled.
She ran until she left the mist behind and she was somehow standing on her own front porch. She knew it was her front porch because the house looked the same and those were the lights she’d left on spilling out of her windows.
But she was alone.
Oh, and she was also apparently losing her mind.
She dropped her keys a handful of times before she managed to get the right one in the lock and open her door. She realized she was hyperventilating only after she’d gotten herself inside her cottage and locked the door shut behind her. She pushed a chair in front of the doorknob, made sure she had her phone, then rechecked all the windows. Everything was locked up, but she still couldn’t catch her breath.
She was too panicked to even cry.
She ran to the bathroom and locked herself inside there as well. She looked at herself in the mirror and decided it was best to ignore the smudge on her shoulder. It was mud, not drying blood, and she was going to lose it if she didn’t get hold of herself very soon.
She stripped and stood in the shower until she simply couldn’t stand any longer, then she put herself into her pajamas and considered going to bed.
She was fairly sure she would never sleep again.
Just what in the hell was going on?
She took refuge in her kitchen and wondered if she had the presence of mind to even make tea. A knock at her door startled her so badly, she shrieked. She grabbed a knife out of a kitchen drawer, took a deep breath, then fumbled with the chair wedged against the doorknob. It took a moment or two before she could bring herself to open the door, but she managed it.
Patrick MacLeod stood there. He looked at her, looked at the knife in her hands, then held up his hands slowly.
“Friend, not foe,” he said.
The knife fell from her fingers, but Patrick had the quickest hands she had ever seen. He caught it before it landed point-down on the top of her foot. He straightened, then held it out to her haft-first.
“I’ll make tea,” he said simply.
She let out a breath that didn’t feel at all steady, then attempted a smile. “Sorry. Long day.”
He said something in return, but she didn’t catch what it was. She was too busy looking at him and seeing something . . . well, there was something about him that was different. He looked so much like Nathaniel that they easily could have been brothers, but that wasn’t it. There was something about him that seemed a bit raw somehow and that wasn’t just his rugged Highlander persona.
If she hadn’t known better, she would have said that he absolutely would have been comfortable in that little battle scene she’d just imagined.
But that was impossible.
She had a very active imagination, that was it. Her imagination had years ago sent her in the direction of art and kept her from becoming a corporate attorney. It would, she was sure, provide a decent living when she took that imagination and used it to fashion wearable pieces of art that reflected sea and sky and heather on the hills—
“Emma, are you unwell?”
Was she unwell? She scoffed at the very idea. She wasn’t unwell, she was . . .
She was completely freaked out, that’s what she was. She was looking at a guy in front of her who she could easily imagine using a sword. She was living next
to a guy she was starting to believe actually did use a sword. Unwell? She wasn’t unwell, she was losing her mind. The worst thing about it was, she thought she just might find some company for that activity if she looked hard enough.
“Emma?”
“I’m fine,” she managed, realizing that she was croaking as badly as Nathaniel had been that morning in the village.
That morning. Was it possible that it was only that morning when she’d dropped her phone and broken it?
Patrick was looking at her thoughtfully. “It can get a little—” He paused and seemed to be looking for the right word. He frowned again. “Solitude can be good,” he said slowly, “but it can get a little—”
“Freaky?”
He smiled briefly and Emma wanted to close her eyes. She wasn’t sure how he and Nathaniel could look so much alike without being related, but, as she’d pointed out to herself more than once already that morning, Scotland was a strange place.
“I was going to say trying, but perhaps that isn’t the right word, either,” Patrick continued. “I should have brought the runabout. I could have walked back home.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t have asked that,” Emma said in surprise.
“I know,” he said simply. “I’ll bring it round tomorrow.” He picked up a basket. “We thought you might want a few things to liven up the old place. Why don’t I set it on the counter for you?”
Emma stood aside to let him in and tried not to weep. She was tired, that was it. It had nothing to do with the kindness of strangers. She shut the door, then sat down at the table, watching Patrick MacLeod make tea. He set her up with a cute little brown pot and a china cup on the table, then leaned back against the sink.
“I take it the very elusive and reputedly very desirable Nathaniel MacLeod ran you into Inverness?” he asked mildly.
She nodded. “He was headed there anyway, apparently. Hopefully that will throw Sheldon off the scent.”
Patrick smiled. “I imagine it will.”
“You and Nathaniel could be brothers, you know.” She wondered if it might be ill-advised to point that out, but she couldn’t help herself. The resemblance was uncanny.
