Love Came Just in Time (28 page)

Then there were the people who hastened past him without marking him. He was pushed and jostled as more souls than he had ever seen in the whole of his life swelled around him.

The confusion, the noise, the heat and the mass of humanity were almost enough to bring him to his knees weeping with uncertainty. He struggled to regain his courage—something he had never had trouble with in the past. But who could blame him? By the saints, this was a world he'd never expected, full of sights and sounds he could hardly digest. He clutched his hands together only to realize he was clutching Jane's hand between the both of his. He looked at her to find she was staring at him with something akin to pity in her eyes.

“I . . . I fear . . .” His voice cracked. “So many people,” he managed.

She smiled, a gentle smile that almost had him kneeling at her feet in gratitude.

“We'll take a cab to my place,” she said, giving his hand a squeeze. “You'll feel better once you've had a shower and something decent to eat.”

Eat
was the one thing he did understand at present, so he nodded over that and let her lead him into a little yellow car that suddenly stopped in front of them. He sat on the strange bench and closed his eyes as the car lurched forward, the driver swearing and bellowing his displeasure at those around him.

Ian began to pray.

It seemed to take forever until the car stopped at their destination. Jane handed the man pieces of paper that Ian surmised served as payment. Ian followed her from the car and into a tall, bricked keep. He sighed in relief at the sight of steps. At least there would be no more torture in the little box that went up and down.

“You'll probably want to eat first,” Jane said after they had climbed the steps and she had led him through a doorway she had opened with a key. “Stand here and don't move.”

Ian stood and he didn't move. He didn't dare. Her dwelling was a curious mixture of only black and white and he feared to soil anything he might touch. He watched as Jane came from another part of her house carrying a goodly bit of cloth. She spread it over a strangely cushioned bench, then motioned for him to sit.

“I'll bring you something to eat, then I'll go see if I can round up some clothes for you. You're not going to want to wear what you've got on much longer.”

“Aye, it could bear a washing.”

She looked skeptical that such a thing might suffice, but he didn't argue. His belly was nigh to burning a hole in his middle and he didn't want to distract her from her errand in the kitchen.

Within moments, Ian was holding a strange, round trencher with something called a BLT piled atop it. It was very edible and he ingested several, depleting Jane's loaf of bread, but unable to apologize for it. It had been a very long time since he'd had anything fit for a man to consume. After they had eaten, Jane took away their trenchers and headed toward a black box in the corner.

“Here's the television. You can change the channel if you want to. I'll be back in about an hour.”

Ian started to say “fine,” then gasped in surprise as Jane touched the box. It sprang to life, or rather the people trapped inside the contrivance sprang to life. Ian could only gape at the poor souls, unsure if he should try to rescue them or not.

“Ian? You okay?”

Ian looked up at her, still speechless.

“I know,” she said with a sigh. “Saturday afternoon TV. It's pretty bad, but it'll keep you entertained. Here's the remote.”

And with that, she left.

He was alone with the television.

By the saints, 'twas almost as frightening as contemplating another trip into the Fergusson's dungeon.

At the thought of that, he felt his eyes narrow of their own accord. Jane was a Fergusson, no matter how far removed she was. Had she turned on the beast to torment him?

He sat on the soft bench in her house and pondered that. Then he looked at the black sticklike thing she had placed into his hand. He pressed upon it and jumped at what happened inside the television. It was too horrifying to be believed. He pressed what he'd pressed before and, by the blessed saints, the group of players trapped inside changed yet again.

He wished somehow that Jane hadn't left him alone.

“Dolt,” he muttered to himself. He was a score and fourteen, surely old enough to have lost his fear of things he didn't understand. This was a Future creation. There was no dark magic about it. It was just another marvel the men of the Future had invented to entertain themselves—the saints pity the poor fools they had shrunk and trapped inside the box to provide the amusement.

Could he rescue them? He gave that serious thought before deciding that perhaps that was what he needed to do. He leaned further up on the edge of the bench. The television paid him no heed. He rose slowly and approached as quietly as he could. His body was still battered, but he felt better than he had before. Another fortnight, and he would be fully himself again—if he survived an afternoon alone with the beast in front of him.

The television gave no sign of having marked his approach, so he moved even closer. Ian reached out to touch the smooth surface and jerked his hand back as the beast bit him with invisible teeth.

Ian sucked upon his fingers. As tempted as he was to do a bit of rescuing with his sword, he decided that perhaps patience was a virtue he could practice that afternoon. He retreated to his square of cloth and sat down again, eyeing the television with disfavor. Cheeky beast. Then he realized the players inside were speaking in Jane's English and he saw the benefits of paying close attention to them.

But despite himself, he couldn't help but wish Jane would hurry with her errands.

JANE STOOD IN her bedroom several hours later, leaned on her dresser and stared at herself in the mirror, and wondered if she would be better off to lock her door and forget what lay outside it. Somehow, though, she suspected locking it wasn't necessary to keep the non-native out. He didn't particularly seem up to turning the handle. Either he was a complete wacko, he was from a different planet, or he was from where he said he was.

Scotland, the Year of Our Lord 1313.

But she didn't want to think about how that could be possible.

Unfortunately, it was a conclusion she was having a hard time avoiding, and that had everything to do with the afternoon and evening's events. She'd never considered herself a Sir Gallahad type, but she had done more rescuing in the past eight hours than Sir G. had likely done in his entire life.

Jane had initially—and with no small bit of trepidation—left Ian at home to watch television. She'd warned him under pain of death not to touch anything. She wouldn't have been surprised in the least to have returned and found her building belching smoke and fire into the afternoon air. She'd been relieved to find Ian in the same place she'd left him: gaping at the TV. He'd jumped half a foot when she'd touched his shoulder. She'd then found herself standing stock-still with a sword at her throat.

