He suspected not.
And he was still wearing that damned tracking anklet that he hadn’t dared remove. He couldn’t credit Patrick with stooping so low as to use that in his morning’s sport, but it also chaffed abominably which might leave him fleeing at a less-than-optimal velocity. All in all, being hunted was not what he wanted to see on the schedule for the morning.
He rubbed his hands together in his best imitation of someone who’d looked over a deal and found it just not quite the thing. “So sorry, old bean,” he said, listening to the last two words come out of his mouth and wondering if he’d just lost the rest of his sleep-deprived mind, “but I haven’t a thing to wear.”
Patrick pursed his lips. “An extra twenty, then,” he conceded. “Go find something suitable.”
“You can’t be serious,” Oliver managed.
“Do I look like I’m not serious?”
He looked capable of all sorts of mayhem, but who was to say? Those damned medieval clansmen were just so bloody unpredictable. A bloke never knew if they were joking or if they genuinely intended to use their swords for more deadly business.
“And then you’ll give me to a hundred?” Oliver asked, just to make certain he understood the rules of what he sincerely hoped was a game.
“Unless I grow bored.” Patrick shrugged. “I don’t have much of an attention span, if you want the truth.”
There were several things Oliver wanted, but the truth about Patrick MacLeod’s attention span was not one of them. He didn’t bother wasting time shutting the door. He jumped back into the cottage, pulling off clothes and flinging on vintage gear at the same time—
“Sword, lad,” Patrick called.
Oliver hadn’t intended to engage in any lollygagging, actually, and a sword would only slow him down. There was wisdom in the oldWhen in Rometrope, but he was in Scotland and he would have a medieval clansman on his tail. Speed was of the essence.
Besides, he wasn’t planning on pitching through any time gates, which precluded the need for steel. Well, except the knives down his boots, but that was one of those slightly illegal things he’d been more than flirting with for years. He took a very brief moment to curse himself for not having worked out a utility belt to go under his kilt for use in precarious vintage situations, but in his defense he’d been designing one on the evening he’d been so callously wrapped up and delivered to Scotland.
He wished he’d had time for a decent breakfast instead of someone’s takeaway leftovers, but obviously that wasn’t on the schedule for the day, either.
He stepped out into the fresh air and left the closing of the door to his new friend. With any luck, Patrick would forget to lock it and someone would steal not only all his clothes but that damned book he was certain was only going to add to the unpleasantness he could sense coming his way—and tracking him from behind—for the rest of the morning.
“Oh,” Patrick said, frowning thoughtfully, “I’ve been going by tens. You’d best run away very quickly.”
Oliver tossed a sufficiently vile curse in the direction of his current tormentor, then bolted, still cursing Patrick for being far more awful than he’d anticipated. He wasn’t unaccustomed to outrunning all sorts of people—he’d been doing it since boarding school, as it happened—but skipping off into the wild in rustic boots and a skirt whilst not having done any prior reconnaissance of the area was a bit trying.
Also, the truth of the current situation was he just wasn’t entirely sure about that younger MacLeod brother. Patrick was delightful to his wife and spawn, but any man who’d been through one of his training courses tended to grow a bit pale and refuse to comment on the particulars when asked.
Holiday? Not, apparently, in the current lifetime.
He wasn’t incapable of turning himself into a ghost on the fly, however, so he ruthlessly slammed any further useless thoughts behind the usual door in his mind he reserved for that kind of thing, took stock of his surroundings whilst he was sprinting past them, and made a plan. Obviously being out in the open was going to be best avoided. Doubling back and hiding in Patrick’s kitchen where he might manage a decent breakfast was likely out of the question for the moment as well. Obviously he would need to simply make the best use possible of his usual methods of disappearing.
The morning wore on.
Unfortunately, Patrick didn’t wear out, which likely contributed to the eternal nature of the hours. Oliver finally stopped in the shadows of the forest slightly to the north of Moraig’s to catch his breath and decided that the best he could do was hope that Patrick’s middle-aged—plus a few hundred years—knees would give out. His own knees that were sliding toward thirty-two trips around the sun would obviously have the advantage.
He heard a twig snap behind him, shot Patrick a smile over his shoulder, then bolted.
He didn’t feel any blades going into his back, didn’t find himself tackled to the ground and smothered, and he most certainly didn’t hear the plaintive calls of a medieval Scotsman begging him in lilting tones to slow down so he could be vanquished.
He did, however, run directly through a time gate.
The fact that he could feel himself blundering through the centuries was appalling enough. That he continued to run until he’d run into a situation he wasn’t sure was going to go all that well was just…
Well, he wondered how he might manage to count it as self-care because it was for damned certain no one else would be coming to rescue him.
Then again, the woman standing there surrounded by a clutch of Highlanders he didn’t recognize, trying to pull herself away from one of them, perhaps didn’t have anyone to rescueher, and that he couldn’t allow.
He took a quick reading of his position, wondering how any time traveling might affect his precise longitudinal location, made himself a mental note to make an addition to Jamie’s master map, then continued on into a situation he definitely hadn’t asked for but perhaps might be able to put to rights. At least he was wearing sleeves that covered his watch and a plaid in colors Jamie had claimed were authentic covering the rest of him. He could have been in jeans and a Led Zeppelin sweatshirt.
On the less-helpful side of things, he wasn’t their kin and he was also minus his sword, which might be the last time he would leave home without it.
