by Lynn Kurland
If he returned.
He stopped still as he was preparing to swing himself up onto his cousin’s horse. Not return? Where had that daft idea come from?
Connor, your path will lead you where no other MacDougal has ever set foot . . .
His grandmother’s parting words came back to him forcefully, though not unexpectedly. He tended to think on them before each setting out, especially if he was off on a long journey. He’d always assumed that she meant he would be the first to rout out that pesky group of Gordons to the west, but now he began to think differently.
Had she suspected he might travel to the Future?
Could he travel to the Future?
“Connor, are you unwell?”
Connor looked at Cormac and felt as if he’d never seen him before. Or perhaps it wasn’t that; it was that he might never see him again.
“ ’Tis Victoria McKinnon,” Connor managed. “Her daft words have affected me adversely.”
“Have a good long ride,” Cormac advised. “Perhaps some cattle-raiding on your way home.” He rubbed his arms for emphasis. “A hard winter’s coming.”
Connor almost smiled. It wasn’t his habit to smile, but his cousin almost inspired it in him now and again. He swung up into the saddle feeling quite a bit more himself.
“Until we meet again,” he said, then wondered where those words had come from. His usual sentiment at parting was a grunt and a nod.
Cormac looked equally shocked. He nodded, wide-eyed.
Connor rode off before he did anything else unsettling, such as burst into tears.
His first destination was the last croft he knew had sheltered the fugitives. The Frenchman had threatened the poor couple with death if they made known anything about their unwelcome guests, but Connor’s former minstrel obviously had no concept of clan loyalty. Connor had received the message not an hour after his wife and her lover had taken his bairns farther away.
He should have ridden off after them then, but he had foolishly assumed Morag would see the error she had made and return with all haste. That, and the fact that Campbells had attacked that eve from the west, had taken too much of his time.
He would have to live with that misjudgment for the rest of his life.
He sighed deeply. He would find his children and bury them. And then perhaps he would seek out that ring in the grass and see where it took him. Perhaps it would take him off to Titania’s lair, where she would force him to be her lover for centuries. He supposed a body might be subjected to worse fates.
Aye, he would try that haunted bit of ground and see what happened to him. If he was carried off to the Fairy realm, he would survive it. If he was carried off to the Future, he would find Victoria McKinnon, offer his thanks, and return home as quickly as he could.
And if none of it worked as promised, he would take a day or two and go fishing.
At least he would have a full belly when he went home.
Chapter 29
Victoria stood on the stage and wondered if she would ever be able to look at any part of Thomas’s castle again without weeping. She folded her arms over herself and looked heavenward. She wept anyway, no matter how she tried to thwart gravity and her own broken heart.
Time-traveling did that to a person.
She was really going to have to give it up someday.
She walked the boards, from one end of the stage to the other. There was no scenery left. That had long since been put into storage for use in some other production. Lights and sound had also been put into storage for use in some other production.
She wondered if she would ever be able to stage another production.
She stopped in the middle of the stage and frowned as she looked around her. Not only was all the stage paraphernalia gone, the ghosts were gone, as well. She’d been back almost a week and nary a sight of a single one. She suspected the Boar’s Head Trio had decamped for France, leaving her time to deal with her grief on her own.
She hoped they were planning on staying a good, long time.
Connor was probably giving ghostly thought to what a jerk he’d been during her visit to the past and was wisely giving her time to cool off before he showed his face again.
She couldn’t blame him.
Though she would be the first to admit that she hadn’t been angry at that point. She hadn’t even cried—not at first. She’d stumbled out of the fairy ring one afternoon a week ago and somehow managed to make her way back to the inn. Thomas had been standing at the end of the driveway, as if he expected to see her. He’d made her eat, then put her to bed without asking any questions.
She’d needed to tell Iolanthe that her husband wasn’t such a bad nursemaid after all.
Fortunately for her, the rest of her family had left for London before she’d even attempted her trip to the past, so she’d had no questions to answer upon her return. Thomas, she supposed, had just assumed that since she hadn’t returned with Connor, she hadn’t been successful.
“I warned him,” she said at supper, five days later.
Thomas had looked at her for several moments in silence, then picked up his fork and dug into Mrs. Pruitt’s meat pie. “You couldn’t do more than that.”
She hadn’t talked to either Thomas or Iolanthe much since then. They had departed the day before for another visit to Artane. Perhaps they had grown tired of her silence.
She hadn’t minded. She’d spent most of her days up at the castle, sitting on the stage, wondering what she would now do with the rest of her life. Wondering if she would ever see Connor again.
Wondering if she wanted to.
She sighed. She supposed Thomas had called Jamie to let him know that things hadn’t gone as planned. Would Jamie mind if she came up and camped with them for a few days? She felt a longing well up in her to stay again at Ian’s, enclosed in that family circle, listening to Ian and Jane’s children wreak havoc and fight over Legos.
