Chapter 7
Sunny stood huddled near a fire in the middle of a dead Cameron healer’s house, pulled Cameron’s plaid more closely around her, and wondered what in the hell she was going to do now.
She wasn’t having a good week. It was bad enough that she had been jerked out of her comfortable little cottage—replete with running water and a fridge—and deposited back in a time where her profession was a lethal one, worse that she had barely survived a drowning, and catastrophic that she had tried to get home and found it impossible.
Now, she had to have increasingly fond feelings for a man who was going to marry his sister-in-law?
She wished with a fervor that left her a little unnerved that she had asked any one of those damned MacLeod time travelers about their experiences.
All it would have taken was a single conversation with Jamie to have cleared up quite a few things.
Instead, she had just taken to heart the advice to stay on the right path and she wouldn’t have to worry about anything.
And why not? She’d been happily oblivious in modern Scotland with her hot showers and endless rain.
If she wanted to get up close and personal with a medieval expat, she went to dinner at her sister’s, or down to Jamie’s, or over to Ian’s.
She had wondered, now and again, what it would be like to visit a time that wasn’t her own, but she had never, not even in her wildest night-mares suffered after the occasional indulgence in dark chocolate, imagined she would be the one doing the visiting, much less finding herself stuck.
With men who thought she was a witch and a laird who was going to marry his sister-in-law.
She took a deep breath and turned away from that thought.
She just needed to look at the whole thing logically.
If a gate had worked to get her into the past, a gate should work equally as well to get her back to the future.
And even if Moraig’s gate had somehow self-destructed on her way through it, the super-duper, mother of all gates in the forest should have worked for her.
She knew several individuals who had used it successfully—or unintentionally, in her sister’s case.
Madelyn had found herself in medieval Scotland and captured by Fergussons—yet another reason to dislike them—but Patrick had rescued her and gotten them both back home—
She caught her breath. Her sister had been in medieval Scotland .
For a split second, she felt a rush of relief so strong, it almost knocked her to her knees.
Just as quickly, though, she realized why it wouldn’t work. Madelyn had traveled back to 1382.
She blew out her breath. 1382? She was going to wait seven years for her sister to be in the same year as she found herself?
Not bloody likely.
No, she wouldn’t wait for Madelyn because she wouldn’t have to.
She would go try the gates again and this time one of them would work.
She spared a brief regret that she hadn’t taken more time to memorize all the gates on Jamie’s map, but she did have the little red Xs between her house and Madelyn’s indelibly burned into her consciousness.
Those were ones that led to places she hadn’t wanted to go.
She’d had no desire to wind up back in seventeenth-century Barbados drinking rum with pirates, or in twelfth-century Spain enjoying the Inquisition, or in fifteenth-century France enjoying all sorts of other debaucheries.
At least she’d only landed in relatively friendly Scotland. Things could have been worse.
She wanted to laugh, or make a joke, or stare the facts down and force them to look away, but she couldn’t.
All she could do was sink down beside the fire that Cameron had built with his own hands and realize she was on the verge of losing it.
She was hungry, exhausted, and, quite frankly, terrified.
The tears didn’t help, nor did the shuddering sobs that came at her from nowhere.
She put her hands over her mouth and did her best not to make any noise.
Cameron’s knife was solid and comforting in her hand, his plaid was warm around her shoulders, but in spite of both of those things, she had never in her life felt more alone.
And she would stay alone because she couldn’t get home and she couldn’t imagine anyone would come and find her.
How could they, when they wouldn’t have any idea where she’d gone?
She supposed they might somehow stumble on Moraig’s gate— despite the fact that she’d lived there for a year without so much as a hint of anything untoward in that doorway—but even if they did, how would they know when she’d landed?
She was the proverbial needle in history’s haystack and it would take them months to even narrow down where she might have gone.
And even if they did find the right time, they wouldn’t have the right place because she was living in Robert Francis Cameron mac Cameron’s dead healer’s house, two hours on horseback away from where she should have been.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t go back and wait for them at Moraig’s.
