Page 34 of A Scot on the Rocks

The sensible answer was no. Jamie had given sensible answers to excise officers, customs men, suspicious merchants, constables, and once to a minister who had taken an unfortunate interest in why three ponies were crossing church lands after midnight.

Instead he rubbed his thumb over the leather reins and said, “That is a word best spoken softly on an open hillside.”

Olivia looked toward the ponies again, where the men below had begun shifting the load farther into the shelter of the slope.

“Which means yes.”

“Which means yer clever enough to become inconvenient.”

“That’s been mentioned before.”

Jamie almost laughed. That was the trouble with her. She’d appeared from a disused tunnel dressed in trousers, on foot, alone, and possibly had her wits addled, yet somehow had the nerve to sound annoyed that the morning wasn’t proceeding sensibly.

The mare gave an impatient toss of her head, and Jamie caught the reins. Olivia’s gaze returned to the casks almost immediately, not with the interest of someone thinking about drinking what was inside, nor with the calculating look of a thief deciding what they might fetch, but with a curiosity about them.

“How old is it?” she asked.

Jamie frowned. “The whisky?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve no need to concern yourself with my whisky.”

Her mouth tightened, though instead of arguing she looked toward Dunarraidh again, and whatever she saw there drew the last of the humor from her expression.

Her gaze traveled over the repaired roofline and the smoke rising from the south wing, then down to Jamie’s clothes, the mare’s tack, the rough track beneath them and the sword at his hip. She began looking around with the concentration of someone fitting separate pieces together, and Jamie recognized the instinct because he did the same when a patrol had been reported nearby.

He disliked the fear that gathered beneath her concentration.

“What is it?”

She didn’t answer at first. A gust lifted loose strands of her hair and sent them across her mouth, and she brushed them away without seeming to notice she’d done it.

“Mistress Olivia?”

She sighed and met his gaze, her blue eyes troubled.

“What year is it?”

The question was so strange that Jamie laughed.

“So ye did hit yer head in the tunnel.”

She swallowed. “Please. Just tell me the year.”

Jamie straightened. “Seventeen eighty-six.”

For several seconds, she didn’t move at all. Rain ticked softly from the branches of a nearby hawthorn, and somewhere farther down the hill a sheep called to another across the wet ground. Jamie watched the color drain from Olivia’s face until she looked like freshly fallen snow.

“It can’t be.”

“I’m afraid the year is fairly settled.”

“There has to be a logical explanation.” The words were barely above a whisper.

Jamie saw her knees start to give way and crossed the distance between them quickly enough to catch her around the waist.

This time she didn’t pull away as her hands seized the front of his coat, bunching wet wool in both fists while she stared up at him as though he was the most alarming thing on the hillside.