Mal stared at him. ‘I thought your degree was Pictish history? Suddenly you’re surprising us with a knowledge of the eighteenth century? I feel betrayed.’
David shrugged. ‘I read. I get a lot of time on my own.’
There was that silence I’d noticed before when David spoke about his life. Clearly nobody knew what to say, as though the existence of his sister was an embarrassment.
I tried to break that mood. ‘It’s good that one of us has a vague idea though.’
‘Yeah,’ Kaylinn chimed in. She’d obviously picked up the awkwardness in that silence too and her voice was so full of injected cheerfulness that I almost expected canned applause. ‘I gotta read more. We’re all working so hard we forget that history exists outside what we’re studying.’
That made it sound as though David wasn’t working hard and had spare time to casually catch up on everything Scottish history had to offer, but I couldn’t think of any more spin to put on the situation.
David went on. ‘But you’re right. Not really my period, I’m more down at the “everyone fighting everyone else” end.’
‘Or “Saturday night in Glasgow”, as we call it.’ Mal put in, with evident relief at the return to normality.
‘Shut up, Mal,’ Lachlan finally joined in. ‘And stop maligning my countrymen. Pax, you said a rider came?’
I explained what I’d seen and how everyone seemed to be taking the news seriously. ‘It’s not the king, is it?’ I asked.
Lachlan frowned. ‘Not if we’re right and it’s George the First. If I remember Dan Snow on the subject, he could barely speak English.’
‘He’d be right at home here, then,’ Mal said darkly.
‘He didn’t come to Scotland, as far as I know.’
‘So, who are we expecting?’ I asked, forgetting that I was supposed to be being cool to Lachlan.
‘We can always go and find out.’ To my astonishment he grabbed my hand. ‘Come on. You lot stay here and tidy up. If we’ve got a visitor then it’s likely they’ll be up and down into the cellar again, so we need everything out of sight.’
He tugged me on up the wooden steps, which were still as rattly and temporary-feeling as they had been when I arrived. As we got onto the staircase and the door closed between us and the others, he stopped. ‘You’re avoiding me, aren’t you?’
‘Not right at this minute, no.’ He’d still got my hand.
Now he turned to face me. He was on the stair above, so looked down on me. ‘You know what I mean.’
I couldn’t see anything to be gained by lying, so I nodded. ‘A bit,’ I confessed. ‘I was worried that we… you and I were… I don’t want to get attached,’ I finished, rather incoherently.
‘Any particular reason why not?’
My heart had started to drum in my chest. I wasn’t sure which way this was all going, and I wasn’t sure what to think. ‘Well, this is all such a weird situation, isn’t it? We’re trapped in time, we’ve got no idea why or what to do about it and I’m worried that anything we think we feel might be because we’re all living in a kind of crisis.’
‘High emotions making for false attraction?’ Lachlan came down to stand on the step with me and now he looked into my face. He really seemed to be thinking this over; a small frownline appeared between his eyes and his spare hand scratched at his stubbled chin. ‘Aye. I can see your reasoning.’ Then he bent slightly and looked right into my eyes. ‘And what’s therealreason?’ he asked softly.
I didn’t know what to say. How could I admit that the word ‘real’ was the crux of the matter? That our communication, our level of attraction, Lachlan’s letting me see his internal frailties made this whatever-we-had feeltoo real? When we were trapped in a situation that was almost the anthesis of reality, like being stuck in a story that had no visible ending.
He was very close to me and I could feel him breathing. He’d changed the jumper, finally, for a stolen linen shirt that Jeannie was probably still looking for, and it suited him, damn it, although the faces of The Proclaimers on the T-shirt underneath rather ruined the dramaticOutlanderimage.
‘I got scared,’ I said, sounding reluctant, as though I were dragging the words out over broken glass.
‘Scared,’ he repeated. ‘I think we’reallscared, aren’t we?’
‘This is a different kind of scared,’ I said to the toes of my boots.
‘Scared of the fact that you and I seem to have some kind of connection?’ Lachlan tried to run a hand through his hair but failed. ‘I think that’s more about your previous relationships than about you and me, don’t you?’
‘But how can we?’ I burst out. ‘I mean, we can hardly go for a coffee and a chat and meet each other’s friends, can we? How the hell could we go about having aconnection,as you put it, when we’re spending time being invisible and trying to work out how to go home?’
‘So that’s not an “I like you but I don’t see this going any further”, then?’ He grinned at me and all the heat was taken out of my anger.
