Seventeen

O liver leaned on the sink in the croft's thoroughly spa-like loo and stared at himself in the mirror. Did it show on a man's face when he'd found and then lost through his own stupidity the one person he thought he might actually love?

He didn't like self-reflection. There were too many potholes in his past for that sort of thing to be comfortable and it was for damned sure his current straits were nothing to examine with pleasure. He suspected that if he'd been forced to meditate by some lad foolish enough to insist on the same, he would have cheerfully dealt out a great deal of gross bodily harm.

It was very tempting to wonder how much of that he could commit four hundred years in the past and not have it haunt him—

He blew his hair out of his eyes and set to the rest of his morning ablutions with an unthinkingness that somehow didn't surprise him. His eyes were full of what he'd witnessed the night before in a different century and his head equally stuffed with his own shouts of self-condemnation. It was more of an effort than he cared for to take all those very legitimate things and mentally shove them off-stage. What served him best at present was a clear-eyed, brutal assessment of what had gone wrong the evening before, not recriminations.

He'd arrived at the right time, something of a miracle in and of itself, and managed to avoid being seen by either Mairead or his own oblivious self. He'd positioned himself advantageously for a rescue, watched his original incarnation clunk his stupid head against Moraig's threshold, then watched a knife come down toward Mairead's back. It had been instinctive to take one of the stones he'd picked up on his way to the croft and fling it as hard as he could at the perpetrator.

It hadn't made much difference in the end, though Mairead had suffered a serious blow to her head instead of a hole in her back before she'd been carried off. He'd known instantly that there were too many men there for a quick grab and go, especially since he hadn't brought a sword.

He'd spared a moment of loathing for the practical side of himself that had led him to the profoundly unpleasant conclusion that it wasn't going to work. He'd slunk back the way he'd come, caught the sudden flash of a blade out of the corner of his eye, and managed a very graceful swan dive into the gate. Rolling through the centuries had been an experience he could have easily foregone, but it was over and done with.

He wondered, though, who that lad with the sword had been and how he'd known to look for someone hiking toward Cameron lands and not down to the MacLeod keep.

He pulled a t-shirt down over his head, followed by a black sweatshirt that thankfully didn't proclaim his affection for anything but remaining discreetly unnoticed, then paused to allow a very small, subversive thought to take root in his breast. It wasn't as though he didn't have those kinds of thoughts on a regular basis, but he was trying his best to be a respectable businessman in his professional life and a good guest on someone else's soil in Scotland.

But his thought at the moment was that perhaps he'd been just too polite. He'd been playing by everyone else's rules, keeping to the programme, not cheating on the maths. The truth was, he was quite a bit better at life when he was going at it as a slightly sketchy ghost.

He dragged his hands through his damp hair, looked at himself one final time in the mirror to make certain he was covered in all the right places, then faced the door and prepared to go out and pretend that everything was normal and the woman he was enormously fond of was simply skipping around in a hands-off sort of orbit for the moment. A bit of Regency cosplay, which would have suited her duke and his kitchen maid perfectly.

Only when he left the loo, he found that Mairead was wearing a Highland lass's dress with her long, glorious hair tumbling over her shoulders, looking so peaceful and good and lovely that he lost his breath. It was honestly all he could do not to stride over to her, pull her to her feet, and steal a kiss.

Perhaps more than one, if her saucy dagger remained safely stowed in the back of her belt.

But because he couldn't, he walked over to her and dropped to his knees again, right there on that uneven flagstone.

"I'm going to try again," he said without hesitation.

"Oliver—"

"Mairead—"

"You might call me Mair if you like," she said, looking remarkably shy for a ghost. "I would like it from you, I daresay."

"Mair, then," he said, realizing that his hands were balled into fists where they rested, one on the arm of her chair and the other on his thigh. Perhaps it was good she was a ghost at the moment. Perhaps by the time he managed to get her to the future as a corporeal woman, he would have gotten his rampaging emotions under control and might manage to kiss her hand a time or two before he blurted out that he was fairly certain he couldn't live without her and would she mind sharing not only his Bugatti but his bed for the rest of his life?

