Page 92 of Blood of the Thistle

She glanced up. “Oh, you must have seen... I didn’t see you.”

Bram regretted mentioning it, which essentially announced that he’d been watching her. “I was crossing the yard.”

“And stopped to watch?”

There was no accusation in the question, only mild surprise, but he found himself needlessly clarifying, “For a wee bit. I was attempting to discover what ye were about.”

Anastasia studied him for a moment before looking away. “I was trying to teach them a game, Duck, Duck, Goose.”

“Smacking heads and running in circles is a game?”

The faintest smile touched her mouth, and Bram experienced the ridiculous satisfaction of having put it there.

Anastasia shrugged. “They seemed to enjoy it.”

Bram lowered himself onto a flat rock nearby. “Aye, they did. The squeals carried for miles, nae doubt.”

A soft and small smile touched her mouth but didn’t stay long.

“Ye are... ye seem melancholy today.”

Anastasia scratched her finger in the sand again. “I’m fine.” She drew another line through the sand and confessed, “I was thinking about home.”

For several moments there was only the quiet rush of water over the stones. He looked toward the sea rather than at her, remembering another evening beneath a darkening sky when Anastasia had clung desperately to his arm and thought for sure something decisive was about to happen.

“Have ye felt it again?”

She knew immediately what he meant. “No. And... now I’m afraid I won’t ever again. I don’t even know why I came here in the first place, or what made it happen or why it almost seemed to happen again that night and then... didn’t. So how am I supposed to know whether it ever will again?”

He had no answer for that.

Anastasia wrapped her arms loosely around her bent knees. “What happens to me if I can’t?” she asked, sounding dangerously close to tears.

She was watching him now, and the shattering weight of the query struck him. She was asking what became of the entirety of a life displaced by seven centuries, and Bram could offer her nothing.

“I dinna ken,” he admitted.

“Yeah.” She looked away. “Neither do I.”

“Ye have a place here for as long as ye want it.”

“I might have guessed you would say that. And don’t get me wrong, I am grateful.”

“But?”

Her mouth twisted. “But what? I want to go home.”

The words should not have surprised him, he realized. Of course she wanted to go home. She had parents who loved her, a sister and niece and nephew she spoke of with great affection, children she taught and a life she had neither abandoned nor willingly left behind. Only a selfish man would expect a few weeks in his company and several days of Highland hospitality to outweigh all of that.

Still, the words rankled.

I want to go home.

Away from Craig na Coille. Away from Scotland. Away from him.

Aye, but what reason had he given her to want otherwise?

Bram rubbed a hand across his jaw and looked out over the water, disliking the answer.