Ever My Love

by Lynn Kurland

  Jamie looked rather horrified. “I have never in my life drawn a blade against a woman.”

  “I’m terrifying,” Emma croaked.

  Patrick smiled. “That you are, lass.”

  Jamie tossed his knives to Ian, then held out his hand to her. “I don’t apologize often—”

  “Ever,” Patrick said dryly.

  Jamie glared at his brother, then took her hand. “You startled me.”

  “I’m angry,” she said. She shook his hand because she was certainly happy to move right past their recent encounter, then she wrapped her arms around herself not because she needed the comfort, but because she was freezing. “I know what you told him. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I got caught behind your sofa when you two were talking.”

  “I know.”

  She wasn’t at all surprised. “And yet you said nothing.”

  “Why?” Jamie asked with a shrug. “I knew you knew I knew—” He paused, frowned, then shrugged again. “I thought it best we keep it between ourselves lest we influence Nathaniel unduly. There are things going on in that forest that I’ve never seen before and I offered the best advice I could.”

  “I didn’t like your advice.”

  Ian let out a low whistle and leaned his shoulder against Patrick. “Well, she is something, isn’t she?”

  She didn’t feel like something; she felt cold and tired and not at all happy with the turn of events.

  “I imagine you didn’t, lass,” Jamie said. “Why don’t you take your ire out on my brother here, or my cousin. I’d like to see what you can do.”

  She blinked. “Why?”

  He blew out his breath. “How are you going to go get that poor fool if you can’t protect yourself?”

  She didn’t weep, but she began to have some trouble breathing. And when three medieval guys gathered around her and tried to offer her suggestions on how to regain her breath, she knew they were doing their best in spite of the way they were suffocating her. She didn’t have the heart to tell James MacLeod that patting her on the back with his hands the size of dinner plates wasn’t helping at all.

  Again, medieval chivalry was rather tough stuff.

  “Food first,” Jamie announced, “then you’ll work with Patty this morning whilst Ian and I decide on a plan. What can you do?”

  “Besides kill men with my bare hands?” she asked, dragging her sleeve—the sleeve of the coat Nathaniel MacLeod had given her—across her eyes. “Pick locks, hot-wire cars, and curse in six languages.”

  “That won’t help you against steel, lass,” Jamie said with a faint smile, “but we’ll solve that in time. Can you spin? Cook? Tend sheep?”

  “I draw and I can drive fast cars.” She paused. “I spent a summer working with a blacksmith at a medieval faire.”

  Jamie lifted an eyebrow. “In a true forge?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at Patrick. “Feed her, train her, then let’s send her off after him. I don’t like the feeling of the world this morning.”

  “That’s because you made your own breakfast,” Ian said with a snort. “How you manage to toddle from one end of the day to the other without aid, I just don’t know. I’ll go cook you something, Mistress Emma.”

  Emma thought that might be best. She walked with Ian away from the door.

  “Now, tell me a little about your friend,” he continued. “I understand he’s filthy rich and looks a bit like a Sasquatch. Or Nessie. Never can keep it straight.”

  “He looks like me,” Patrick said, falling in on her other side, “which makes him very braw indeed.”

  “The saints preserve the unfortunate lad if that’s what he faces in the mirror every morning,” Ian said. “What’s your pleasure, Emma? Do you mind if we call you Emma?”

  She shook her head. “I’m fine and I’m not really hungry—”

  “You will be once Pat has finished with you,” Ian said cheerfully, “and you’ll want to ask me all kinds of things about the Fergusson dungeon—”

  “Shut up, Ian,” Patrick said.

  But it was too late.

  She came to an ungainly halt and looked at them both, each one in turn. “What?”

  Patrick rolled his eyes. “Ian, is it possible for you to ever think before you open your mouth?”

  Ian sighed deeply. “Apparently not.” He looked at Emma. “He’s in the Fergussons’ dungeon.”

  “How can you possibly know that?” she asked in astonishment.

  Ian shifted. “I had a feeling.”

  Patrick sighed gustily. “You can blame that on your cooking, not Jamie having called us to come over for a parley.”

  “About Nathaniel?” Emma managed.

  Patrick nodded. “I rang Stephen de Piaget this morning and asked him to find out if Nat’s dagger was still in Edinburgh. He made a call, then rang me back to tell me aye.” He looked at her seriously. “If Nat wasn’t currently loitering in that dungeon, his dagger wouldn’t have been found there hundreds of years later by my loose-tongued cousin standing to your left and given by me to that collector of ancient weapons you met recently in the old city.”

  “That’s all you have to go on?” she asked. Her mouth was suddenly so dry, she could hardly get words out.

  “It’s enough,” Patrick said quietly.

  She stopped still and looked at him. “Is he dead?”

  Patrick lifted his eyebrows briefly. “Hard to say. Any opinions, Ian?”

  “Don’t remind me of that dungeon,” Ian said, “lest I say things no one will want to hear.” He patted her on the shoulder. “He’s canny, that lad of yours, or so I hear. Pat didn’t slice him to ribbons and Jamie left him still breathing. That bodes well. I’ll make some hearty porritch and we’ll decide on our options.”

