Chapter 20
It was well before dawn when Cameron walked to his stables. He’d dreamt of battle and bloodshed and all sorts of activities where a sword was useful, activities that certainly did not find themselves in the current century, activities that had led to a terrible night’s sleep.
He wasn’t sure if he should blame Sunshine Phillips for it, or thank her.
He’d come home after the day spent in Ian MacLeod’s lists and looked in his locked closet for the first time in eight years.
It had been a little startling, truth be told, to see nothing but a Claymore, three dirks, a saffron shirt, and a handwoven plaid—all that he had to show for his twenty-eight years of living in fourteenth-century Scotland.
He wondered what those MacLeods had locked up in their closets.
He couldn’t imagine their wives didn’t know exactly who and what their husbands were.
There was the problem of wondering how Jamie, Patrick, and Ian had come to the future, but he was certain there was an answer to that as well.
Perhaps knowing it would help him determine how he’d done it—since he couldn’t remember a bloody thing about it himself.
But he could remember with perfect clarity the last thing Sunshine had said to him.
I don’t want to be the other woman.
He dragged his hand through his hair and cursed.
He didn’t want her to be that, either, but he wasn’t precisely sure what he was going to do about it.
He was trapped by his situation in London every bit as fully as he’d ever been trapped by his duty in medieval Scotland.
He cursed quite heartily, but it didn’t ease him any.
Why couldn’t he have met her sooner? It wouldn’t have needed to have been that much sooner, perhaps. A pair of months.
Though the thought of her having been drawn into any of the madness that surrounded Nathan and Penelope Ainsworth sent cold chills down his spine.
He pushed aside that thought. He was in Scotland, he was safe for the day, and he could perhaps take another few hours and do what his heart begged him to.
He opened the stable door, quickly saddled two horses, then walked them out into a fine, spring mist. He swung up onto his mount, then cantered south without hesitation.
He would spend the day with Sunshine Phillips and see what was left of them both at the end of it.
There was already light streaming out from her kitchen window when he got there. He dismounted and left his beasts behind her house, then walked quietly to the front door. He prepared himself for the unpleasant sensation that would assault him when he crossed Sunny’s threshold.
He wasn’t prepared, however, for what happened to him when she answered his knock.
A déjà vu slammed into him so hard, he felt as if he’d been run over by a horse. He clutched at the door frame to keep himself from falling to his knees.
He had come to this house, knocked, and seen a woman open to him. A woman with long, curling hair, a black blouse, and a swirling black skirt.
“Cameron? Cameron, are you all right?”
He had to take a step back. He wanted to speak, but he simply couldn’t. He put his hand over his eyes and thought he just might be ill. Again, damn it anyway.
Sunny pushed him back several more steps. “Lean over,” she said firmly. “Breathe.”
He bent over with his hands on his thighs and did as she suggested.
He stood there, hunched over, and struggled to keep his porritch down where it belonged.
He felt her hands, one on his shoulder, the other smoothing over his hair as if she tried to comfort him.
What the door had left of him, she finished off with that touch alone.
By the saints, had he actually managed to fetch the MacLeod witch as he’d set out to do almost seven hundred years ago?
Just thinking on it gave him a splitting headache, so he stopped and merely concentrated on breathing. He straightened, when he thought he could manage it with any success, and found Sunny looking at him with surprise.
“What are you doing here?” she asked faintly.
“I came to see if you would come riding with me,” he said hoarsely, struggling to make it sound like a casual invitation. Actually, he was struggling to make it sound like anything but a pathetic plea.
She looked at him for a moment, then turned away. “I can’t.” He caught her hand. “Sunshine, please.” He had to take another handful of deep breaths before he thought he could speak with any steadiness. “A platonic ride to Cameron Hall, then breakfast. Nothing more.”
She bowed her head for a moment or two, then turned slowly and looked up at him. “Are you having breakfast for three?”
“Nay,” he said quietly, “just you and me.”
She pulled her hand from his and backed away. “It’s a really bad idea—”
“Can you be bribed?” he said before he thought better of it.
