Chapter 13
Sunny knelt in the damp dirt and pulled weeds.
Weeding Moraig MacLeod’s garden patch had been her job from almost the moment she’d arrived in Scotland.
She had tended the garden while Moraig had sat in the sun and talked about life and death and all the lovely things that were to be found in the woods thereabouts if a girl looked hard enough.
Sunny had never once considered that Moraig might have been talking about a man, much less the laird of the clan Cameron.
Who was, apparently, quite alive in the twenty-first century.
She wanted to stop thinking about him, but she couldn’t.
She’d been thinking about him since she’d woken up in Jamie’s guestroom three days ago with Patrick sitting on the edge of the bed and Jamie peering over Patrick’s shoulder at her.
Fainting wasn’t her usual response to things that shocked her, but maybe the bump on her head had been more serious than she’d wanted to admit.
Or maybe what she’d seen had just been too much to handle in a conscious state.
She suspected the latter.
She had escaped the keep with Patrick before Jamie had had the chance to ask her any questions.
She’d promised him she would come to dinner when she felt better.
Perhaps he would spend so much time buried in his texts on head wounds that he wouldn’t notice when she didn’t show up for, oh, a year or so.
Patrick, very wisely to her mind, hadn’t asked her a single question on the way home.
Madelyn had brought Hope and kept her company for the subsequent two days while she’d lain in bed and tried to catch her breath. She’d spent most of the time trying to convince herself she hadn’t seen what she’d seen.
She hadn’t been successful. Whatever the facts might have been, the one most impossible to dispute had been that she’d seen Robert Francis Cameron mac Cameron and he hadn’t known her from Adam.
When she hadn’t been obsessing over that, she’d been puzzling over his age.
He was older. He had also been wearing a suit.
Not only that, he was apparently again lord of Cameron Hall.
How had he managed to hop over almost seven centuries, acquire all sorts of modern polish, land on his feet as laird of the same clan, and forget about her all in one fell swoop?
She’d been tempted to drive up to Cameron Hall—or be driven, in her case—and find out just what had happened to him.
She would have, but she didn’t think she could take seeing that blank expression on his face again.
She also wasn’t sure she would get past his flawless model fiancée to ask him anything.
“Sunny?”
She jumped in surprise, then put her hand to her chest when she realized it was just Zachary standing at the edge of the garden. “You scared me.”
“I called,” he offered. “You didn’t answer the phone Jamie gave you.”
“I turned it off. I don’t like cell phones.”
“Careful, Sunny,” he said with a smile. “You’re starting to sound like Patrick.” He walked over and looked appraisingly at her work. “The garden looks good. The house looks good, too. Nice addition on the back there.”
“You would know,” she said, sitting back on her heels and dragging her forearm across her face, “since you designed it. I have the most luxurious bathroom a witch could wish for. Now, did you just come to make sure I didn’t damage the grout, or did you have another reason?”
He laughed. “Take it easy on me, Sunny; I’m just the messenger today. Young Ian has the flu and Elizabeth wondered if you could do anything for him.”
Sunny crawled unsteadily to her feet. “Do I have time for a wash?”
“The poor kid’s puking his guts out,” Zachary said, “so I’d say no. No one cares about a little mud anyway.”
“All right.” She wiped her grubby hands on her jeans, grabbed her bag from where it lived just inside the door, then collapsed gratefully into the front seat of Zachary’s modest little Ford.
Walking to Jamie’s would have been beyond her, no matter how awful his son was feeling.
She closed her eyes and thought she might just have a little nap while she could.
“Sunny?”
“What?” she asked, not opening her eyes.
“Where did you go?”
She forced herself to take a handful of deep, even breaths.
She’d known the question would come eventually—she just hadn’t expected Zachary to be the one doing the asking.
No one else had dared. Maybe they all thought she was so fragile, they would push her right over the edge into someplace they couldn’t rescue her from.
Either Zachary thought she was tougher than that, or he was too curious for his own good. She suspected a bit of both.
“Nowhere interesting,” she said, when she thought she could say it convincingly.
“Would that nowhere interesting have anything to do with you throwing yourself at Robert Cameron the other day?”
“I was delirious,” she said without hesitation.
“But, Sunny,” he said slowly, “you were perfectly lucid when you saw him.”