  She watched him go, then looked at Patrick. She glanced behind her to find Jamie standing by his fire with his back to them.

  “Is he worried?” she asked.

  “Shaking off the terror of a woman almost strangling him, rather,” Patrick said with a smile. “Actually, I imagine he’s thinking. ’Tis a very great effort for him, so we’d best leave him to it.”

  She swallowed, hard. “Will Nathaniel die?”

  “Can you pick a medieval lock?”

  “That, I don’t know.”

  “We’d best find out then, hadn’t we?” He paused, then looked at her seriously. “Could you kill a man if it meant Nathaniel’s life in trade?”

  She shivered. “I don’t know that, either.”

  “We’ll start there.” He paused. “I don’t know what you’ll need to go through to get to him, but if you can free him, he can do what needs to be done. He’s more dangerous than he looks in those pricey suits he wears. But you’ll have to work fast. You’ve been in our dungeon here and know what it does to you.”

  “Is that Fergusson dungeon worse?”

  “Much.”

  She followed him into Jamie’s very modern kitchen, which should have seemed incongruous. Somehow, given everything she’d seen over the past few days, it wasn’t nearly as weird as it should have been.

  She ate, because she had to. She gave Patrick an unflinching list of her less savory skills, because he needed to know where her weaknesses were so he could remedy them. She apologized to Jamie and had a most abject and lairdly apology in return and a cementing of eternal friendship on her way out the door to see what Patrick could make of her before they burned through all their daylight.

  She didn’t like to think about the fact that Nathaniel probably couldn’t even see any daylight.

  She supposed she would eventually figure out exactly where he’d gone and just what he thought he was going to do once he got there.

  Change history? Let her walk past him?

  She could hardly bear the thought, so she put that thought beh
ind her and went to work.

  Chapter 28

  There were certain events in a man’s life that caused him serious reflection. Birth. Death. Threats from enemy clansmen.

  Rats nesting in his hair.

  Nathaniel considered his situation and wondered just how in the hell he’d managed to get himself where he was at present.

  He hadn’t meant to find himself in the Fergussons’ dungeon. He supposed, looking back on it now, that he was damned fortunate he was alive to enjoy his luxurious accommodations. If that was an improvement over taking a chance with death whilst roaming free through rugged forests and beautiful meadows, he wasn’t sure how.

  The truth was, given where he was, he just wasn’t sure how long his life would be. The decaying corpse sitting against the wall across from him might have had an opinion if he’d had the ability to spew out any details.

  Nathaniel leaned his head back against the wall, reminded himself that he’d been in his current locale for only a handful of days, then decided to distract himself by bringing to mind how he’d come to be where he was. With any luck, examining those details might lead him to a solution he might not see otherwise.

  He had, however many days ago it had been, refused to wait for time to call him and instead had forced the time gate to do his bidding. Jamie had advised him that such a thing was possible, if not perhaps a less-than-desirable thing to succeed at. Nathaniel had felt he hadn’t had a choice, so when the gate had opened, he’d plunged ahead, knowing that he had to do what was necessary regardless of his personal feelings on the matter.

  Leaving Emma sleeping on her couch had been the single hardest thing he’d ever had to do.

  He turned away from that thought and concentrated on retracing his steps. He had been accustomed to walking into battle; he hadn’t been accustomed to interrupting the laird of the clan Fergusson stirring himself to do a little scouting to see if his men were reporting things accurately.

  He’d been welcomed with open arms by a handful of men he had definitely been less than pleasant to in the past, then escorted with all due haste and diligence to their keep. He’d seen that keep before, of course, in both the past and the future, and he could say without hesitation that the place was disgusting no matter in which century it found itself.

  He would admit, grudgingly, that whilst the Fergussons never had much imagination on the battlefield, they made up for it in their dungeon. His dagger had been taken from him, of course, but now it sat five paces away, jammed artistically into the floor. Too far for him to reach but just far enough away to give him a clear view of it.

  No wonder Patrick MacLeod was going to find it hundreds of years in the future.

  Nathaniel didn’t want to entertain the thought that perhaps Patrick might be digging up his bones as well in that same distant future.

  He considered the condition of his potential final resting place and decided he just didn’t care for it. A pity he hadn’t wound up in the MacLeod dungeon. It was definitely a step up, as far as dungeons went, and he would certainly know. He’d spent a day or two in that place whilst Malcolm decided if it was possible to have sired such a handsome bastard as he himself was. Blessing his own mother for having instilled a love of Gaelic in him from birth, he had spent that time fine-tuning his accent and trying to accept where he’d found himself.

  He had also, at the time, been congratulating himself on having listened fairly well to those rumors that went round down the pub about those MacLeod men up the way.

  Time travel. What bollocks.

  Of course, it had been a bit dodgy here and there and he’d lied his bloody arse off at the time to convince his new MacLeod friends that he was neither a demon nor a witch of any stripe, but a man did what he had to do to survive.

  He wasn’t sure any of that was going to serve him at present.

  It didn’t seem exactly fair, he mused, that he should have been attempting to come to an understanding with Father Time about a certain dark-haired Yank only to have his good intentions land him in a pit. He supposed it could have been worse. He could have been a Fergusson clansman and doomed to live out his days with the lot upstairs.