The MacLeods would be just as unfriendly as Cameron’s men had been and she would find herself summarily turned into castle call girl, if they didn’t just kill her outright.
At least on Cameron soil she might be able to count on Cameron coming and rescuing her now and then.
If Gilly allowed it.
A soft knock on the door almost sent her tumbling into the fire. She rose unsteadily to her feet, then crossed silently to the door. She put her hand on the wood, but said nothing.
“Sunshine?”
She closed her eyes briefly, then opened the door. Cameron stood there, dressed in another plaid, and carrying a leather bag in one hand and a rough linen drawstring bag in the other. He caught sight of what she realized had to be her tear-ravaged face and sighed deeply.
“I’m sorry, Sunshine,” he said quietly.
She shook her head sharply. “I’m fine. I just lost it.”
He looked at her with a frown. “Lost what?”
She smiled in spite of herself. “Control over my womanly emotions. I’m fine.”
“Perhaps you’re hungry,” he offered. “I haven’t fed you today. ” He held out his burdens. “The finest I could find.”
“Thank you,” she said, taking them and holding them close. “Do you want to come in and eat with me?”
“I dare not,” he said slowly. “My villagers are suspicious enough as it is and I’ve no mind to fuel any speculations. I’ll return tomorrow, though, to see how you fare.”
She put on a smile, though she supposed it hadn’t been all that successful. “You’ve been very kind to me. Thank you.”
He blew his hair out of his eyes, then took a step backward. “Bolt your door as best you can. You should sleep with that dagger in your hand.”
“I will.”
He motioned for her to shut the door.
She did, then flipped the perfectly inadequate latch over and pretended that it was locked. She put more wood on her fire, was silently grateful to whoever had chopped it and left it behind, then sat down with what Cameron had brought her.
The wine was dreadful, but she drank it anyway. He’d brought bread and cheese and very wrinkled apples. She ate some of everything and thought kind thoughts about him. She couldn’t imagine he could keep up feeding her forever, but she would be grateful for it while it lasted.
She sat up until she couldn’t sit anymore, then she lay down on the dirt floor and closed her eyes.
It made her appreciate the luxury of Cameron’s bed, though she didn’t spare any regret for it.
She could have just as easily been sleeping in the slime of his dungeon.
At least she was marginally safe where she was.
Though she supposed, when she heard the faint scratching at her door an indeterminate amount of time later, that in the dungeon, her door would have had a lock.
The little piece of wood that had been her lock was finding itself lifted by means of a knife slid between the door and the door frame.
Sunny sat up and clutched Cameron’s knife in her hand.
She wasn’t one to succumb to fear easily, but she had no trouble admitting that she was absolutely terrified.
She pushed herself to her feet and slipped over to the darkest corner of the little hut.
At least that way she would stand a chance of attacking before she was attacked.
The door swung open. A man took a step inside, then flinched and grunted. He started to lean forward. Sunny pushed herself back against the wall and tried to make herself as thin as possible as he continued to fall. He landed face down at her feet.
An enormous sword quivered in his back.
It wasn’t but a handful of seconds later that Cameron appeared at the doorway. He jerked the sword from the man’s back, wiped it on the man’s shirt, then resheathed it.
“Sorry about the floor,” he said shortly, then he heaved the man up, hoisted him over his shoulder, and carried him from the hut.
Sunny put her hand over her mouth to keep her hysterics where they belonged—running rampant inside her—then stumbled across the room and looked out the door. Cameron was dumping the body in the street right in front of her house. He shot her a look.
“Deterrent,” he said succinctly. “Shut your door.”
Sunny opened her mouth to speak, but he had already melted into the shadows.
She wanted to ask him if it wouldn’t be easier to just let her stay in the keep, but maybe he had his reasons for that.
Maybe he was going to train his clan to leave her alone, then he would leave her alone as well.
She would live and die in medieval Scotland, in the rain, without a decent fire, all by herself.
She put her hand back over her mouth to keep herself quiet. She shut the door, put the inadequate lock back in place, then went to sit against the opposite wall.
She didn’t sleep.