Put simply.

"I know what you're thinking."

"Do you?" he asked, alarmed.

"Well," she conceded, "perhaps not precisely. There is a bit of an art to it, after all. And just so you know, I've tried to leave you your privacy over the years."

"Thank you," he said weakly.

She shrugged casually. "I didn't want to pry and find that you didn't care for me as much as I wished you to."

He hardly knew where to start with that. The idea that perhaps she'd been an unseen presence in his life up until the present moment even though he'd known her—in the most chaste of ways, something he thought he should add a little extra emphasis to mentally on the off chance she was actually reading his thoughts—

"Then you don't have feelings for me?"

He blinked, then pulled himself back to the present moment with an effort. "Well, of course I do."

"You don't look like it," she said pointedly.

He rubbed his hands over his face. "I'm trying to be polite."

"Please stop."

He laughed a little, though he supposed it sounded every bit as unhinged as it felt. "Mairead MacLeod, you are without a doubt the best part of my life." He ignored the burning that had started up behind his eyes and looked at her. "I'll tell you how I feel later."

"Will there be scorching looks involved?" she asked politely.

"For you and you alone."

"Thank you," she said primly, then she seemed to be trying to decide what, if anything, needed to be added to that. "I think you should know," she said finally, "that I did my best not to intrude."

"Into what?" was out of his mouth before he realized what he was asking and how desperately he didn't want to hear her answer.

"Into your doings with other gels," she said grimly. "Though I'll admit that I did note the lassies you took to supper."

"Please tell me you limited yourself to suppers."

She glared at him. "You were hardly a monk during your university years, Master Phillips. Or afterward, if we're going to be perfectly frank."

He bowed his head and laughed because it was either that or run and hide in the loo, and he didn't run. He looked at her. "If you tell me now that you're responsible for my endless series of first dates, I'll… well, I'm not sure what I'll do."

She shifted uncomfortably. "I'll admit nothing."

He studied her thoughtfully for a moment or two. "And here I always thought those hens never wanted to see me again because they didn't appreciate my attentions."

"'Tis possible there might be another reason," she conceded.

"Mairead," he said, dredging up as much shock as he could to put into his tone. "For shame."

"Me?" she exclaimed. "You libertine!"

He winced. "Can we stop talking about this yet?"

She scowled at him.

He pulled up a stool and managed to get his arse atop it without undue effort. He clasped his hands between his knees to keep them captive, then looked at her. He felt his smile fade in direct proportion to the silence that descended. It wasn't an unpleasant bit of quiet, as it happened, just one full of a desperate hope that likely caused every gate within a five-mile radius to shudder a bit at his determination.

"I will try again," he said quietly.

"I wish I could help you," she whispered.

He looked at his hands for a moment or two, then met her eyes. "Am I venturing where I shouldn't?"

"Don't be daft," she said briskly. "Unless you—"

"I want to."

"I want you to."

He couldn't help but a smile a bit. He started to make a list of all the things about her that he was very fond of, but he was interrupted before he even began by the chirping of his phone. Well, Patrick MacLeod's poached phone. Mairead waved him on to his business, so he wasted no time popping up and going to the kitchen to liberate Patrick's phone from where he'd hidden it under his book of torments, certain it would be the last place anyone with the brilliant idea to come steal it from him would ever look. He pulled up the message and read with hardly a flinch.

Oliver, it's Zach. I'm at Patrick's.

Oliver considered. That was an interesting wrinkle he hadn't dared put into his starched plans. He had questions Zachary Smith certainly would have answers to and if Zachary were at Patrick's, he could give those answers without James MacLeod standing there scowling over the same. He sent back his most pressing concern.

Privacy?

Bring your sword.

Oliver swore, stuck the phone in his pocket, then looked at his lady. "Care for a little walk to see your uncle?"

She rose and smoothed down her skirts. "Will they—"

"Absolutely," he said without hesitation. "They will want to see you because first, you're family, and second, you're charming. You may be offered a few opinions about why, when I manage to get you here in a different guise, you might want to make certain you haven't limited yourself to your current dating possibilities, but I suggest you ignore that bit."