  He continued to hold out hope that he might manage to get himself free. He had done his best to continue to exercise his muscles as much as his shackles would allow. He’d eaten what he’d been given, though he’d considered the very real possibility of plague infesting those meals. There hadn’t been anything to do about that, because he hadn’t had a plague vaccine, and it was a bit difficult to get to the local surgery for the same at the moment.

  He should have taken Emma and fled to Paris.

  He shifted against the wall and contemplated his life, mostly because he had nothing else to do. He tried to count the days he’d been sitting where he was and decided that perhaps he had misjudged them. It must have been at least a week. During that time, he had learned the voices of the guards upstairs, timed the changes of those guards, and learned more than he cared to about the plans the Fergussons had for the MacLeods to the south of their keep.

  That last bit was nothing he wasn’t familiar with, though, and he’d heard nothing new, so he’d basically dismissed it. Then again, they never came up with anything new. He was just surprised by how many lads they always seemed to have ready to sacrifice for whatever madness they contemplated. He wondered if they ever tired of it.

  He thought he just might be tiring of it, which was reason enough to put a stop to the whole madness of his visits to the past.

  He supposed if he’d had any sense before, he would have taken a few days and grilled Jamie about his experiences with popping into different centuries. The man certainly had more than his share of experience with the same. He’d been planning on it, actually, in the back of his mind as they’d been sitting in Jamie’s study, talking about things that shouldn’t have existed outside the realm of nightmare. Then Emma had asked him to stay and he’d spent the rest of the evening trying to keep his hands off her, because he knew he would have to let her go.

  Of all the things he’d experienced since his time-traveling madness had begun, short of losing his parents, the thought of losing her had been the worst.

  And so he’d made a decision. He had planned to simply wrench time to his own purposes. Jamie had obviously been back and forth to various centuries more than once and apparently each time managed to keep what he wanted.

  Why not him?

  Well, apparently because he was a stupid arse, but perhaps that could be debated later, after someone dug up his bones several centuries in the future and did a little DNA testing to make sure it was him.

  He would have dragged his hands through his hair, but his hands were shackled to the wall and he couldn’t bring them to his hair. Hence the new home for his rodentish friends.

  The problem, he decided in a leisurely fashion, given that all he had to hand was a leisurely amount of time in which to decide such things, was that he wanted it all. Especially if all included himself, Emma Baxter, and his Lamborghini, all in the same century.

  That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

  He hadn’t thought so, which had left him deciding at the last minute that he would march off not to his front door but to Emma’s gate into the past, present himself at its gaping maw, and demand that it take him where he wanted to go. And where he wanted to go was not to the point in time where he’d first seen Emma so he could do the sensible thing and avoid her.

  That, he supposed, had been the problem. He hadn’t wanted to go to the spot where he’d first seen Emma, he’d simply wanted to go back and somehow break the loop time seemed to be putting him through. He hadn’t even been all that clear about exactly what that place looked like or when it found itself, which had resulted in his current locale.

  That had obviously been badly done.

  And now he was definitely in a place where he was going
to be of no use to anyone. Not himself, not Emma. His grandfather would have him declared dead and confiscate all his assets. The thought of that crotchety old bastard driving either of his cars was almost more than he could think about without gritting his teeth.

  He listened to the hall begin to settle down for the night, but that somehow wasn’t as comforting as it should have been, because he heard booted feet coming his way. The grate was pulled back and two men jumped down into the hole with him. The torchlight almost blinded him, truth be told. When he could open his eyes again and squint at the two men facing him, he could hardly mask his surprise.

  Well, at least his surprise over the identity of one of his visitors. The man on his left was Simon Fergusson, currently the laird of the clan Fergusson, a man as ruthless as he was unpleasantly determined. And the man on Simon’s left?

  Gerald MacLeod.

  His cousin.

  He supposed he could have outed his cousin right then, but he supposed that such a declaration would only result in unpleasant things for himself. Either Gerald would deny it and tell Simon to put the prisoner to death before his madness infected the entire keep, or Simon would turn on Gerald and slay him, then decide that Nathaniel should be slain as well before his madness infected the entire keep.

  Either way, he would be facing death.

  He listened to Simon and Gerald discuss things as if they were standing in a pleasant garden, not a sewer. Gerald’s accent wasn’t terribly good, but his Gaelic was adequate and he freely admitted that he was a MacLeod turncoat. Nathaniel could see why that would send shivers of delight down Simon’s spine.

  “Then we don’t really need him, do we?” Simon was saying.

  “Don’t slay him yet,” Gerald said, with surprising deference. “I’ll wring things out of him first. Family things.”

  Simon frowned, then shrugged. “As you will. If you can bear being down here for as long as that takes.”

  “I live to aid you, my laird.”

  Nathaniel had to admit that if there was anything in this world or the next that Gerald MacLeod excelled at, it was sucking up. Nathaniel thought that deference bordered on sycophancy, but what did he know? He was the one, after all, sitting in the muck in chains while Gerald was free and now holding on to his dagger. Perhaps he should have taken a few cues from his cousin.