Maybe she would go. After all, what else did she have to do? Remain at Thorpewold and just soldier on? Fly back to Manhattan and try to pick up the pieces of her shattered life? Find a new venue for her company? Spend more time flattering big bucks, soliciting sponsors, begging for funds?
After she’d seen Connor MacDougal in the flesh?
After she’d tasted the heady intoxication of becoming Shakespeare’s words on stage?
She couldn’t. She couldn’t go back. She could only go forward, only she had no idea where forward would lead. But she suspected it wouldn’t lead to another stint as director of her own troupe.
She began to walk around in a circle, slowly, with her eyes open and watching the floorboards. She walked faster, then faster still, until she was running.
And then she closed her eyes.
She didn’t care if she fell. Maybe she would fall forever and find herself back in medieval Scotland, where she could have all the time in the world to persuade a certain laird that she was desperately in love with him and if he could just remember the future, he would find he felt the same.
She suddenly felt nothing under her feet, just as she had twelve years earlier when the circle of actors had broken and she’d had no one to keep her from falling into the orchestra pit.
“By the saints, woman!”
She opened her eyes the split second before she landed.
In Connor MacDougal’s arms.
In his arms.
She must have been cruising at quite a clip. He stumbled backward and landed quite firmly on his backside, still clutching her to him.
She could only stare at him, amazed beyond all reason, unable to form a coherent thought.
She supposed, absently, that she should have been happy he hadn’t broken her back with how tightly he was holding onto her.
“Are you daft?” he exclaimed.
“Ah . . .”
He pushed her away from him and crawled to his feet, where he could, apparently, more easily glare down at her.
“Where am I?” he demand
ed.
It might have been the strain of her rigorous training at Jamie’s. It might have been that brush with death on her way to castle MacDougal in the thirteenth century. It could have been the fright she’d had when encountering Connor MacDougal on his home turf, very much alive and very much irritated by her interruption. It could have been all the sleepless nights, all the headache-inducing dreams in Gaelic, all the horrible imaginings of things to go wrong. Or it could have been that she hadn’t had any breakfast and was now succumbing to a hypoglycemic episode.
Whatever the case, she did the most sensible thing she’d done in weeks.
She fainted.
And she realized, as the numbness started at the top of her head and worked its way down, that things had most definitely changed. Normally, she would have fought the feeling, fought the loss of control, fought the descent into uncertainty.
Not now.
“Bring it on, baby,” she murmured happily as she plunged into oblivion.
She woke. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been out. She did know, however, that Connor was leaning over her with his hand raised, as if he contemplated briskly bringing her back to her senses. That he was staring at his hand as if using it for such harsh purposes was a bad thing was a promising sign.
He looked at her and a look of relief crossed his beautiful face.
His beautiful, mortal face.
Victoria closed her eyes and tried not to weep.
“Ach, nay,” he exclaimed, “do not faint again, ye weak-stomached wench!”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. “I won’t faint,” she said faintly.
“See that you do not,” he grumbled. “I’ve enough to see to without fretting over you.”
“Of course,” she said, closing her eyes to better memorize how it felt to have his hands holding onto her arm.
“Victoria McKinnon!”
She opened her eyes immediately. “What?”
“You were going to faint yet again!”
“I wasn’t. I was . . . well, never mind what I was doing.” She sat up gingerly. “I’m fine.”
He grunted and sat back on his heels. Victoria clenched her hands in her lap. Otherwise, she might have been tempted to reach out and touch his dirty kilt, his smudged face, his glorious hair . . .
“Where am I?” he demanded. “I’ve little liking for this place. I had planned on Faery, or perhaps even the Future, but this looks far too much like the Lowlands for my taste.” He looked around for a moment or two, then scowled again. “I’ll be going now.”
She gaped at him. “Going?”
“Aye,” he said shortly, rising and walking away. “I’ve lost my cousin Cormac’s horse. I must go find it.”
Victoria scrambled to her feet and stumbled after him, trying to see him through the sheets of stars flashing before her eyes. “Wait,” she managed.
He turned and looked at her. “Aye?”
It was all she could do not to tackle him and keep him where he was.
Safely in the Future.
She had to close her eyes again, briefly, and get her bearings.
“Do not faint!”
She opened her eyes quickly. “I wasn’t going to. Um, how would you . . . yes, how would you like some food? Before you go,” she added.
He pursed his lips. “Your Gaelic is awful.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“Hmmm,” he said, frowning. “At my hall. It was awful then.” He paused. “It hasn’t improved here. You’ve a Sassenach tinge to it.”
“I was late in learning it.”
“You’re a McKinnon. You should have been speaking it from birth.”
“I know. Sometimes things don’t go as you plan.”
He grunted. “Indeed, that is truth.” He looked at her. “Your parents taught you ill, then.”
No, you can blame James MacLeod, she thought sourly. Well, she probably couldn’t in good conscience blame Jamie. He had done his best. She had done her best. That she could understand half of what Connor was saying and manage to make herself partway understood after little more than a couple of months spent at the task was nothing short of a miracle.
