Chapter 9
Sunny dragged her hand through her greasy hair and wished desperately for a bath.
She’d been in the fourteenth century for two weeks, long enough to be getting a little desperate to be clean.
She supposed her trip to the loch counted as something of a bath, but she wasn’t all that eager to repeat that experience so she supposed she would just have to be dirty.
Maybe she would turn into a proper medieval gal at some point, grimy and rather less than fresh-smelling.
She had already been to the meadow that morning, picking things to dry for when they were needed, and she’d at least put her hands and feet into the stream.
It wasn’t perfect, but she supposed it would have to do.
She was making do with quite a few things, most notably her location in time.
She’d thought about going back to Moraig’s, but it had never seemed the right time to try again.
She wasn’t sure she could live the rest of her life in medieval Scotland, but for the moment, she was surviving.
She had the rain, she had earth under her feet, and she had the sky pressing down on her like a comforting embrace.
She could survive without hot showers for a bit longer.
Besides, medieval Scotland did have its advantages.
No traffic, no cell phones, no pantyhose.
Cameron wasn’t exactly the simple man she’d wanted—and she wasn’t going to have him anytime soon—but in time she might be able to tend a garden for him without his villagers and men wanting to drown her. It could have been much worse.
She rebraided her hair, tied the end with a few threads worked out of the fraying hem of her dress, then put her shoulders back.
She did have Cameron’s dagger stuck into the back of her belt, so she felt slightly better about her chances of surviving the rest of the afternoon.
She opened the door, prepared for just about anything.
The body was no longer in front of her doorway, but apparently just the memory of it had been enough to ensure her safety.
She’d seen Cameron every day, several times a day as it happened, but he had never stayed with her again for longer than it took to have a brief conversation about the situation up at the hall.
His answers had ranged from as I expected to not good.
Yesterday the only answer she’d gotten was a tightening of his mouth and a shake of his head.
She wondered what he would do. She had ventured to suggest that perhaps she was the reason for his troubles. He had disagreed so strongly that she hadn’t brought it up again.
She pulled her door shut behind her, looked around to see what she might face, then jumped a little in surprise. There, fifty feet away, standing under the eaves of the edge of the forest, was the laird of the clan Cameron.
She tried not to think about how pleasant it was to see him, or to know that he was watching over her.
Over the past week, she’d learned that, if nothing else, the man was relentless—and stubborn.
He’d ignored her comments that she didn’t need to eat so much, snorted at her suggestion that he shouldn’t be spending his nights under the eaves of the forest watching her, and glared at her when she said that perhaps she should just pack up a little hobo bag and try her luck with another clan.
Actually, he’d done more than glare about the last. It had been the only time he’d touched her in a solid week. He’d jerked her into his arms, wrapped those arms around her so tightly that she’d squeaked, then he’d whispered harshly into her ear.
If you leave me, it will kill me.
And then he’d proceeded to kiss her until she’d promised she wouldn’t fight him any longer. He hadn’t touched her since, but he’d given her so many smoldering looks, she’d half wondered why she hadn’t caught fire.
The situation was untenable. He was a medieval laird and she was a twenty-first-century commoner. Even if he hadn’t been planning to marry his sister-in-law, he couldn’t have married her. There was no hope for them in the real world.
He lifted his hand and crooked his finger at her.
She closed her eyes briefly, took hold of the butterflies taking flight in her stomach, then ducked out from under the eaves of her house and ran across the muddy path to where he stood. He wrapped another plaid around her shoulders.
“’Tis cold out,” he said.
“It’s spring.”
“Aye,” he said with a faint smile, “so I hear.”
She pulled the plaid closer around her and looked at him. “What are you doing today?”
“Walking in the woods with you.”
“Are you?” she asked in surprise. “Why?”
“Because, love, if I don’t have an hour of privacy with you, I will go mad.”
“But—”
He looked at her with an expression so serious, she decided it was better to just keep her protests to herself.
“All right,” she said.
He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her deeper into the woods with him. “I’m sorry I have no shoes for you, but the path is soft. ’Twill be safe enough, I imagine.”
“Safe,” she echoed, “or comfortable?”
He smiled grimly. “I meant to say comfortable.”
