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“Olivia Bennett.”
“From where?”
That, at least, had an answer. “Boston.”
His eyes moved over her clothes again.
“Boston. The Americas,” he repeated. “And what are ye doing on my road?”
Olivia glanced toward the ponies below, then at the casks strapped across their backs.
Whisky casks.
She closed her eyes, but when she opened them again, the stranger was still there, armed, and watching her. Not a hallucination at all.
Chapter 6
Jamie
Glenbrae, Scotland
1786
Jamie had never been in love with a pair of boots before, though as he slowed the mare on the rain-dark hillside and took in the strange woman standing along his smuggling route, wearing a pair of boots he’d never seen the like of, he was willing to admit the possibility had presented itself under unusually persuasive circumstances.
The woman herself was difficult to ignore, but he had no intention of admitting that.
She stood in the wet grass with one hand curled at her side and the other brushing mud from the knee of odd trousers no respectable woman would have dared to wear. Dark hair clung to her shoulders and the coat fastened with tiny metal teeth instead of buttons. She looked exhausted, furious, and thoroughly misplaced, as if the hill had spit her out from some faraway place.
His gaze settled on the boots again. Black leather fitted close around her ankles and disappeared beneath the strange black trousers, stitched with a precision Jamie had never seen, while the soles were thick enough for Highland weather without being clumsy and cut with deep ridges that looked made for gripping wet stone. He’d seen fine ladies’ slippers from Edinburgh, sailors’ boots from Glasgow, officers’ polished leather that looked like the wearer had never stepped willingly into the mud, but these… these had been made by someone who understood the terrain and spent a great deal of time traipsing through mud and climbing rocks.
Tearing his gaze from the footgear, Jamie narrowed his eyes at the woman standing dangerously close to what he’d believed was hidden.
“Stad an sin!” he called, tightening his hold on the reins as the mare shifted beneath him, her ears flicking toward the stranger while rainwater slid from the leather of the bridle.
The woman looked up at him without moving.
“I said stop there,” he repeated in English.
“I heard you.”
Her accent struck him first as foreign and then familiar in the way ports made distant places half-known. Not English, certainly, and not Lowland Scots. American, perhaps, though she sounded nothing like the soft-voiced merchant’s daughters he’d heard near Greenock. This woman clipped some words, flattened others, and sounded like no one he’d ever heard before.
Jamie swung down from the saddle, keeping hold of the reins. The mare stamped once behind him and shook rain from her mane as he took a few steps closer, enough to see that the woman had muddied both knees, had a scrape across her cheek, and looked confused, though she appeared otherwise unhurt.
She’d told him she was from Boston. An American, then. Jamie had always had an ear for accents. But why was Mistress Olivia Bennett all the way out here in the Highlands, alone, standing above a route no stranger should know existed?
He knew what he must look like to her. A Highlander in a rain-heavy coat and tartan waistcoat, mud on his boots and a sword at his hip, appearing out of the mist.
While the lass… she looked like trouble.
Still, his gaze dropped again. The boots really were extraordinary.
“Where did ye get them?”
Her expression changed from wary to incredulous. “Excuse me?”
“The boots.”
