Page 38 of A Scot on the Rocks

“Jeans. Everyone back home wears them.”

Her raincoat hung from a peg beside his heavier wool coat, with her gloves spread near the hearth. Against the stone, iron, horn cups, wooden bowls, and walls of the castle chamber, they looked like props someone had forgotten to remove from a historical film set.

Olivia’s thoughts went to Calum.

“My head’s still a little fuzzy. You said you found me alone.”

Jamie’s amusement faded. “Aye.”

“You looked for the man I told you about?”

“I did. There was no one in the tunnel or on the track below.”

Relief came first. Calum had been with her when everything changed, his hand gripping hers while the tunnel shook. She’d heard him shouting even after the strange light appeared ahead, yet he hadn’t seemed to see the old woman standing only yards away.

Whatever had happened, it had taken Olivia and left Calum behind.

“He must’ve stayed where I came from.”

Jamie leaned one hip against the table. “And where, exactly, would that be?”

Olivia rubbed a hand over her face, realizing her error.

“I meant, he must have perished in the tunnel collapse.”

Olivia had met men who stared because they were flirting, men who stared because they weren’t listening, and men who stared while waiting for their opportunity to explain something to her that she already knew. Jamie watched her because he was thinking, and right now she could almost see him arranging her clothing and every strange thing she’d said into a pattern.

“If this Calum is no kin of yours,” he said, “why were ye alone with him in the old smugglers’ tunnel?”

“Because I…” Olivia heard the trap in the question a beat too late.

She could hardly tell him Calum was part of a restoration crew from the twenty-first century and had been standing in a tunnel beneath Glenbrae with a flashlight, a hard hat, and absolutely no idea the universe was about to throw their lives into total chaos.

“He was traveling with our party,” she said carefully, yawning to buy herself a moment to think.

He narrowed his eyes. “Your party?”

“My husband’s.” The lie formed one plank at a time beneath her feet, narrow and splintery, but better than empty air.

“We sailed from Boston to Greenock because he hoped to make connections with Scottish distillers and merchants. Spirits, wine, rum, whisky. Anything that might sell well back across the ocean in Boston.”

Jamie didn’t say a word as he crossed his arms which she took as permission to keep building her story.

“My husband and the rest of our traveling party became ill with fever shortly after we arrived.”

She looked toward the fire, not wanting to meet Jamie’s eyes in case he could see the lies in them.

“He died, along with the others.” She thought about an old stray dog she’d had as a kid and managed to put the emotion from losing her pet into the words.

“But not you.”

“Not me or Calum.”

Jamie’s mouth tightened, not with disbelief this time, but with the grim understanding of a man who lived in a world where fevers could kill.

“I’m sorry, lass.”

The sympathy was worse than the suspicion. She hated lying to him, but what alternative did she have? Blurt out that she was from the future? That would go over like a ton of bricks.