Chapter 6
Cameron stood under the eaves of a hut that was standing only because it was leaning against a sturdy tree and cursed silently.
He shouldn’t have held that bloody MacLeod witch.
He certainly shouldn’t have kissed her. What he should have done was left her in front of her house and walked away without a backward glance.
’Twas that damnable sense of honor his mother had instilled in him, no doubt, rearing its ugly head yet again.
It just might be the death of him one day.
Unfortunately, he was too old to change now. He waved a fond farewell to his good sense and eased along the side of what was masquerading as a house to see what Sunny was about.
He didn’t have to go far to discover it. She was cursing and weeping and stomping about so loudly, he almost bid her stop before she attracted every MacLeod ever spawned to her. It wouldn’t have gone well for either of them. He was the Cameron and she was completely mad.
She was blethering on in Gaelic, then something that sounded a bit to his ears like French, then in perfect English.
Well, perhaps her English wasn’t perfect.
She spoke her words strangely, though she was intelligible enough.
He peeked around the corner and watched her as she continued to step back and forth over the threshold of the hut, growing increasingly frantic.
Cameron pulled back and gave that some thought.
She obviously expected to find something inside that wasn’t there.
He understood that, for as he’d looked over her shoulder he’d been equally surprised to find that the inside of the house was completely empty.
But the one he’d pulled her out of hadn’t been.
He contemplated that for a bit longer before he realized that there was no more cursing coming from around the corner.
He leapt forward in a panic only to find Sunny kneeling in front of the threshold, rocking herself and muttering in Gaelic things about gates through time, Xs on a map, and death to a certain MacLeod laird named James.
Well, the last he could certainly agree with.
He walked over to her and stopped next to her. “Sunny?”
She looked up at him quickly, her expression one of absolute anguish. “My sister calls me that.”
He frowned. “Aye, so you said.” Did she miss her sister so that his using that name would distress her so deeply?
Or was it, the saints forbid, something of a more womanly nature that he couldn’t immediately divine and wouldn’t be happy to know about if he discovered it? He was not at his best when women wept.
But he was also nothing if not courageous, so he put his shoulders back and squatted down beside her.
“What is amiss here?” he said briskly. “Tell me of it and let’s be about seeing to it.”
She looked at him for several moments, her mouth working futilely—as if what she had to tell him was of such a monumental nature, she simply couldn’t find words to express it.
Cameron did his damndest to ignore her mouth. He knew what it felt like under his and it took all his formidable amounts of self-control not to lean forward and taste it again.
He drew his hand over his eyes. By the saints, he was just as daft as the woman in front of him. There he was, less than half a league from Malcolm MacLeod’s front door, and he was thinking less about his sword and more about Sunshine Phillips’s mouth.
Madness, that.
He pulled her up to her feet and forced himself to concentrate on the problem at hand. “Why have the innards of your house disappeared? Did the MacLeods steal all your belongings whilst you were gone?”
She started to speak, then shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Of course I would,” he said without hesitation.
“You wouldn’t,” she said just as firmly, “and even if I told you, you couldn’t help me. I think the best thing you could do is get out of here before the MacLeods find you.”
“I will not leave you here alone,” he said sharply, “and I can help you. You forget who I am.”
She smiled, though it wasn’t an insulting smile. “I haven’t forgotten who you are.”
“Then be about answering my questions.”
She looked at him for a very long moment or two, then nodded. “All right, I’ll tell you. But let me see your hands first.”
He blinked. “Why?”
“I want them comfortably away from anything with a hilt.”
He held up his hands slowly.
She looked at them, looked at him, then took a deep breath. “Very well, here’s the truth. This isn’t just a doorway from the outside of this little house to the inside; it’s a doorway through time.”
He blinked. He heard the words, assumed they would thicken inside his poor head into something resembling a coherent thought at some point, then frowned when they didn’t. Perhaps he’d missed something somewhere. “I don’t think I heard you properly,” he said.
