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“What did he say?”

The stranger repeated himself, grinning this time. Olivia didn’t understand a word, but she knew an insult when a man delivered one while looking at her chest and waiting for his friends to laugh. She’d heard enough of them growing up and had learned to take care of herself.

Jamie got to his feet.

“You’ll take that back,” he said in English, giving the man every opportunity to understand him.

The stranger leaned closer and added a final remark, soft enough that Olivia caught only the tone. Jamie hit him once, squarely in the face.

The man reeled backward into an empty bench, overturning it with a crash. For the briefest moment the room seemed to freeze around them. Olivia had seen plenty of bar fights begin with a punch, and she’d learned at a young age that the second man was often more dangerous than the first.

The stranger’s companion had already come around the table. He wasn’t looking at the man on the floor. He was looking at Jamie’s unprotected side, and his hand was coming up with a heavy pewter mug clenched in it.

“Jamie!”

Olivia seized the wooden plate in front of her, stepped into the fellow’s path, and brought it down hard across the side of his head as the crack echoed beneath the low rafters. He dropped the mug, staggered sideways, and landed sitting among the rushes with an expression of profound surprise.

Unfortunately, the mutton, onions, and turnips hadn’t stayed on the plate.

Olivia stared longingly at the scattered remains of her supper. Two dogs that had been sleeping beneath the table sprang into action with a speed that would have impressed an F1 driver. One claimed the mutton. The other buried its nose in the gravy-soaked turnips. By the time Olivia thought to rescue even a single onion, both were eating with the desperate enthusiasm of creatures who’d spent their lives preparing for precisely this opportunity.

“Oh, for the love of all the saints and their flea-bitten underpants!” She looked at her empty plate, then at the dogs. “I was going to eat that.”

Jamie turned, took in the man on the floor, the mug rolling beneath a bench, and Olivia standing with a plate in her hand, a bit of gravy dripping onto the rushes. His expression moved from alarm to astonishment.

“Did ye just strike him with your supper?”

“The plate,” Olivia said. “The dogs finished my supper.”

Finlay arrived, laughing so hard he could barely speak, though he had enough presence of mind to collect the fallen mug. Alasdair caught the taller stranger by his collar as he tried to rise.

“You two have had your ale,” Alasdair said, with the sort of quiet authority that made argument seem inadvisable. “You’ll be leaving now.”

The man Olivia had hit touched the side of his head and looked toward Jamie, perhaps hoping for sympathy though he found none. Between Alasdair and the other men, the two travelers were shepherded out into the mist, accompanied by Mairi’s warning that neither would be served in her house again.

Olivia lowered the plate onto the table and surveyed what remained of her supper. One dog was licking the rushes while the other had moved beneath Jamie’s bench in case a second course fell from heaven.

“They’re very efficient,” she said mournfully.

Mairi patted her shoulder. “I’ve another plate almost ready. Ye’ll no go hungry.”

“I appreciate that,” Olivia said as her stomach growled. “I was rather fond of the mutton.”

Jamie was watching her again, this time with a look she’d never seen on his face before. “He might have hurt ye.”

“He was going for you with that mug.” She rubbed her palm against her skirt, surprised by how the blow had gone straight up her arms. “I grew up in a pub, Jamie. Men who come in pairs don’t always fight one at a time.”

His gaze dropped to her hands. “Are ye hurt?”

“No. I’m hungry.” She figured she knew, because it was always about the size of her chest, but she asked anyway.

“What did he say about me?”

Jamie hesitated. “He said ye had a…” The rough and tumble Highlander actually turned pink as he cleared his throat. “The bloody bastard said ye had lovely tits then asked what I would charge to let him take ye upstairs.”

Olivia looked toward the door. “Well, now I wish I’d hit him with the candlestick as well.”

Jamie laughed, sudden and helpless, and the warmth came back into his face. He reached for her hand, turning it to make sure her fingers weren’t bruised, while she pretended it was just the heat in the room that made her dizzy for a moment. Between his accent and his looks, he could have been a huge movie star in her time. Then again, if he had come forward in time instead of her going back and told her he was from the past, she probably would have dropped him off at a hospital for evaluation and not given him a second thought.