“You can relearn it.” He sat back on his heels. “And if you forget all the things you’ve learned about me over the course of my life, then after I’ve safely rescued you, you decide that you fancy someone else, I’ll survive that too.”
“Will you?” she asked in surprise.
He scowled at her. “Of course not,” he grumbled. “I’ll slink off to a corner and howl off-key pub ditties until you beg me to stop, then I’ll begin again with asking you on a first date.”
“Well,” she said slowly, “I do know you from my mortal past and I’m fairly certain you almost kissed me on our rocky perch on Cameron soil.”
“I was afraid you’d clout me in the nose if I tried.”
She smiled. “You weren’t.”
“It’s all about timing, love,” he said pleasantly, then his smile faded a bit. “I’d like to kiss you for the first time on the edge of the sea, if you want the truth. To make it memorable.”
“You’d best not admit that to your mates,” she said, feeling a little breathless. “They’ll never stop teasing you for being such a romantic.”
“I’ll bear it,” he said, “especially if you won’t bloody my nose for attempting it.”
She shook her head, but found herself suddenly unequal to any more words. He was in earnest, she knew, and she wasn’t sure she could stop him even if she wanted to. Accepting that she wanted him to try one last time was more terrible than she’d suspected it might be.
He shot her a look full of what she suspected might have been a suggestion that she not think so much, then he smiled and pushed himself to his feet. He fed the fire again, then sat down on the soft chair that lay at an angle to hers.
“Time is an odd thing,” he said.
“How so, my love?”
He smiled briefly at her, then he shrugged. “I was thinking about Jamie and his endless lectures on the perils of changing the past. I didn’t listen and look where it’s left us.”
“I don’t regret the time I had to watch over you.”
“I don’t either, actually,” he said, looking at her seriously, “though those memories are rather newly arrived.”
“’Tis odd, that,” she mused. “That your memories now hold me, but before you came to Scotland surely you didn’t know who I was.”
“Yet I knew you somehow. The first night I was at Jamie’s, I almost tripped over you at the top of his stairs.”
She looked at him in shock. “’Twas the same for me. And I saw you in the forest.”
“And I you,” he agreed. “Who’s to say we wouldn’t have echoes of these memories just the same? Then again, you might not want to give up memories of the past four hundred years.”
“I’ve written them down.”
“You have?” He sat forward and looked at her in surprise. “How?”
“Icanwrite,” she said archly. She smoothed her hair back from her face. “Do you think Mistress Constance Buchanan is the only woman with volumes to her name?”
He laughed a little. “Did you writeromances?”
“Historical fiction,” she corrected. “And they were to be, if I may say so, very light on the historical part.”
“Where is your book?” he asked, sounding a little breathless. “Or do you have more than one?”
“I haven’t gotten to them yet,” she admitted, “though I have plans for several. I had even chosen a lad to write them down for me.”
He sat back and looked at her with bright eyes. “I have to know the details. Tell me who, where, and what he did the first time you arrived in his study for a wee get-to-know-you chat.”
She pursed her lips at him. “He was a Victorian Englishman who’d come to Scotland to document its glories for a yet-to-be-secured audience in London. He had come to stay with the McKinnons, which I suppose was his right given that he hailed from that line. And the first time I approached him in William McKinnon’s study as he was sipping on whisky he’d brought with him, he leapt to his feet and dropped his finely cut glass against the stone of the floor.” She paused. “I did feel terrible about that.”
Oliver was resting his chin on his fist and watching her with an affectionate smile. “I can only imagine. And then?”