She pointed toward the doorway. “On this side of that threshold is the year 1375. On the other side, through a gate you can’t see, is the Future. The year 2005, to be exact.”
She paused, no doubt to gauge his reaction. He had to admit, without hesitation, that he was too surprised to have any sort of useful one.
“That night when you came to fetch me, I was standing on the other side of the door over six hundred years from now,” she continued. “I should be able to just walk over that threshold and get back to my time.” She paused for quite a while. “Apparently, the gate isn’t working.”
He shut his mouth when he realized it had fallen open. Bloody hell. How could a woman who was that beautiful, who smelled that good, who had such perfectly lovely teeth and bright eyes, be so thoroughly, completely, entirely, stark raving mad?
She must have seen his thoughts on his face because she backed up. Then she turned suddenly and bolted.
He caught her before she managed five paces. He wrapped one of his arms around her waist, the other around her shoulders, and pulled her back against him.
“Stop,” he whispered against her ear. “Stop fighting me. Breathe in, Sunshine, and don’t scream when you breathe out. I have no intention of hurting you.”
“Your hand was on your sword.”
“It wasn’t.”
“It was.”
“I have bad habits,” he said without hesitation, realizing that she had it aright. “That madness you spouted startled me, nothing more. I won’t hurt you.”
She didn’t relax, but he understood that. The same thing happened to him when he knew someone was behind him, preparing to stab him. He rested his chin on her shoulder, hummed the most cheerful love song he could bring to mind, and kept her immobile.
“Breathe,” he whispered. “In and out.”
She did, though they were ragged breaths indeed.
Finally, he felt her hands come up to rest over his arm.
A sob escaped her, but she stifled it almost immediately.
He was impressed. He wasn’t accustomed to women who could do anything but shriek when they’d determined that giving vent to a womanly bout of weeping was the thing to do.
“A time gate,” he said finally, turning the words over on his tongue. “From one century to another.”
“Aye.”
He had to work very hard to suppress a mighty snort of disbelief.
It was simply the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.
There were rumors, of course, of mysterious things happening on MacLeod soil, but this was beyond what foolishness even a giddy MacLeod could spew.
Men were men and they lived and died in the years Fate had decreed for them.
Unless it was a MacLeod telling the tale, of course, and then anything was possible.
Most of their long winter evenings were spent speculating on the fate of the laird James, who had apparently escaped death and gone on to some glorious paradise with his wife, Elizabeth.
Cameron had always suspected the scatter-brained pair had left the keep for a bit of privacy, been assaulted by some plucky Fergusson, then been tossed by that same Fergusson into the loch where they had been resting comfortably on the bottom for the past sixty-four years.
He shouldn’t have been surprised that Sunshine should have believed something that fit in with their tales so well, even if she were a MacKenzie by birth. Any MacLeod influence on a susceptible mind was obviously a bad one.
He closed his eyes and permitted himself a deep breath of a woman who smelled like flowers, then made his decision without hesitation. He would humor her for a bit, convince her afterward that she had been led astray, then he would carry her back to his keep where he would—
Wed Gilly, that’s what he would do.
He suppressed a curse. He had never in his life regretted more his position in life than he did at that moment.
If he’d been a simple clansman, he could have asked the lord for permission to use his threshold, taken Sunshine Phillips in hand, and handfasted with her.
Surely he could have managed over the ensuing year and a day to convince her to stay with him.
He might have even found a way to borrow the laird’s priest for half an hour and wed her properly.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t a simple clansman and he had a duty he couldn’t shirk. He would have to be about the fulfilling of that duty very soon.
But perhaps not quite yet. Perhaps he could lay his duty aside for a bit longer and concentrate on the woman in his arms.
“Sunshine, are there any more of these gates you speak of?” he asked.
“There’s one in the forest to the west of the keep.”
Of course. He shouldn’t have expected anything else. “Shall we attempt an assault on that one?”
She pulled away from him, then turned and looked at him in surprise. “You would help me?”
“Of course.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks. She looked so grateful, he almost wept.
“Thank you,” she whispered.