Highlander Guarded: A Scottish Time Travel Romance (Highlander In Time Book 10) Read online

  It didn't stop her feeling uncomfortable, though, as she got up and began to dress herself. She wrinkled her nose a little, realizing that her clothes were still slightly damp — especially her boots, which still had a slightly squelchy feeling to them when she took a few experimental steps. Well, she didn't exactly have many other options right now, did she? Not in medieval Scotland. She probed at that thought for a moment, trying to see if she was about to experience any complete mental breakdowns. It didn't seem to be the case. For now, she felt oddly stoic about the whole situation. Maybe the mental breakdown would come later… but for now, what she really wanted was something to eat.

  She headed down the long corridor and then down the winding stairs, pleased by how quiet the inn was this early in the morning. No more half-drunk men or curious stares… the room she'd sat in the night before was all but empty, save for the publican tinkering away under the bar. Replacing a keg, maybe? Did they have kegs in the sixteenth century? She almost went to grab her phone to Google it before realizing her mistake and suppressing a laugh. Her arrival in the room, though, had alerted the bartender, and he struggled upright, giving her a cheerful smile.

  "Morning, lassie. Did you sleep alright?"

  "Very well," she lied smoothly, not particularly wanting to reveal the details of her awful nightmare to this near-stranger. "Am I too early for breakfast?"

  "Early?" He chuckled. "Lass, you're too late. It's almost nine — everyone's been up and about for hours, now."

  "Guess I'm more of a night owl than an early bird," she admitted, feeling a little embarrassed that she'd slept so long.

  "You have to be both, in my line of work. Let me see if I can dig something up for you," the publican said cheerily, disappearing into a room behind the bar that she suspected was either the kitchen or the storeroom. Before long, he was back with a cloth-wrapped package that he handed to her with a smile. "There you are. We're closer to lunch than breakfast at this point, so that'll do you for both. A couple of pies, fresh from the oven."

  "Pies?" She'd been to Australia a few times — knew that savory pies, pies with meat in them, were something that that strange country had in common with England — and, she supposed, Scotland. Wishing she knew a little more about the culture of the country she'd ended up in — just what were the major differences between Scotland and England, anyway? — she opened up the little parcel and cautiously sampled one of the pies. They were still warm, and the pastry was flaky and delicious. She could even get over the inherent strangeness of discovering meat inside, not something sweet as she usually expected from pastry.

  Well, if the weirdest thing she ran into on her first day of exploring medieval Scotland was a savory pie, Scarlet decided, she'd call it a triumph.

  Chapter 7

  First on the agenda once she'd finished her breakfast was a wander around the village itself, to get the lay of the land and figure out what she could do from here. It was a beautiful day — a little chilly, but there was sun breaking through the cloud cover that had banished the worst of the troubling mist she'd been struggling through the night before. If she'd been harboring any lingering doubts as to the veracity of this place, they were banished by the first five minutes of her walk. Even the most dedicated set-builder, or medieval LARPer, couldn't have come up with something this vivid and detailed. She wandered the streets, quite forgetting that her intention had been to scope the place out — it was so beautiful, so worth just staring at like a tourist, that she found that hours had passed before she knew it. It wasn't a large town, in the end… the pub in the middle of town seemed like the biggest building, with the rest an assortment of beautiful little cottages and larger houses, all squeezed in together on the narrow, winding cobblestone streets. People rode horses here and there, and she saw a cart come through once or twice along the main street of the town — the cobblestone street gave way to dirt on the edges of town, and she recognized the road she'd walked in on during her explorations. Where did it go? she wondered. Off to a river, she knew that much… but what lay beyond that?

  Not Philadelphia, she thought with a shiver. She knew that now.

  Unnerved by that side of town — it reminded her too much of how far she was from anything familiar — she turned on her heel and headed for the opposite side to see where the road headed after it passed through town. This one was much more pleasant looking — it wound its way up a hillside, toward a stand of trees that stood maybe a couple of miles away. She wondered, as she gazed up the hill, where it was that the Keep that Kieran had mentioned stood. Hadn't he said there were other women — women like her, women who'd been brought back through time — who lived there? She wished, now, that she'd had her wits about her more, that she'd asked a couple more questions than she actually had about everything that was going on. Well, she'd simply add the other time tourists to her list of questions for Kieran once they saw each other again.

  But she wasn't going to let him be her only source of information. No way. That was a recipe for disaster. Besides, she was an expert at getting information, and she had a couple of days at least before she'd see him again… time to see what kind of eavesdropping she could do. But first, she needed not to stick out so much. A few of the villagers had greeted her on her walk, and though they'd all been perfectly civil, she could tell they were staring at her strange clothes. And fair enough, too. She was dressed rather oddly, especially in comparison to everyone she met. She'd need some clothes more suited to the locals if she was going to start eavesdropping.