She imagined not. She pulled the knife out of her makeshift belt and handed it to him. “You might want that.”
He hesitated, then took it and stuck it in his boot. “I’ll give it back to you tonight.”
“I won’t remind you that you don’t have to keep watching over me,” she began, “but I could point out that it might be easier for you if you would let me sleep in the keep.”
He hesitated, then shook his head. "’Tis too dangerous, Sunny, and I’ll tell you why as we walk.”
Well, that promised to be more answer than she’d had up until then.
She nodded and continued on with him. The path was, as he had promised, soft under her feet, untroubled by the rain that fell onto the treetops.
If there was prickly spot, he lifted her over it, otherwise he simply walked beside her.
He would stop every now and again, as if he listened.
“Cameron?”
He looked down at her. “What?”
“Why do you stop?”
“I like to know what’s in the woods,” he said simply. “Now, as for why you’re safer in the village, the answer is complicated. ’Tis partly because if you sleep in my bedchamber, they will all think I’m bedding you and then I don’t think it will go very well for either of us.”
“Because I’m the MacLeod witch?” she asked.
He smiled briefly. “Aye, that is part of it. I also can’t leave you outside my bedchamber, because—well, you’ve already seen what happens when I make the mistake of leaving you at their mercy.
And if you want the entire truth, I’m not sure I trust any of them with either of us inside the keep anymore.
” He shot her a look. “Too many lads between us and the front door, aye?”
“Oh, Cameron,” she said with a wince. “They’re your kinsmen. ”
“You would assume that might mean something to them, but apparently it doesn’t.
” He took a deep breath. “Why don’t you take my mind off my traitorous kinsmen by telling me of your family.
I assume they aren’t lying awake at night, imagining up in their black hearts ways to kill you without making too much mess. ”
She managed a smile. “I don’t know how you can make light of this.”
He shrugged. “’Tis either that or weep and I never weep. So, ’tis your duty now to humor your laird’s curiosity.”
“And curiosity is your worst fault,” she said. “Or is that your chivalry?”
“Chivalry,” he said with a snort. “That’s English rubbish, lass. We don’t have it here in Scotland.”
“Of course you do. It’s called honor.”
He smiled at her. “I suppose so. Now, get on with ye, gel, before I blush. Tell me of your parents first. And I see you’re no longer denying that I am your laird.”
“I’m humoring you.”
“As you should.”
She laughed at him. “You’re relentless—and shameless. But I’ll answer your nosy questions. My parents are scholars. They spend their days teaching languages to other scholars.”
“Even your dam?”
She smiled at the surprise in his voice. If her mother had heard that, her hackles would have immediately risen and Cameron would have found himself skewered linguistically as a result. “Actually, yes,” she said. “It’s a different world where I come from.”
He looked at her thoughtfully. “They sound quite learned. Even your mother.”
“She would agree. They’re probably too learned for the rest of us. I only have one sibling, my sister, Madelyn.”
“The one brave enough to wed a MacLeod?”
She nodded. “Patrick loves her to distraction, so I can’t fault him. He is a lovely man.”
He walked next to her in silence for quite a while. “He’ll be worried about you,” he said finally.
“I imagine so.”
He put his arm around her shoulders, then reached behind his back and caught her hand so he could draw it around his waist. Sunny took the moment and fixed it in her memory.
She was walking in a beautiful forest, with a springtime shower falling softly through the trees, and a gallant, powerful man was holding on to her as if he truly wanted to.
Of course, she was without a home, hundreds of years out of her own time, and she had no shoes, but perhaps those were things she could continue to do without for the moment in trade.
Cameron finally stopped, looked around them for a moment, then pulled her over to sit with him on a fallen log. He took her hand in his, studied both sides of it for several minutes in silence, then looked at her.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Thirty-three,” she managed. “Why?”
He shrugged. “I’m curious why you’re still a maid. Are the men you know merely blind, or blind and stupid as well?”
She shifted uncomfortably, but he only continued to watch her without a flicker of anything on his face that might have been construed as scorn or ridicule.
“I’m not going to evade answering this, am I?” she asked finally.
He shook his head slowly.
“Why does it matter to you?”
“Because I think it says quite a bit about you, and I’m curious as to what that is.”