“How would I?” she asked with a puzzled look. “’Tis still in our future.”
“Of course,” he said. He considered, then looked at her. “I’ll go now.”
“But ‘tis full dark outside.”
“The gate won’t care.” He paused. “I might be gone for a bit, so don’t worry. I’ll try to get back earlier in the day—earlier today,if that isn’t impossible to believe—then rescue you after I’ve clunked my damned head on the threshold.”
She didn’t look any less worried. “Please be careful.”
“I will be.”
He suspected that if she’d been a different sort of woman and he’d been a different sort of man, she would have begged him not to go and he would have… well, he would have gone just the same. He very much suspected that if the roles had been reversed, Mairead would have been making one last visit to the loo to rebraid her hair before she’d bid him farewell and marched off to see to the business at hand.
He was fairly sure he might just love her.
“I’ll wait for you,” she said quietly.
“I’ll be quick.”
She only nodded, which he supposed said everything without saying anything. He would go and rescue her because the thought of living any of the days that remained in his life without her to hold as a living, breathing woman was simply intolerable.
She’d had four hundred years to get used to the idea.
He had no intention of doing the same thing.
Sixteen
Mairead sat in Moraig MacLeod’shouse and contemplated a pair of things.
The first was that she was, perhaps a bit selfishly, happy that time had caught up to events to the point where she’d actually been able to reveal herself completely to Oliver instead of just remaining discreetly outside his view.
The second was that she loved Oliver Phillips so desperately it hurt.
She would have sighed if she’d been able to, but since she couldn’t, she settled for yet another in an endless series of contemplations on the mysteries of life and death and all things in between.
She had decided, once she’d resigned herself to the fact that she was indeed no longer alive, that she would simply watch the events of the world unfold in front of her without interfering. She’d managed that for the most part, though she imagined Master James, wherever he was lingering in some slag-lined pit of Hell, was still enjoying the memories of how she and her sisters of the fire had made the remains of his mortal life equally hellish.
She took a mental breath and pushed that thought aside as not helpful.
What she could say was that she’d promised herself she would stay out of Oliver’s life and leave him to finding his own way. Or she had until she’d watched his parents drop him off at a school and leave him there without a backward glance.
She was, after all, very fond of children.
Outside of a few ghostly melodies sung in the quiet of the night, she supposed she’d held to her vow well enough. She’d left him to his years of yobbery and refrained from clucking her tongue at him even once. She’d absolutely left him to fending for himself in situations where she likely could have altered his path. That had been a bit more difficult than she’d anticipated, but she’d done so simply because she’d been certain that his choices then had made the man he was at present.
That braw, stubborn, magnificent man who was off in the wilds of Renaissance Scotland, trying to save her life.
Perhaps he would manage it. Several of the women he’d squired about might appreciate that, at least, given that they wouldn’t have found themselves troubled at any point in an outing by any sort of restless spirit. Of course she hadn’t frightenedallof them off. Not entirely. Not with anything more than a friendlybooor two to liven up any given evening.
She thought she might not want to admit to any of that.
A knock on the door startled her so badly that she jumped until she realized that it hadn’t been the knock of a mortal hand. She looked over her shoulder to find none other than Ambrose MacLeod, laird of her clan during those rather tumultuous and glorious 1600s, poking his head through the door.
She smiled. “Come in, nephew.”
He walked through the door and snorted, no doubt for her benefit. “Auntie, I continue to tell you that I’ve at least thirty mortal years more than you in my current state.”
“You could have chosen a more youthful appearance,” she reminded him.
