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“I thought I’d come all this way only to lose you.”
He’d known she cared for him. He hadn’t known the sight of him falling would strip the color from her face long after the danger had passed.
Jamie reached out with his good hand, and when she came to him, he drew her close enough to rest his cheek against her hair. She was trembling now that there was no task demanding her attention. He sat with her until the shaking eased, listening to the storm.
“I’m sorry I frightened ye,” he said.
“You didn’t choose to get shot.”
“A fortunate thing.”
The corner of her mouth lifted, and he was relieved enough to want to kiss her. He didn’t. Not yet, when she’d barely recovered from the shock.
She brought him the broth Morag had left and made him eat it, and for a little while they spoke of Finlay and how well the haunting had worked.
By morning the glen had already begun to tell the story. Mairi arrived with bread and an account of three different ghosts seen in Dunarraidh’s windows, while the healer brought fresh bandages and reported that every child in the village now wanted to learn how to make a sheet fly. Jamie listened from his chair beside the window, a cup of whisky at hand. Olivia was at the table showing Ewan the place where Robertson’s men had nearly discovered the passage beneath the chapel. She pointed out a better way to conceal it, then asked whether moving the entrance would put the villagers using it at risk. Ewan considered the question and gave her an answer. Only after they had agreed did she begin sketching the change with a bit of charcoal.
Jamie remembered the abandoned basket on the quay, her determination to prove she could manage anything, and the fear that had made him answer her with anger instead of honesty. She was still the same woman. She’d been brave last night, clever, and careful afterward to ask whose safety her plans might affect.
He’d been wrong to think the only way to love her was to keep her beyond the reach of danger. There was no such place in this world, not for Olivia and certainly not for a man who made a living smuggling whisky past the excisemen.
When Ewan went to fetch the timber, Olivia came to his side and adjusted the sling so it no longer pulled against his neck.
The sunlight emerging between the clouds picked out copper threads in her hair and the stitching at the edge of her sleeve. He thought of the dead husband she’d invented, the future she’d left behind, and the grandmother whose love reached all the way across time. Perhaps he could understand why she hadn’t told him the truth of herself.
“I owe ye an apology,” he said.
“For getting shot?”
“For being a fool, though I suppose getting shot might fall under that heading as well.”
Olivia looked at him, and Jamie wished he could reach for her without having to consider which arm still worked. She’d been moving about the castle since dawn, keeping herself occupied with a hundred small tasks, and although she’d smiled at him over breakfast, there had been a carefulness between them that he was heartily sick of.
“I had a right to be angry when ye took a risk the others hadna agreed to,” he said. “But I was frightened for ye, lass, and I made a poor business of showing it. After ye told me where ye came from, I was hurt that ye’d let me believe ye were mourning a husband who’d never lived. I needed time to make sense of what ye’d told me, and I suppose I needed time to forgive ye for thinking so little of my trust.”
“I never thought little of your trust.”
He turned his good hand beneath hers and caught her fingers before she could withdraw them.
“I understand that now. And I should’ve told ye sooner that I was coming to believe ye, impossible as the whole business sounds. I’ve known ye long enough to recognize when you’re lying, Olivia Bennett. Ye usually become far too agreeable.”
That won him the smallest smile.
“I wish I’d told you sooner,” she said. “And I know I was wrong about the basket. I thought I could fix everything if I was clever enough.”
“Ye’re clever enough for three men, lass. The trouble is, sometimes ye’ve the judgment of a fourth who’s been at the whisky.”
She laughed, and the sound eased something that had been tight in his chest since their quarrel.
“That’s probably fair.”
“Aye, well, I’ve been known to make a mistake or two myself.”
“A mistake or two?”
“There’s no need to count them.”
Her smile softened, and for a moment she looked at him in the way she used to before the harbor, before he’d learned the truth of her journey through time and begun worrying over how little he could offer a woman who’d seen another time.
