Chapter 9 #2
It took her a moment or two to decide what she could tell him that would make any sense.
Why hadn’t she slept with anyone? Because she’d been a geek, that’s why.
High school had been a nightmare. It hadn’t helped that she spoke a dozen languages, found plants more interesting than clothes, and vegetarian dishes tastier than hamburgers.
If she hadn’t had Madelyn, she wouldn’t have had anyone to talk to.
Of course, that had changed once she’d gone to college and found like-minded friends, but even then she hadn’t fit in precisely.
She had a leather coat because she liked the feel of it, she delivered babies because she loved how the world shifted when a new life took its first breath, and she wore linen because it looked good right out of her suitcase.
She wasn’t extreme enough for the green crowd and she was too weird for the burger crowd.
And somewhere along the way, she just hadn’t found a man she wanted to get involved with.
Until she’d met the one next to her.
“Was it the herbs?” he prompted.
“Partly,” she agreed. “And partly because I’ve always liked things that others didn’t find particularly popular.”
“Things like meadows of flowers and nosy, unpleasant Highland lairds?” he asked with a smile.
She smiled in return. “You aren’t unpleasant, but I do like meadows of flowers.
And aye, all that witchly sort of thing tended to leave men looking past me.
But you don’t have any of my problems, so why aren’t there women fighting over themselves to get into your bed—which I imagine is the case no matter what you say. ”
“You would think it would be so, but you would be wrong.” He shrugged. “I’m very choosy. And I don’t like women who haven’t the spine to stand up to me.”
“That’s a little difficult when you’re the laird, isn’t it?”
“You seem to have no problem with it.”
“Shall I be fawning and deferential, then?” she asked lightly.
“The saints preserve us both if you tried,” he said with a weary smile. He stared down at her hand in his for quite some time before he looked up again. “I am very unhappy with all this, Sunny. I would like to have you near me, but I’m not sure how to arrange that so it doesn’t put you in peril.”
She found that her eyes were stinging all of a sudden. She blinked furiously to keep the tears where they belonged. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, damn it.” He dragged a hand through his hair, cursed, then slipped that hand under her hair and pulled her tightly against him. “I’m going to kiss you now—chastely, I hope—and good sense be damned.”
She closed her eyes as his lips met hers.
It was not the kiss he’d taken from her in front of Moraig’s hut, or the one he’d given her in the meadow, or the one he’d all but branded her with the other day, but it was the same tingle she’d felt when he first touched her hand.
Only this was a hundred times more intense.
She shivered as he pulled away. “Cameron—”
“Cam,” he corrected.
“Cam?”
“’Tis what my brother Sim calls—called—me . . .”
He went suddenly still. Sunny started to speak, but he squeezed her hand, hard, and she stopped. She watched him as he turned himself into some sort of bad-guy antenna. He sat perfectly still for a moment or two, then he looked at her.
“We aren’t alone.”
She felt panic slam into her. She would have jumped to her feet and bolted, but he shook his head just the slightest bit.
“Just carry on, love,” he said quietly. “As if you noticed nothing amiss. Come here and let me distract you for a moment.”
“Cam—”
He cut off her word with his mouth. Sunny wished she could have enjoyed it. In fact, she was almost tempted, but her heart was beating too quickly for it. She felt his hand come up and press against the back of her head. He put his lips against her ear.
“We’re going to walk back at a leisurely pace. No harm will come to you.”
“But—”
He kissed her again, then pulled back far enough to smile at her. “As usual, you’ve forgotten who I am.”
“Never,” she said promptly. “But I think that’s part of the problem here, don’t you? Whoever this is certainly doesn’t have it in for me.”
“You are the single mouthiest wench I’ve ever known,” he said with another smile. “Have a little faith in me, Sunny. I’ll get you back to the village in safety.”
She could only nod and try not to throw up with fear. She let him pull her to her feet, went somewhat willingly into his arms as he held her close for a moment, then tried to keep breathing normally as he put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her back the way they had come.
“Not to worry,” he said lightly.
She didn’t believe him, but she wasn’t going to argue.
He actually didn’t seem overly concerned, so perhaps it had been his imagination on overdrive.
She was the first to admit she tended to do that when she heard a noise in the middle of the night.
In fact, there for a while she’d been terrified every time she thought she saw something out of the corner of her eye at Moraig’s.
Of course, that was before she’d realized she actually had been seeing things out of the corner of her eye—mainly ghosts and bogles—but perhaps that was something to think about another day.
“I’m cursed,” he remarked at one point as they walked along the path without undue haste.
“Are you?” she asked. “How so?”
“You,” he said, pursing his lips. “I finally find a woman I want and what is she? A bloody virgin. I should just bed you anyway and see if it satisfies me on the matter.”
“Is that what you’re thinking about right now?” she asked in astonishment.
“What else?”
“Aren’t we being followed?”
He shrugged. “I’m always being followed. I’m just not usually with a woman I want, so now I’m being a bit more careful than usual. But even so, I’m permitting myself a few pleasant thoughts along the way.”
She smiled as she walked with him the rest of the way back to the village in silence.
A woman I want. She was tempted to just do what she wanted to and burst into tears, but she wasn’t a weeper.