Whatever else she could say about Ian MacLeod, she had to admit he was apparently a helluva swordsman.

Once she'd been able to breathe again, she'd ushered Ian to the bathroom. She'd soon heard a serious clanking noise and had hurried to investigate only to find he had peed in the sink and was in the process of taking apart her plumbing. She'd saved him from being bonked over the head with her showerhead—by her. The last thing she needed was to have to call the super and ask him to come put her powder room back together. Deciding that perhaps Ian's next foray into the bathroom could wait, she'd taken him back to the kitchen for a second lunch.

That had precipitated his sudden love affair with the chrome toaster. Jane had barely managed to throw together a tuna casserole before she'd had to announce “stop” in a very loud voice to keep him from completing his investigation of the toaster insides with a sterling silver butter knife. He'd transferred his attentions to the outlet, necessitating a stern command that he park himself at the table with his hands empty and in plain sight.

He had subsequently looked at what had come out of the oven as if he'd never seen anything like it before in his life. She was the first to admit she was a lousy cook, but surely her offering hadn't merited such tentative pokes with a fork into the depths of the casserole dish. Apparently Ian's appetite was less threatened by her potato-chip crust than Ian was, because it induced him to wolf down the entire thing without missing a beat.

She'd headed him back into the bathroom again with grooming aids that hopefully wouldn't get him into too much trouble, and left him to it. Then she'd come into her room, leaned on her dresser, and looked at herself, wondering what had possessed her to bring Ian home. And that brought her back to her initial problem of determining his origins: loony bin or fourteenth-century Scotland. She fervently hoped there was a difference.

Well, there was no sense in postponing the inevitable any longer. She would have to go out, find out the truth, and then figure out what to do about it. Maybe she could help him find his family and get him out of her life so she could get back to darts and gathers.

Somehow, though, after what she'd been through in the past eight hours, producing wedding gowns just didn't sound all that exciting anymore.

She took a deep breath and walked to her bedroom door. The apartment was minuscule, but it was hers alone. It had reminded her of drafty servants' quarters in some bad eighteenth-century penny novel and that had seemed so appropriate, she hadn't been able to pass it up. That and she could afford it. The down side was that there wasn't some long, elegant hallway separating her from the living room so she would have its length to get a good grip on herself.

She opened the door and stepped out into the living room/dining room/kitchen combination and for the second time that day found herself gaping at Ian MacLeod. Only this time terror had nothing at all to do with her speechless condition. He had risen to greet her and stood in front of her couch with his hands clasped behind him, a grave smile on his face. She was greatly tempted to swoon, a good, old-fashioned, antebellum kind of swoon. Instead, she shut her mouth and commanded her knees to remain steady.

He'd shaved. She noticed that right off. Amazingly enough, beneath that ratty beard lurked a granitelike jaw, chiseled cheekbones, and a full, pouty lower lip that had her biting hers in self-defense. She wondered if fanning herself would give the skyrocketing of her blood pressure away. And then there was his eyes, a vivid blue that made them seem as if they leaped from his face. They were eyes she could have lost herself in for centuries and not cared one bit about the passage of time.

His shoulders were impossibly broad and she was vaguely disappointed that she'd bought him an extra-large tee shirt.
Should have picked up that medium,
she thought with regret. It wouldn't have been as good as a wet tee shirt, but she wouldn't have quibbled. All in all, Ian MacLeod was the most handsome man she had ever laid eyes on in the whole of her twenty-nine years. Something nagged at her, but she shoved it aside in favor of more lusting. She looked lower and saw that his jeans hugged him most securely—and then it hit her what was so dreadfully wrong with the picture.

He was wearing boxer shorts.

On the outside of his jeans.

She looked up, startled, only to find that he'd turned himself around to look at a noise from the kitchen end of the living room and she got an eyeful of his long, glorious dark hair—tied back with a bright pink bow. The only relief she felt was knowing it was something he'd unearthed from one of her bathroom drawers.

But before she could say anything else, he'd turned back to her and given her another of his smiles, only this one wasn't grave. It was a heart stopper.

“My thanks for the clothing,” he said, with a little bow. “Passing comfortable, these long-legged trews.” He pulled at his jeans, then lovingly caressed the boxer shorts with the smiley faces on them. “Very cheerful and pleasing to the eye.”

Jane didn't have the heart to tell him he had them on in the wrong order. Besides, it was New York. No one would look at him twice.

“Do you perchance have a map?” he asked, his lilt taking her for another roller-coaster ride. “I've a need to find my cousin as soon as may be and I'd best know where I am now. I'm not familiar with New York.”

“Sure,” Jane said. She had an atlas. She'd bought it her first month at Miss Witherspoon's, based on her certainty that she'd be traveling to all the fashion hot spots soon and it would be best to know where she was headed.

It was, unsurprisingly, still in shrink-wrap. It had been, after all, a very expensive atlas.

But who better to use it on than a lunatic sporting a pink bow and wondering where New York found itself in the grander global scheme of things? Jane got the atlas and sat down next to Ian on the couch. She opened up to the world and then looked at Ian to see if anything was ringing a bell for him yet.

He was looking at it blankly.

Jane pointed carefully to the British Isles. “Scotland,” she said. “I think the Highlands are up there.”

Ian looked the faintest bit relieved to see something that was apparently familiar. “Aye,” he said with a gulp. “And there's Inverness, Edinburgh. Those places I know. Now, where are we? Lower down?”

“A bit to the left,” she said, sliding her finger across the Atlantic and stopping on Manhattan. “We're on a little island here.”

Ian gaped. “Across the sea?”

“Across the sea.”

“But,” he spluttered, “how did I come across the sea?”