She looked at him and found he was studying her far too closely for her peace of mind. “Watch the road, kid.”
He smiled briefly. “Nice try. Want to give me an answer this time?”
She had to take another deep breath. “I thought I recognized him, but I was wrong. Please, Zachary, just don’t ask me anything else.”
He turned at the fork in the road and started toward Jamie’s. “I won’t push you. Just remember that I’m good at keeping secrets.”
“Which is why you’re Jamie’s time-travel research companion of choice.”
He laughed. “Probably. It also helps that I’m self-employed. I don’t make much money, but my hours are flexible.”
She managed a smile, but she supposed it hadn’t been a very good one.
Zachary said nothing more and she didn’t volunteer anything.
She was very grateful when they reached Jamie’s front door, though, as she walked through it, she wondered why.
Zachary might have backed off when she wanted him to; Jamie wouldn’t be so accommodating.
If he thought it was in the best interest of her mental health for her to unload a few details, he would be ruthless about encouraging her to cough them up.
“Is young Ian upstairs?” she asked Zachary. Maybe she could make a quick dash upstairs and avoid the inquisition entirely.
“In the bathroom, probably.”
“I’ll go find him,” she said, taking her bag back from him. “Thanks for the ride.”
“My pleasure.”
She let her eyes adjust to the light, then started across the great hall.
She realized, as she was halfway to the stairs, that the place wasn’t empty.
Jamie was sitting in front of the hearth talking to someone.
He looked up, smiled, and motioned for her to come over.
She supposed Ian would last a few more minutes, so she nodded and walked over to stand next to his chair.
Then she realized who was facing him.
Her bag slipped from her fingers and landed on the floor. The sound of glass breaking was very loud in the silence of the hall.
Cameron rose immediately. He took her by the arm and drew her over to his chair.
“Sit,” he commanded.
She sat before she thought better of it.
Too much time spent being bossed around by him in a different century, apparently.
She watched him fish through her bag and pull out things that were salvageable.
Within moments, Zachary appeared with a rag.
He didn’t say anything, he just looked at Cameron periodically as he tidied up the floor.
Zachary stood finally. “Come on, Sunny. Let’s go make that tea for Ian.”
Sunny pushed herself to her feet, but found Cameron in her way.
She didn’t want to look, but she couldn’t help it.
He was wearing jeans and some species of long-sleeved shirt.
If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought him nothing more than an average, albeit exceptionally handsome, Highlander.
Only she knew better.
“Come back when you’re finished if you please, Sunshine,” Jamie said. “Our good Lord Robert has decided that he will take on half the financial responsibility for the new leisure center in the village and we’ll want your input.”
Before she had to come up with a decent way to refuse, Zachary had taken her by the hand and pulled her out of harm’s way. She sighed in relief when the kitchen door closed behind them both.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Interesting,” he noted.
“Shut up,” she suggested.
He laughed and dumped the towels with the broken glass into the garbage. “Come on, Sunny. It’s killing me not to know.”
“Die a little longer,” she said grimly. She certainly was.
He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms over his chest. “You know, Sunshine, we don’t like it when our women get hurt.”
“Are you a MacLeod these days?” she asked with a snort.
He shot her an even look. “I knelt and pledged Jamie my fealty just as you did, my little Colonist friend. And I’ll repeat what I said: we MacLeods don’t like our women being hurt. He who does the hurting will find himself regretting it.”
“I’m not being hurt.”
He pursed his lips, but turned away just the same to make tea out of what she handed him.
He kept his back to her while it steeped, then poured it into a thermos.
“I won’t say anything,” he conceded, turning around and handing it to her, “but I will keep my eyes open. And he will pay if he hurts you.”
She escaped from the kitchen before she had to respond, then made for the stairs without looking at anything in the hall besides the stone under her feet. She would have run up the stairs, but she wasn’t up to that, so she contented herself with merely climbing them as quickly as possible.
And then she found she had more to concentrate on than her heart lying broken downstairs on Jamie’s floor. Young Ian, Jamie’s eldest son, was indeed very sick. She found him in Elizabeth’s master bathroom, sitting on the floor and looking very green.
“Poor lad,” Sunny said, sinking down next to him. “Is it bad?”