She was more likely to take out her frustrations on her garden or stand on her head and let the tension drain out of her.
The fact that what she wanted to do at present was take Cameron’s sword and go beat on someone with it was indication enough that perhaps she had spent just a few days too many in medieval Scotland.
Too bad that wasn’t going to change anytime soon.
He stopped her at the edge of the village. “Want to be my mistress? ” he asked suddenly.
“Thank you, but nay,” she said, though she was appalled to find out she was very tempted.
He grunted. “I didn’t expect you would, but I had to ask.” He sighed, squeezed her shoulders, then slid his hand down her arm and linked his fingers with hers. “Well, that’s behind us for the moment. I don’t suppose you have anything on the fire, do you?”
“That’s it?” she asked in surprise.
“It was only one lad, so I’m not going to fash myself over it.” He shot her a smile. “Dandelion soup, or dare I hope for anything tastier?”
“Are you really eating with me?”
“After this morning? Aye, and the villagers be damned.”
She suspected she should have argued, but she felt safer when he was two feet away, so she didn’t. She let him enter her little house first, then made him sit on the stool.
She started the fire as Patrick had taught her, then set her soup to warm again.
She had a pot—and a plate, a cup and a tallow candle, which she understood the scarcity of very well—thanks to Cameron’s generosity.
She set a plate of bread and cheese on the floor next to him, then sat at his feet with her legs curled underneath her.
When she finally looked at him, she found him watching her gravely.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I am thinking about what I can’t have and it bothers me,” he said simply. “I can’t have you in my bed, or in my hall, or in my heart, and I don’t like it.”
“Some things just aren’t meant to be, apparently.”
He pulled her closer, placed her crossed arms on his knees, then reached out and unbraided her hair.
He dragged his fingers through it for quite some time in silence, then he met her eyes.
“I want you to tell me it all again,” he said quietly.
“I’ve given it much thought as I’ve sat and watched your door this past se’nnight.
I don’t think I believe any of the babbling you did about time and gates, of course, but I’ll hear it again anyway. ”
“You aren’t going to throttle me, are you?” she asked with a half smile.
He took her face in his hands, bent and kissed her softly, then sat back with his hands on her arms. “Nothing worse than the occasional kiss.”
She took a deep breath. “All right. Where do you want me to start?”
“At the beginning, again. You were in your house, no doubt brewing up something to secretly poison a MacLeod with, and you opened your door and found me there. What then?”
“There isn’t much more to it than that. You pulled me back into your time through the gate on the threshold of my house.
I actually wasn’t all that surprised to find I was in the past because my laird in the twenty-first century, James MacLeod, was the one to tell me about time gates.
He should know, given how many of them he’s found.
” She paused. “He was, if you can believe this, laird of the clan MacLeod in 13—”
“11,” Cameron finished for her. He didn’t look terribly surprised. “The tale is he left the keep with his bride, Elizabeth, and found a way to Paradise.” He paused. “I had always assumed he’d ended up in the bottom of his loch.”
She shook her head. “He didn’t. He went to the future. As did his brother Patrick and his cousin Ian—”
“Patrick,” Cameron said, looking surprised then. “Your sister is wed to that Patrick MacLeod? He’s the one who taught you to fight?”
She nodded silently.
Cameron studied her for a moment, looking as if he were trying to come to terms with something he’d begun to believe before but hadn’t quite accepted.
He started to speak a time or two, then shook his head.
He looked at her, then shook his head again.
He patted her arms, then eased out from underneath her, rose, and began to pace.
Sunny took her soup off the fire, then watched him.
He was far too large for such a tiny room and the energy he was expending cursing made the chamber seem even smaller.
He strode over to her suddenly, then pulled her up and made her sit down on the stool. He looked down at her.
“What in the hell am I going to do with you now?”
“What difference does any of this make?” she asked, puzzled.
“It makes a difference because I believe you. It wasn’t that I didn’t think you believed your tale before, but now . . . well, now you can’t stay.”
She swallowed, hard. “I can’t get back, either, seemingly.”
He looked at her, then took her by the arms and pulled her to her feet. He yanked her against him and wrapped his arms around her tightly.
“Damnation,” he said curtly. “Damn it to hell.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she managed. “You’re marrying Gilly.”
“When hell freezes over,” he said, before he bent his head and kissed her.
Sunny threw her arms around his neck and held on.
It wasn’t, as he would have said, a chaste kiss.
She’d never felt anything like it before, though she was the first to admit she didn’t have all that much to judge him by.
He was so far out of her experience, she could only put herself in his hands and trust she would emerge unscathed.
He must have felt her surrender because he groaned and muttered a curse against her lips.
He gathered her even closer, but he held her gently and kissed her so sweetly, she felt her eyes begin to burn.
He finally lifted his head and looked at her for a moment in silence, then he released her abruptly.
He poured her soup on the fire, stomped out the remaining embers, then took her hand.
“Come.”
“Cam—”
He flashed her a sudden smile. “Thank you. I like hearing that name again from someone I love.”
Sunny was still reeling from that as he pulled her out of the hut.
She hardly had time to decide that maybe they should have paid a little more attention to what had been following them in the woods.