She smiled. "I'll keep that in mind."

He certainly hoped she would. He grabbed his sword, opened the door and looked out to make certain there were no stray Renaissance thugs in the vicinity, then stepped over the threshold and waited for Mairead to follow him. He pulled the door shut behind them and walked with her to Patrick and Madelyn's castle.

He had scarce knocked before the door was opened and they'd been welcomed inside. He watched Mairead be welcomed without hesitation into that loving family circle and found himself questioning not Patrick's consideration for his guests, but rather the condition of his flues. Damned smoky interiors were going to be the death of his poor eyes.

"Shall we?"

He jumped a little when he realized he wasn't standing there alone, though he was grateful Zachary Smith had only asked the question quietly instead of bellowing it in his ear. He shot Mairead a smile, had a happy one in return, then followed Zachary out to Patrick's garden.

"You didn't bring a sword," he managed.

"I was giving you an excuse to rush right over," Zachary said innocently. "Besides, I figured you would just want to chat, not have a beating."

Oliver snorted, though he'd seen Zachary with a sword in his hands and been happy to have a good reason to be loitering in a different part of the man's castle. Still, there was no sense in leaving that challenge unanswered.

"I've been training with Robert Cameron," he stated, patting his sword that he'd propped up against the wall.

"And I trained with Robin de Piaget."

Oliver considered. "I hear he's good."

"He would be extremely offended by the watered-down nature of that compliment," Zachary said with a smile. "My father-in-law was, I think I can safely say, the best swordsman of his generation and quite possibly several other generations as well. Now, what do you need? Actually, what do you already know?"

"About your 1600s adventure?" Oliver asked. "The basics, but what I'd like are details about what happened when you tried to go back and rescue that girl."

Zachary made himself more comfortable atop the dry-stone wall. "Well, the first thing of note is that I arrived twenty-four hours after Jamie and I had originally walked into their little village initially."

"And you couldn't have controlled your landing more tightly than that?" Oliver asked, surprised.

"It wasn't for a lack of trying, believe me."

"Sorry," Oliver said, waving him on to the retelling of the disaster. "I'm still working on that part, so tell me all so I'm properly terrified."

"You should be," Zachary said frankly. "It was a nightmare trying to keep myself out of sight from my first me, which I didn't manage to entirely do—well, let me rephrase that. I stayed out of my own line of sight, but someone else saw me."

"Jamie?"

Zachary shook his head. "No, and I didn't stop to find out who it was. That was definitely a mistake because that person almost got us—my first incarnation and Jamie—burned at the stake right after that poor girl who in the end still met her fate."

"Brutal," Oliver managed.

"Extremely," Zachary agreed. "Jamie and I—the first me—managed to get ourselves home, but it took the second me almost two weeks to get the gate to open back up. I'm not exaggerating when I say New England winters are not anything to mess around with."

"But surely Jamie didn't leave your other self to rot there—or did he just not know what you'd done?"

"He knew," Zachary said, "and he did try, more than once. There was—and still is—something temperamental about that particular gate. I'm not sure if it was because there were two of me making trips through it at different times and the gate lost count of the return tickets, or there was something else going on." He shrugged. "It didn't work for Jamie that second time, either, so there's that."

"Couldn't you have used a different gate?"

"Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Not only did that gate take us to the 1640s, it took us across the Pond to New England." He smiled without humor. "Hopping across centuries and large bodies of water in a single bound. Hard to top that."

Oliver decided it was best to allow the utter improbability of that to continue on past them without comment.

Zachary looked at him and there was pity in his eyes. "Sometimes things happen for a reason."

"And if I could find a reason that a particular event would have been better not happening?"

"I think you could spend every moment of the rest of your life making a list of those kinds of things," Zachary said with a sigh, then he smiled. "But given that I suspect you've already made that decision for at least one thing, let me tell you why I really wanted to talk to you. Do you know Thomas McKinnon?"

"Never heard of him."

"You should look into him."

"You should save me the time."

Zachary shot him a dark look, then sighed. "Without invading their privacy too much," he said, sounding as if he were trying very hard not to do exactly that, "I'll give you a few details about Thomas and his wife Iolanthe."