  Well, clothes were easy enough as a first mission. She wandered through town a little more, playing up the starstruck wide-eyed thing a little… then ducked down an alley and found her way around the back of a row of houses, suspecting she'd see what she needed to see once she got there. Sure enough, in two of the dozen or so cottage backyards, she saw clothing hung up to dry on washing lines. Some things never changed, she thought with a grin, vaulting nimbly over the fence, and liberating a few pieces from their place. She deliberately chose the bigger houses, the richer-looking homes that didn't seem like they'd miss a couple of items here and there, and with her armful of clothes, she ducked around the corner and back to the pub. It was getting busy again as the lunch time crowd drifted in for a meal, and she scanned the clientele, realizing to her surprise that half of them seemed to be farmers. She supposed that made sense in such a rural area, but she'd spent so much of her time in cities and towns that it was odd to remember that farmers were people, too.

  Still, she didn't want to draw too much attention — not with her arms full of stolen clothing. She'd kept it minimal — a couple of blouses that looked around her size and seemed to match the same kind of thing that she saw a lot of women in town wearing, and a full skirt that had been stretched out on a line. Lots of fabric; that seemed to be what women wore around here… honestly, she'd been gazing with some longing at a pair of trousers, but the only people she'd seen in trousers had been men, and she had a suspicion that being stared at for wearing men's clothing would be just as detrimental to her cause of blending in as wearing her contemporary clothes.

  So, she headed upstairs to get changed. Sure enough, her eye had been spot on with the blouses — they fitted just fine. There was no way of seeing how they looked on her, unfortunately — the room didn't seem to be furnished with a mirror; was glass hard to come by in the medieval era? Had glass even been invented yet? Surely it had… But looking down at herself in the skirt and blouse, she was satisfied that she looked at least a little medieval.

  And the skirt had another added bonus, she realized with a grin. There were several pockets sewn into it, discrete but ample, and she grinned to herself as she realized the benefits of the thick, voluminous layers of fabric that swished around her legs as she moved. She might have been a modern thief, but the basics of pickpocketing had been drilled into her sternly by her father as a child. You never knew when it would come in handy to liberate an object from its possessor… whether that was a wal
let, or a swipe card to get into a bank, either way, having the skill came in handy.

  And Scarlet had no intention of being poor and destitute here in medieval Scotland. Nor would she be reliant on kindness and favors from Kieran, whoever he was… that was a fast road to being manipulated or controlled by him, and she had no intention of opening herself up to that kind of thing. Not after Ryan. She needed a steady income stream… and as far as she was concerned, that was going to be the people of the town.

  She'd long since stopped experiencing any kind of guilt when it came to stealing. You simply couldn't get into the ethics of it if you wanted to make it in the business. The facts were that some people had things, and some people didn't… and it was up to you which of those groups you wanted to be a part of. Her father had always kept her training deliberately morally gray, framing all her ethical questions the same way — okay, is it bad to take things from people? Great. What are you going to do instead?

  "I'll work," she told him once, jutting her chin out. She'd been thirteen years old and feeling particularly defiant. "I'll get a job in a factory or a shop and I'll work and they'll pay me."

  "Okay," her father had said, turning those deep brown eyes to her. "You'll get a job. And that will be fair, will it?"

  "Yes," she said, wavering a little. "Of course, it will."

  "Why is it fair?"

  "Because… because the man who runs the shop sells things, and he'll give me some of what he makes for helping him sell the things."

  "Right. And how much of what he makes will he share with you?"

  "That's up to him," she said, frowning a little.

  "Ah, right. And he'll pay you what's fair?"

  "Yes."

  "How do you know?"

  "Well, he must be fair. Otherwise, people would quit."

  Her father had been quiet for a while… then he'd beckoned her over, pulling out his battered laptop from under the table where it had been charging. They'd spent the next two hours going over profit statements from the largest companies in the world and comparing those statements to what they paid their workers. She'd ended up in tears of anger — not with her father, but with the men who ran these companies, who allowed their workers to suffer and starve while they made more and more money. After they read a particularly egregious article about a huge company who'd actually run a charity drive for their workers to afford Christmas — while reporting record profits to their shareholders — she'd had to slam the laptop shut.

  "Some people have things they don't deserve, Scarlet," her father said finally. "That's just the way of the world. I won't pretend we're better than those men who run those companies, but I won't allow you or anyone to say that we're worse."

  She'd never forgotten that lesson. Never lost track of the moral ambiguity of late capitalism, of the way companies exploited their workers — she'd read article after article about sweatshops in other countries, about outsourcing customer service and IT departments overseas where labor laws would allow them to pay their workers pennies, about how profits had climbed and climbed and climbed while the rich still begrudged the idea of lifting the minimum wage so that the workers whose sweat had built all that profit could afford to feed their families… and wherever she could, she made sure that her thieving targeted businesses and corporations, not individuals. And when she did target individuals, they were usually rich individuals… though that wasn't exactly a moral choice. After all, the poor didn't really have much to steal, did they?

  She spent the afternoon in the pub, scoping out her potential targets. It seemed that the folks who lived in town were reasonably well off. Actually it seemed like most of the customers of the pub were doing alright for themselves, at least from what she could tell. Perhaps the poor of the area chose to eat their meals at home… or perhaps wealth was distributed a little more evenly here than she was used to. Fascinating, to think that the world had actually gone backwards on that front. For a moment, she wished sorely that her father was here. He'd be having a field day with all this economic analysis. He'd told her once that he'd gone to college to study economics, many years ago — she wished, later, that she'd asked him a little more about that, about the evolution from straightlaced business student to con man and professional thief.

