A gust of wind swirled Jack’s hair around. “Right. Well, I was reworking a scene not long before the end—or before the betrayal that led to the end, anyway—and somehow, I couldn’t find Wallace any more. I knew the fighter and the tactician, but I’d lost the man.”
I jammed my hands deeper into my pockets. “When you talk about the story, you get this inward look. It’s like you can see it all playing out inside your mind.”
He grinned at me. “Well, that was the problem, y’see. Because I could see it all so clearly. Until the final days—his final days. Then it vanished. He was totally gone from me. I wrote it anyway, but when I handed in the final draft, Rebecca called me on it.”
“Rebecca,” I said again, not even caring that I sounded like an idiot. “Rebecca, your agent.”
He grinned at me. “Yes. Rebecca my agent called me on it. So I headed to the circle. It wouldn’t have been one Wallace would have found—I was too far north, writing near home, but it was of a similar look to those down south. The problem was all the damnable tourists, of course. So that’s why I left, in the end.”
“Yeah —I hadn’t expected to find that bus there, either. Or Gerald, for that matter.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Gerald?”
I grinned at him. “Oh, just someone I met who was looking for his own Scottish warrior.”
“Ah. Well, I’m sorry how that all turned out,” he said, quietly. “Or rather, for how unhappy it made you. I didn’t want to add to it.”
“I’m okay,” I said, lightly. And as I said it, I knew it was true. “I have to go back to Chicago, but I think I really did find what I was looking for here, after all.”
He leaned against the ancient stone. “And ye’ll be back someday, aye?”
“I hope so.”
“I do, too.” He smiled at me then, and brushed the sleeve of his coat. “Well, we’d best be off, before the Lothian and Borders Police start combing the countryside for ye.”
“Just a minute,” I said, and in two strides I was in front of him with his jacket lapels in my hands. I believe I actually muffled his startled exclamation when the kiss began, but he got the idea pretty quickly. When I pulled away from him so we could both catch our breath, he clasped my hands in his.
“Emma Sheridan, I did not see that coming,” he said, and his slow smile erased the worry he’d been wearing since we’d climbed the hillside.
“I just wanted to see if it would be as nice as the last one,” I said.
“And?”
I thought a minute. “Well, you do taste a bit of Irn-Bru and—maybe peppermint? But it’s a surprisingly nice combination at this hour of the morning.”
He kissed me again, then, perhaps to give me the opportunity to solidify my opinion, and the chill of the morning suddenly fell away. The eagle cried out in the distance once more, and a sliver of yellow daylight shone down and touched the top of the sunstone.
“So, all this time, ye thought Rebecca was my girlfriend?”
“Well, only since I determined you’re not wearing a ring. Before that I thought she was your wife.”
He laughed a little, low in his throat. “No wife,” he said. “No girlfriend, either. Not for a while, anyway.” He brushed my hair away from my face, and tucked a loose strand behind my ear.
“I have read the book, y’know.”
“The book? OUTLANDER, you mean?”
He nodded. “Twice, in fact. And just to be clear, I’m no Jamie Fraser.” He crinkled his eyes at me. “I’m not exactly a virgin, for starters.”
I thought for a moment. “Well, as long as you bear no resemblance to Black Jack Randall either, I think I can live with that.”
He clapped a hand over his heart. “Ye wound me, Emma. And I’ll have ye know, that man’s name is actually Jonathan.”
“It is indeed. Jonathan Wolverton Randall, to be exact.”
I grinned up at him, and using the flat of my hand, pushed him back against the mammoth stone. Holding him in place, I leaned back and ran my other hand down the front of his coat. “So, you know what She says about why women love men in kilts?”
“She?”
“Yes, She. With a capital ‘S’. As in Herself. Your lovely friend the author.”
He smiled down at me. “Okay, I’ll bite. What does She say?”
“She says it’s because we know in the back of our minds that you can have us up against the nearest wall in under a second.”
He grinned, and spun me around so the cold stone pressed against my back. Undid the top button of my coat and kissed me under the line of my jaw.