Chapter 31 #2
“Wasn’t it? It was because of me that you were even in the forest that day.”
“I might have been out for a walk just the same. It was running from Bentley that got me in this predicament. How is he, by the way? Have you seen him?”
“Aye, I saw him,” Patrick said. “Showed him a little of my displeasure.”
“You beat the crap out of him?” she asked. She wondered what he thought of the way she mixed Gaelic with English. She wouldn’t, if he didn’t surprise her so often. There were just some things that her own Mother Tongue was better at expressing.
“Not as much of it as I might have liked,” Patrick admitted. “No bruises. No broken bones. Just aches and pains that will last for a pair of weeks without much showing.”
“Goody,” she said. “I hope he’s still reaching for the ibuprofen even as we speak. Now, get on with your story. What made you decide I was gone, and how did you know where to look?”
“You left Jane’s mobile phone behind. And your footsteps just disappeared.” He looked at her briefly, took a deep breath, then resumed his whittling. “That was my first clue.”
“So what is the deal with that forest, anyway?” she asked. “One minute I was running away from Bentley, the next I was running into a group of medieval Highlanders.”
“My brother could give you a week-long treatise on the ins and outs of it—indeed, he did his damndest to give it to me—and it still wouldn’t be the precise answer.
Generally, if you’re interested in following someone back in time, all you must do is go to the proper place, concentrate all your thoughts on that soul, and voilà, you are there. ”
“And that didn’t work this time?”
“Aye, it worked, but not as quickly as I had hoped. I had anticipated three hours; it required three weeks.”
She sighed. “Those were three very long weeks.”
“I know,” he said quietly. “I tried to hurry.”
She watched him work with his hands and knife, smoothing, scraping, running his fingers over what he’d done. “I wonder why I got popped back here in the first place,” she said with a yawn. The motion of his hands was mesmerizing.
“Jamie would tell you that you had something to accomplish here in the past.”
“Hrumph,” she said, trying to keep her eyes open. “To lose a few pounds, maybe?”
He smiled up at her, then shook his head and went back to his work. “I doubt that. I suppose time will tell.”
She propped her elbows on her knees and her chin on her good fist. It seemed the wisest thing to do, considering how heavy her head was becoming. It was also easier to look at him and not be overcome by the simple beauty of his smile when she had some way to hold herself up.
“So, why did it take you so long, do you think?” she asked with a yawn so uncontrollably huge she almost swallowed her fist. “All part of time’s master plan?”
“I daresay it had more to do with Bentley’s interference.”
“He’s a pest,” she said. “I wish he’d find his way into the Fergusson’s dungeon.”
“One could only hope. He sat and watched me long enough while I was trying to wrest the forest to my desires. For all we know, he will.”
She lifted her eyebrows—no mean feat, all things considered. “He watched you? When? While you were hanging out in the forest each day, waiting to do a little time traveling?”
“Aye,” Patrick said, holding his remarkably bowl-shaped bowl up to study it. “He sat on a damned chair with several cans of soda at his elbow, watching me day after day. Listening to him belch was damned distracting.”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. Patrick looked up at her in surprise, a smile on his face.
“That sounded like you,” he said.
“I feel more like myself,” she said with a smile. “Maybe I’m not going to lose my mind after all.”
“You’re handling this quite well.”
“It’s just the thought of Bentley in a recliner, watching you like he might have some Saturday afternoon college football—” She shook her head. “It’s just so him. But if he was watching you all the time, how did you get him to stop?”
“Ruined his Jag.”
Madelyn blinked. “You’re kidding.”
He looked up at her. “I would never jest about a Jaguar.”
She could hardly believe her ears. “Are you telling me that you were desperate enough to actually do damage to an automobile?”
He smiled, but he didn’t look up at her. “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“What did you do?”
“I put sand in the oil reservoir.”
“Wow,” she said, stunned. “You must have been worried.”
He nodded, but didn’t look up. “Frantic is more the word I would choose. For you see,” he continued softly, “I knew the perils of the time. And the thought of you having to face any of them . . . well, it almost drove me mad.”
He looked up at her.
And the look on his face almost knocked her off her rock. A more foolish woman might have mistaken it for a quite serious emotion.
It was the same thing she’d seen in the hut the day before.
She turned away first. She didn’t want to speculate on his feelings. She didn’t want to let herself sink into that look and lose more of her heart than she’d lost to him so far.
Though she wasn’t sure her whole heart wasn’t gone already.
“Well,” she said, looking up into the gray sky and marveling that it looked and felt so much like snow already, “tell me what you did when you first got back here. How did you know where I was?”
“I didn’t know,” he said. He started whittling again. “I went to the MacLeod keep, made friends with the current laird, acquired a horse, and came up with a tale believable enough for a Fergusson.”
“You thought I might be there?”