  There were a lot of things she wished she could talk to her father about. But right now, all she needed to do was focus on her marks.

  An afternoon of work, and she'd liberated a good quantity of coin. Nothing too drastic, nothing that would be missed… she'd made sure to steal only the price of a couple of drinks from each mark, dipping into their purses as she brushed past them now and again. Drunk men were the easiest targets, she thought, shaking her head a little as a mark blundered past her and out into the street. She could have all but walked up to him and taken his purse in full view and he wouldn't have realized he was being robbed. In her old life, working in a big city, she'd have taken the whole purse… but she had to operate more sustainably here. The last thing she needed was word getting around that a cutpurse was operating out of the pub. No, no — plausible deniability. What drunk would notice coming up a few coins shorter than he'd thought he was? The cost of a drink or two wouldn't be noticeable.

  But it would to her. As the afternoon wore on, she added to her stores more and more. If the bartender noticed what she was doing, he didn't let on — she wondered if he was on the level, if he was the kind of man she could cut into her operation. Having a friend on that side of the bar could be very lucrative… but she didn't want to risk getting thrown out, not this early, so she kept her activities discrete.

  The mid-afternoon came and went — the publican insisted on feeding her, confirming that Kieran had paid for her meals for the week and refusing to hear anything from her about payment.

  "That Kieran," she said with an affectionate shake of the head. "I did tell him that I'd brought enough coin to cover my stay." Worth planting that seed now — otherwise the publican might get curious about how she was affording her drinks.

  And she had every intention of buying more than a few drinks here in this pub. Because step three of the plan — after getting some appropriate clothing — was to talk her way into some information about this place. And what better place to bait people into loosening their tongues than the local pub?

  One way or another, she was going to find out where she was — and more importantly, how she could get back home.

  Chapter 8

  The afternoon wore on. When the sun was low in the sky, people began to filter into the bar — men and women both, she noticed with a pleased smile. It seemed the male-dominated state of affairs she remembered from last night was an anomaly — that, or the women got home early. Much more sensible, she thought with a grin. She'd developed as much of a backstory as she reasonably could with her limited insight into how things were around here — she knew precious little about medieval Scotland beyond what Kieran had told her, so she'd assembled a bare-bones narrative about being in town to visit a distant family friend. Her father, she'd say, was a farmer from a few counties away — that was, if anyone asked — and with any luck, they wouldn't go on to ask her too many questions she couldn't answer.

  To her relief, though, nobody seemed especially interested to hear her story. She was a pretty young woman at the bar who was willing to buy people drinks in exchange for their stories… and as for the curious stares she'd been getting the night before, well, she had a suspicion she'd sorted those out.

  Once, years ago, she'd gotten into running a scam with a friend that had, for complicated reasons, involved her taking a few meetings at a bank, pretending to be an important investor from a company in England. The company, of course, had no idea who she was, something that became clear only once the bank had made a few rather substantial transactions to her account… but she'd had to keep up appearances, and as such had needed to learn how to do a convincing English accent. Thankfully, her business associate had plenty of actor friends, one of whom moonlighted
as a dialect coach, and a few sessions with him allowed her to get a very reliable and very passable English accent under her belt. She'd practiced a little that morning in her room, double-checking that she remembered it well enough to use it, but sure enough, it had come right back. Like riding a bicycle. If the bicycle was soft vowels and over-active articulation.

  So it was her English accent that she used now, chatting with the people in the bar. She'd been a little worried it might antagonize the locals, an English accent rather than a Scottish one, especially after what Kieran had said about the tensions between the two countries… but she'd given a Scottish accent a go upstairs, based largely on what she'd heard from Kieran and from the publican, and it had been an absolute disaster. Irish was similarly not an option — her vocal cords, and lips and tongue simply were not onboard. English it had to be.

  She felt a little strange, putting on the accent of the woman she was accused of resembling so closely… but what other option did she have? Sticking with her bizarre American accent was going to get her a lot more curious looks than she was willing to put up with. She needed to blend in better than that — and speaking with an accent that technically didn't even exist yet wasn't going to help.

  God, this was strange, she reflected as she headed downstairs for dinner, bracing herself for the noisy bustle she was about to step into. She kept waiting for the inevitable mental breakdown to come… and so far, nothing. Maybe it was because she was being so proactive in making plans to get herself settled in. If she stopped working, she'd probably go insane. Best to keep her focus, then. Tonight's goal — listen to as many stories about the area as she could to try to get a sense of just what was going on with the alleged time-traveling women taking up residence in the area. She supposed it would be too much to hope for one of them to stop by… from what Kieran had said, they tended to stick to the castle. Well, that was alright. She could get plenty of information without their input. If anything, that was the best way to go — get background info before going to the source. You couldn't trust just one person to tell the truth. A consensus was much more reliable.