"Interesting name."

"More interesting birthdate," Zachary said. "Sometime during the late 14th century, I would guess."

Oliver shook his head. "It's just a hotbed of paranormal activity up here in the wilds of Scotland, isn't it?"

"It is, which is why I sleep so well in my unassailable keep in England, though my wife's relatives do seem to show up with alarming regularity."

"Carrying swords," Oliver noted.

"More often than not," Zachary agreed. "But here's the interesting thing about Iolanthe, something I don't think she would mind me telling you. When I first met her, she'd been a ghost for over five centuries."

Oliver almost fell off the wall. He was generally a man of few, though sometimes salty, words, but he couldn't find even one of those to lay his hand on at the moment.

Zachary nodded knowingly.

"How did she die?" Oliver asked, wishing he didn't sound quite so hoarse.

"She was murdered in England, though the exact details aren't important. What is important is that Thomas met her because he'd bought the castle she was haunting."

"Yet she's here? Alive?"

"They live in Maine, but yes, she's alive."

Oliver pushed off the wall. "Let's walk."

Zachary only nodded and started across the garden with him.

"I assume he rescued her?" Oliver asked.

"He did, but that's not what I think will interest you. You see, while Thomas was off attempting a rescue and Iolanthe was still a ghost, she had anyone who would sit with her write down everything she could remember." He smiled. "Sort of as a backup, if you can call it that."

"Interesting idea," Oliver managed. He walked with Zachary for a bit, turning that over in his head for comfort, if nothing else. He finally stopped and looked at Jamie's brother-in-law. "Did she read her book?"

"I'm not sure she did at first, but in the end it didn't matter."

Oliver closed his eyes briefly, then faced his doom. "Why not?"

"Because she began to remember things from her future all on her own."

Oliver was torn between looking for a corner to use for the appropriate tear-filled activity and throwing his arms around Zachary and bawling all over him .

"Do you think so?" he asked.

Zachary only shrugged helplessly. "I haven't grilled her over it at Christmas, so I can't tell you specifics, but it's what I've heard. And I guess in the end maybe it wouldn't have mattered what she remembered or forgot. They're disgustingly happy together and I have to watch that up close when they're over here visiting." He shuddered. "It's really gross."

"So says the man who looks like he's been clobbered by a cricket batt every time his wife walks into the room."

Zachary laughed a little. "I'm still in a state of shock that she agreed to marry me, so that's probably true."

Oliver walked on, shaking his head at his companion's good fortune, then mulled for a bit the things he'd heard.

The first was, a successful rescue was possible. He had his own reason for believing that given that he'd managed to save Mairead at least from that initial bit of foul play in front of her home. That success was absolutely repeatable with the right plan.

The second thing that encouraged him was the idea that Mairead could have someone—possibly even him—write down her memories. Any delay in trying another trip to the past made him anxious, but the tradeoff could be worth it if she were willing.

But the third item of note…

He looked at Zachary. "So, what you're saying," he began slowly, "is that she remembered her own future."

"The one she lived as a ghost?" Zachary asked, then he nodded. "As improbable as that sounds, yes."

"Not improbable," Oliver said. "Completely daft."

"'There are more things in heaven and earth,'" Zachary said with a smile.

"Said by an utter madman," Oliver said promptly.

"Or the only one who was sane in a cast of characters caught up in a different sort of murderous madness."

Oliver blew out his breath. "Tell me again why I agreed to talk to you?"

Zachary smiled. "You're welcome." He nodded back toward the hall. "Let's go back in through the kitchen. I know where Patrick keeps all his best snacks."

Oliver thought it wise not to pass up that opportunity, so he fetched his sword then followed Zachary around the back of the castle, forcing himself to set aside concerns and warning bells and everything else that was clamoring for his attention.

That was difficult given the sense of urgency he couldn't quite explain, one not unlike what he'd felt when he'd watched Mairead walk through the faery ring to a keep being inflamed by a madman. He would have preferred to have given her time to write down her memories, but he feared there was no time for it.