She looked up at him in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ll give you what you want if you’ll give me what I want—and what I want is for you to ride home with me.” He paused. “You could make your price steep.”
She looked terribly indecisive. She looked at him for another moment or two in silence, then shrugged, though she didn’t look particularly casual. “I suppose you could answer a few personal questions.”
“Not that steep,” he said, and he smiled, though he supposed it had been a rather sick smile indeed.
He didn’t care for personal questions. He had more than his share of secrets and he never put himself in a position where those secrets needed to be divulged.
It was proof enough of how desperate he was for her company that he was even considering it.
“Go inside and fetch your coat, woman, and come home with me,” he said, before she could change her mind.
“All right,” she said slowly, though she didn’t sound overly enthusiastic about it. She looked at him once more, then turned and went into her house.
He was tempted to wait by her doorway, to make certain she didn’t run to Patrick’s, but decided for the sake of his poor head that it was safest if he just went to wait with the horses.
He put his hand on his gelding’s neck and bowed his head, trying to take enough deep breaths to soothe the pain that still screamed through his head.
“Cameron?” Sunny called a moment or two later.
He closed his eyes. Penelope never called him that unless she attached a Lord to the front and unless she was talking to him in front of someone else. She called him Mac, which he’d had various people call him over the years and never loathed until she’d taken it up.
“Cameron?”
“I’m here,” he managed.
Sunny came around the corner with a jacket in her hands and stopped next to the horse he’d brought for her. She hesitated. “Won’t your staff wonder why you’re having breakfast with someone who isn’t your fiancée?”
“They’ll all be thrilled to see a proper Scot at the breakfast table.”
“I’m not a Scot.”
He frowned. “I thought you were a MacKenzie.”
Her mouth fell open. “What?”
He rubbed his fingers between his eyes, then managed to focus on her. “What, what?”
She looked at him as if she’d just seen a ghost. “How on earth did you know that?”
He opened his mouth to tell her she’d told him, then realized he couldn’t remember when she had. He started to speak several times, then finally shrugged. “I have no idea. Are you?”
“I’m a MacKenzie through my mother,” she said, her voice nothing more than a whisper.
“A good guess,” he said. He decided that no good would come of delving too deeply into it, so he would leave it at that.
There were, as he could personally attest, strange things that happened on MacLeod soil.
The sooner they were back at his hall, the better off they both would be.
He boosted Sunny up into her saddle, then swung up onto his own horse’s back.
He urged his horse forward, then looked over his shoulder.
“Will Patrick and Madelyn wonder where you’ve gone? ”
“I left a note in the bathroom. It’s standard procedure.”
He nodded, then headed north out of the woods. Once they reached the meadow, he simply watched Sunny watch the countryside gravely, as if she found something about it that touched her too deeply for banter.
He understood. He felt that way when he looked at her.
Two hours later, he was dismounting in his own stables.
He walked around to help her down, but he wasn’t fast enough.
He took her reins from her and handed the horses off to a new stable lad.
The man looked at Sunny with a frown of disapproval on his face.
Cameron stepped between them, cursing silently.
He needed to spend more time in Scotland and see who was being hired to tend his horseflesh.
He put his hand on the small of Sunny’s back.
“Allons-y,” he murmured in French.
She shot him a look that said very clearly that she thought he was an idiot, then she jerked open the door and walked out of the stables without waiting for him.
He followed immediately, pulling the door shut behind him. “Sunshine—”
“I need your phone. Patrick will come get me.”
He followed her, then caught her before she could push her way inside. He pulled the door shut, then put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to him.
Her look of irritation melted into something entirely different.
She looked for the first time since he’d seen her in front of Patrick’s hall that evening when he’d almost run over her as if she would shatter if he wasn’t careful with her.
He took off his jacket, wrapped it around her, then pulled her wet hair out from under it.
He leaned his shoulder against the door under the porch some enterprising soul had put up in the nineteenth century and put his arms around her.
“Sunny, please stay,” he whispered. “Please.”