He looked around him. “Where am I? Where is here?” he asked. “Heaven?”
“Not even close.”
“Faery?”
“Not there, either.”
“Damnation.”
She smiled, trying to make it an unassuming and friendly smile. “I’m thinking you must be hungry.”
He looked at her for a moment, then nodded. “Aye, I am. Is your hall nearby, or is this crumbling wreck all you have?”
“This is my brother’s hall,” she said. “There is an inn down the road.”
“To the inn, then,” he instructed. “But make haste. I want to be home before the sun sets. This is not at all what I had expected when I stepped into the fairy ring near my home.”
“I’ll just bet,” she muttered under her breath.
Connor set off. It was all she could do not to take his hand. It was even harder not to cry. Ambrose had warned her. Thomas had warned her. Hell, even Iolanthe had warned her.
He won’t remember you, they had said as she went through MacLeod boot camp. He won’t remember you at first. Give him time. Don’t pressure him.
“Don’t bean him over the head with a rock to bring sense back,” she grumbled.
“Eh?” Connor said, frowning down at her.
“Nothing,” she said, smiling in her most undemanding manner. She pointed down the path toward the road. “Food is that way.”
He grunted and walked with her.
And he hummed depressing battle dirges as he went.
She almost wept.
They reached the inn soon enough, mostly because Connor was using his long legs to their best advantage. Victoria gasped for breath as he came to a sudden halt. Good grief, she’d been through Jamie and Ian’s training course, managed to survive medieval Scotland and get home again, yet a little run from the castle was leaving her in this kind of shape?
She supposed it might have something to do with a mild case of shock.
She took a sideways glance at Connor. He was staring at the inn with his mouth hanging open and his eyes huge in his face. He turned to her, astonished.
“This is a familiar place.”
“Is it?”
His eyes narrowed. “Did you bring me here?”
“To the inn or to the Future?” she asked.
“The Future. Nay, this inn.” He frowned. “Both.”
“No, I didn’t. You came yourself, remember?”
Blessed, wonderful, baffled man.
He gestured imperiously. “I’ve dreamed this.”
“Do you dream often?”
He corrected her Gaelic automatically, then gestured to the path. “Aye, I do, but we won’t speak of that.” He drew his sword with a soft hiss. “You go first. I will follow.”
“Do not stab me,” she instructed firmly. That, at least, was one phrase she had practiced to perfection.
His frown lightened just the slightest bit. “I will not. I might need you to ransom to the fairies to let me go home.”
“We’re not in Faery.”
“So you say, but I have my doubts.” He looked at her. “Aye, I think I am beginning to rethink this all. Consider your beauty. You claim to be a McKinnon, but no McKinnon I’ve ever met could possibly have produced a wench as fetching as you. Ergo, you must be a fairy.”
“Um, sure,” she said, and for the first time, she wondered if this had been such a good idea.
Never mind that he’d just called her fetching enough to be a fairy.
And then he put his hand on her back and gave her just the slightest of nudges forward.
It almost brought her to her knees.
She took a deep breath and went ahead of him. She walked to the door and opened it. Then she looked over her shoulder.
“Are you coming?”
He hung back. “I
do not care to admit weakness, but this place gives me pause.”
“It’s haunted,” she said easily, “but the ghosts are away. It’s just the innkeeper inside and she’s a very good cook.”
He looked at her assessingly. “You look as if you possess all your wits, yet you spout madness.”
She wasn’t going to touch that one with a ten-foot pole. At least not yet. “You should eat. You’ll feel better after you do.”
“Will it be poisoned?”
“I’ll taste everything for you first.”
“Sporting of you.”
“I do what I can for the cause.”
He lifted one eyebrow and almost smiled.
She almost wept.
But before she made a bigger fool of herself than she had already, she walked through the door. She could feel him following her. Mrs. Pruitt came out of the dining room, wiping her hands on her apron. She smiled.
“Mistress Victoria,” she said. “Laird MacDougal.”
“Does she ken me?” he exclaimed. “How comes this wonder?”
Mrs. Pruitt frowned. “I’m well acquainted with all the inhabitants hereabouts, be they corporeal or not—”
“Mrs. Pruitt,” Victoria interrupted politely, “is there anything to eat? We’re a little on the hungry side.”
Mrs. Pruitt frowned, then shrugged. “Of course, lass. Come on, and I’ll make ye something.”
Victoria nodded for Connor to follow her. He hesitated. She turned to see what had stopped him. He was staring, frozen in place, at the library door. He looked at it for a brief eternity, then drew his hand over his eyes and shook his head.
“Now I’m going daft,” he muttered.
Victoria pretended not to notice. She led him though the dining room and pulled out a chair for him in the kitchen. She sat next to him and had to clasp her hands together on the table to keep them from reaching for him.
Mrs. Pruitt whipped up eggs, fried tomatoes and potatoes, sausage, and the obligatory cold toast. It smelled heavenly. Connor’s stomach growled.