Perhaps they could simply make new ones to replace the others.

As for the business at hand, at least he wouldn't make the mistake of his first attempt, that of relying only on his ability to adapt himself to the exigency of the moment on a moment's notice. He now knew what to expect, he had a fair idea of the number of men he would face, and he had the advantage of having tried at least one method that hadn't worked.

He would go and he would do it that afternoon.

And this time, he wouldn't fail.

Three hours later, he walked through the twenty-first century forest near Moraig's house and suspected ceasing to live by everyone else's rules might not be extreme enough to do what he needed to do.

He'd made it back to the right time, avoided being seen by the men milling about the lower part of the meadow, and hidden himself in an advantageous locale where he watched two incarnations of himself—the original and his first retry—go about their business on their way to complete failure. He'd promised himself a proper assessment of the collective disaster later—perhaps with Zachary Smith, Patrick MacLeod, and a large bottle of something very strong all in the same place—then gone about trying to fix what he'd already made such a great hash of twice before.

He dismissed his unconscious self falling into Moraig's because just watching that was painful. It was even more shocking to watch his body simply disappear—presumably into the future—but he filed that away as something not to think about without that same bottle of something strong in his hand.

He'd waited until his second self had flung a rock at one of Mairead's cousins he wasn't able to name but did recognize, watched that man fall, then listened to the rest of the bloody bastards shriek that Mairead wasn't just a witch, she was a demon who could fell men around her with nothing more than her presence.

He'd known at that moment that there was no hope of rescuing her and that trying would very likely result in his own death which would most assuredly make impossible any further attempts. He had slipped back into the darkness of the forest and come back to the future, too heartsick to even dredge up a few curses with which to keep himself company.

He took a deep breath, released it slowly, then continued on his way to the twenty-first century version of Moraig's house, exhausted beyond any reasonable measure. The cottage was dark, which he knew shouldn't have chilled him as it did, but it had been that sort of evening.

He didn't care for failure.

No, that didn't come close to stating just how deeply he loathed it. In fact, he despised it so thoroughly that he'd made a career out of never being in a position where he did anything but succeed brilliantly and he did that by compensating for every contingency he'd mapped out thanks to knowing all the answers beforehand. His research methods were impeccable, his sense of direction flawless, and his competitive nature only matched by Derrick Cameron's on Wednesdays and Fridays. The lad had to have time to recover, which Oliver tended to discreetly neglect to notice.

He took a deep breath and opened the cottage door. He almost hesitated to reach inside and turn on the lights, which made him angry at himself. Better that, perhaps, than being devastated that not only had he failed to rescue Mairead, he'd watched her brother almost knock her out in his fury whilst screaming at her that she was in league with demons.

He imagined Tasgall had been talking about him, which was yet another reason to aim a little fury at himself.

At least Mairead hadn't been stabbed, which he supposed would be something to discuss with her later if she could bear it. For the moment, he would go inside, drop to his knees, and apologize for failing her.

And then… well, he had no idea what he would do then.

He flicked on the lights to find the cottage empty.

He spun around and flung himself out the door. He ran in the only direction that made sense to his poor fogged brain which was toward the meadow. He came to an ungainly halt at the edge of the forest and simply stared into that open, moon-drenched expanse.

Mairead was standing there in that moonlight as if she'd been something from a dream. He leaned over with his hands on his thighs until he'd caught his breath, then straightened and walked until he was standing five paces from her. She turned and smiled at him, a gentle, beautiful smile that was full of nothing but affection. No condemnation, no anger, no disappointment, just love.

He stood there and watched her with the moonlight falling down on her, somehow turning her into something that wasn't quite corporeal yet wasn't quite a dream, and for the first time in years had absolutely no idea what to do. He had come to the conclusion, as he'd tried to avoid the other rescuing incarnation of himself, that he had two choices.

He either needed help.

Or he needed to give up.

"We could try living as we are," she said quietly.

He looked at the woman standing in front of him, part dream, part the embodiment of almost everything that had been beautiful in his life in a way he only understood at that moment, and could do nothing but nod.

"All right," he agreed quietly. "We'll try."