“You weren’t at the MacLeod keep. I was told there had been a small skirmish with Fergussons recently, so I suspected they might have captured you. Had you come to this time, of course. I could only hope that was the case.”
She shivered. “I could have gotten very lost.”
“Aye.”
“No wonder Jane has red dots on her map.”
He nodded. “She fears them.”
“Well, at least she already speaks Gaelic. That would have to be a bonus.”
He looked up at her. “Jane is a wonderful woman,” he said. “I daresay, though, that only you could have survived what was put upon you.” He paused. “It would have broken her.”
“It almost broke me.”
“Did it?” He shook his head. “You are much, much stronger than she is. But if you repeat that, I’ll deny having said it.”
She snorted. “Coward.”
“She feeds me regularly.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” she said, and she felt a funny warmth begin near her heart. That was a compliment he’d paid her, wasn’t it? It felt like one.
A damned difficult thing she’d had to go through to get it.
“I have to say, I’ve never been happier to see anyone in my life than I was to see you,” she offered.
He looked up at her and smiled. “Me either.”
“Really?” she asked in astonishment.
“Is that so surprising?”
“A little,” she said dryly.
He put the bowl down, rested his knife on top of it, and looked at her. “We should talk.”
“Later,” she said, heaving herself to her feet. She almost heaved herself into the stream. The only thing stopping her was Patrick leaping to his feet and grabbing hold of her.
“By the saints, Madelyn,” he said with half a laugh, “you needn’t flee.”
She looked down at the ground between them, and there wasn’t much ground between them, and found that she had no desire whatsoever for any talk.
She didn’t want to know what he was feeling.
She didn’t want to know if along with all the details about the forest, his brother had given him advice on how to get rid of a pesky Yank.
She could just hear it now: Drop the wench back in the Middle Ages, Patrick .
It was sort of like taking out the trash, only you didn’t have to worry about the landfill issues.
Patrick put his arms around her and pulled her close. “If you’ve no stomach for speech now, we could attempt it later.”
She took a deep breath. “I don’t think I can stand much more today,” she said. She made herself look up at him. “I’ve had a bad couple of weeks.”
He tucked her hair behind her ears and smiled down at her gently. “I have an idea,” he said.
“A fire?”
“That, too. Nay, my idea is this: Why do we not just take the days as they come, together?”
“What other way is there?” she asked. “It isn’t as if you can just leave me here and go off by yourself.”
He pursed his lips. “You’re damned argumentative.”
“One of my best traits.”
He surprised her by smiling. “Aye, it is. Take the days with me, Madelyn. Together. We’ll take them as they come and see what comes of them.”
She nodded with a sigh.
He kissed her forehead, then kept his arm around her and turned her toward the horses. “Let us see if you can even ride. If you can, we’ll try the forest. If not, we’ll try the MacLeod keep.”
“The keep?” she squeaked.
“Fire. Food. Perhaps even a comfortable scrap of floor to call our own. If I flatter the laird enough, he might offer you a bath.”
A bath. The thought of it was enough to make her feel quite spry.
She would have danced a jig if she’d been capable of it.
It was amazing that even what she was certain would be quite primitive conditions sounded so luxurious.
If she ever managed to get herself to even a one-star hotel, she wouldn’t complain about lumpy, disgusting mattresses again.
Then she hesitated.
“What will they think about me? Do you want me to come up with a story?”
He looked faintly alarmed, then smiled quickly. “Leave it to me.”
“It is your era, after all.”
“It is that.”
“We’re going to have to talk about that, too, you know,” she said as she stood in front of the current-day mode of rapid transit.
“All those comments to the tour guides. All those complaints about the Crown Jewels. That river of bilge you gave me about having read so many history books that it was almost as if you’d lived it.
” She scowled up at him. “Deceitful. Dishonest. Bordering on unethical.”
“I couldn’t up and give you the truth right off, could I?”
“You could have.”
“Aye, well, we’ll have to talk about that, too,” he said. He looked at the Fergusson horse, then at her. “What do you think?”
She thought that if it meant getting the absolutely disgusting crust of filth off her, she would jump right on that horse with a vertical leap that would have impressed any NBA star. She looked at Patrick. “Let’s go.”
He made her a stirrup of his hands. She put her foot in, only to have the horse shy away. The beast must have been bred to hate MacLeods.
Patrick clucked his tongue. “You’re supposed to let him know you are the master.”
“I tried. He’s not convinced.”
“You’ll ride with me,” he said. He put her up on his horse, swung up behind her, and took both horses in hand. “We’ll go easily at first. I’ll find us somewhere warm and safe, I promise.”
She closed her eyes, held on to the horse’s mane and Patrick’s arm. Did such a place exist in the Middle Ages?
Well, if anyone could find it, she supposed it would have to be the man holding on to her as if he cared.
“Trust me,” he said.
Heaven help her, she did.