“You’re perfect.”
He blew out his breath and laughed uncomfortably. “That would be you, but so we don’t spend our evening arguing over the truth of that, let me dive in here and see what delights await us.”
She nodded and pretended that she was actually able to make herself comfortable in what she knew from past experience was a terribly comfortable chair. She would pass the evening listening to Oliver read, then see if she couldn’t convince him to make himself a pallet on the floor and at least rest for a few hours. They could pretend that they had actually made it through Moraig’s doorway together and they were merely taking a brief moment of quiet to rest from their journey.
The morrow would bring what it would.
She only hoped they would be able to bear those happenings when they arrived.
Seventeen
Oliver leaned on the sinkin the croft’s thoroughly spa-like loo and stared at himself in the mirror. Did it show on a man’s face when he’d found and then lost through his own stupidity the one person he thought he might actually love?
He didn’t like self-reflection. There were too many potholes in his past for that sort of thing to be comfortable and it was for damned sure his current straits were nothing to examine with pleasure. He suspected that if he’d been forced to meditate by some lad foolish enough to insist on the same, he would have cheerfully dealt out a great deal of gross bodily harm.
It was very tempting to wonder how much of that he could commit four hundred years in the past and not have it haunt him—
He blew his hair out of his eyes and set to the rest of his morning ablutions with an unthinkingness that somehow didn’t surprise him. His eyes were full of what he’d witnessed the night before in a different century and his head equally stuffed with his own shouts of self-condemnation. It was more of an effort than he cared for to take all those very legitimate things and mentally shove them off-stage. What served him best at present was a clear-eyed, brutal assessment of what had gone wrong the evening before, not recriminations.
He’d arrived at the right time, something of a miracle in and of itself, and managed to avoid being seen by either Mairead or his own oblivious self. He’d positioned himself advantageously for a rescue, watched his original incarnation clunk his stupid head against Moraig’s threshold, then watched a knife come downtoward Mairead’s back. It had been instinctive to take one of the stones he’d picked up on his way to the croft and fling it as hard as he could at the perpetrator.
It hadn’t made much difference in the end, though Mairead had suffered a serious blow to her head instead of a hole in her back before she’d been carried off. He’d known instantly that there were too many men there for a quick grab and go, especially since he hadn’t brought a sword.
He’d spared a moment of loathing for the practical side of himself that had led him to the profoundly unpleasant conclusion that it wasn’t going to work. He’d slunk back the way he’d come, caught the sudden flash of a blade out of the corner of his eye, and managed a very graceful swan dive into the gate. Rolling through the centuries had been an experience he could have easily foregone, but it was over and done with.
He wondered, though, who that lad with the sword had been and how he’d known to look for someone hiking toward Cameron lands and not down to the MacLeod keep.
He pulled a t-shirt down over his head, followed by a black sweatshirt that thankfully didn’t proclaim his affection for anything but remaining discreetly unnoticed, then paused to allow a very small, subversive thought to take root in his breast. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have those kinds of thoughts on a regular basis, but he was trying his best to be a respectable businessman in his professional life and a good guest on someone else’s soil in Scotland.
But his thought at the moment was that perhaps he’d been just too polite. He’d been playing by everyone else’s rules, keeping to the programme, not cheating on the maths. The truth was, he was quite a bit better at life when he was going at it as a slightly sketchy ghost.
He dragged his hands through his damp hair, looked at himself one final time in the mirror to make certain he was covered inall the right places, then faced the door and prepared to go out and pretend that everything was normal and the woman he was enormously fond of was simply skipping around in a hands-off sort of orbit for the moment. A bit of Regency cosplay, which would have suited her duke and his kitchen maid perfectly.
Only when he left the loo, he found that Mairead was wearing a Highland lass’s dress with her long, glorious hair tumbling over her shoulders, looking so peaceful and good and lovely that he lost his breath. It was honestly all he could do not to stride over to her, pull her to her feet, and steal a kiss.
Perhaps more than one, if her saucy dagger remained safely stowed in the back of her belt.
But because he couldn’t, he walked over to her and dropped to his knees again, right there on that uneven flagstone.
“I’m going to try again,” he said without hesitation.
“Oliver—”
“Mairead—”
“You might call me Mair if you like,” she said, looking remarkably shy for a ghost. “I would like it from you, I daresay.”
“Mair, then,” he said, realizing that his hands were balled into fists where they rested, one on the arm of her chair and the other on his thigh. Perhaps it was good she was a ghost at the moment. Perhaps by the time he managed to get her to the future as a corporeal woman, he would have gotten his rampaging emotions under control and might manage to kiss her hand a time or two before he blurted out that he was fairly certain he couldn’t live without her and would she mind sharing not only his Bugatti but his bed for the rest of his life?
Put simply.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“Do you?” he asked, alarmed.
“Well,” she conceded, “perhaps not precisely. There is a bit of an art to it, after all. And just so you know, I’ve tried to leave you your privacy over the years.”
“Thank you,” he said weakly.
