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“It’s one of my grandmother’s.”
That explanation only made matters worse.
Sorcha tried the phrase and got the rhythm completely wrong.
Olivia winced. “If you’re going to say it, you have to mean it.”
Jamie opened his eyes. “Dinna help them.”
Morag tried next and nailed it.
Iseabail bent over her sewing, though Olivia could see her shoulders shaking.
Morag packed butter, onions, and several bannocks into the basket Jamie had brought back, ignoring his protests that Dunarraidh already contained food.
“You have oats and whisky,” she said.
“That’s food.”
“That’s what men eat when no woman is around.”
Olivia looked at the basket. “She has a point.”
Jamie stared at her. “You’ve been in my house two days.”
“Long enough.”
Morag looked pleased.
They escaped a few minutes later with enough food to survive a minor siege and the distinct possibility that damned swaggering bucket of pig slop would reach every household in Glenbrae by nightfall.
The rain had stopped, leaving the lane muddy as Olivia gathered her skirts and fell into step beside Jamie. Smoke drifted from the cottages, somebody hammered steadily behind a low stone wall, and farther up the hill several children were arguing over something in the grass.
They’d nearly reached the turn toward Dunarraidh when Jamie glanced at her.
“A nice criminal?”
Olivia sighed. “I knew you weren’t going to let that go.”
“Who was he?”
“Someone Grandma knew who came into the pub.”
“And he taught ye to throw knives and hold them at men’s throats?”
“He taught me not to freeze when somebody bigger than me decided he could use that against me.”
Jamie’s amusement faded, though thankfully no pity replaced it.
Olivia looked ahead. “A policeman that frequented the pub taught me how to get out of someone holding me. The other man taught me that once you get free, you should know what you’re prepared to do next.”
Jamie was quiet for several steps, then nodded. That was it, there wasn’t any lecture about what women should or shouldn’t do. No suggestion that next time she should wait for a man with a sword to appear.
Olivia had spent enough of her life around men who needed to be the expert in the room to notice the absence of it.
Ahead, Dunarraidh rose above the glen, broken against the gray sky. She found herself thinking about the whisky clue Sorcha had given her, wondering whether warm stone after the rain might explain the mineral note from the quaich, and hoping Morag had packed extra the bannocks.
She was still in the past, her grandmother would be worried sick by now, and she had no idea whether the tunnel would ever open again, or if there was some other way to return to her own time.
