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the time is right.” He kissed the top of her head and slipped past her.
    She let him go. When she finally checked on him in the study, he pretended not to notice her. Only a few minutes later he heard her in the kitchen, cleaning up the mess he’d made. That should keep her out of his hair for a good time. He had to finish the journal. He had to know everything Duncan Douglas had known.

    ****

    Kenna surveyed the spotless white tile floor of the kitchen. No one would ever suspect half the fridge had been scattered about the room only a few hours before. Would the warlord always be so aggressive with his food? Did he even know how to use silverware? She was almost dreading the next time she had to feed him.
    Rosa would be returning this morning. After learning of her uncle’s sudden death, she’d cut her vacation short and wanted to be with the family in their time of need. Kenna had protested, but the stubborn woman refused to listen. How would she react to Ian?
    Kenna wanted to make it as easy on her as possible so she’d cleaned the mess in the kitchen. Gazing out the window over the sink, she watched the night sky lightening with the coming dawn. For some reason, she felt daylight would change everything. She couldn’t keep Ian a secret forever. What would she tell people about him? He had to stay as a guest in the house. She couldn’t throw him out in the streets of Los Angeles alone.
    She had to come up with a plausible story. Considering he was a six-foot-six, heavily muscled, well-armed Scottish warlord who had just learned how to turn on lights and only discovered television about twenty minutes ago, her options were going to be rather limited.
    “Kenna!” Ian shouted from her uncle’s study. “What is the meaning of this?”
    She rolled her eyes and went into the room.
    Now what?
    First he’d had questions about the books. Then the light switches, the telephone and the gas fireplace lit by remote control. Since he’d found the television, he hadn’t stopped with the questions.
    Ian was seated behind the desk, but now his focus was on the flat-screen television in the wooden cabinet along the wall, instead of on the journal. She suspected he’d finished reading it anyway. Since he knew Gaelic, it wouldn’t take him as long as it had her. He gripped the remote control tightly in his hand as he watched the morning news.
    “What is the meaning of what?” she wondered with a casual shrug. It was only the weather.
    “How does this woman move the clouds?” He watched in rapt fascination as the weather girl discussed another cold front moving in from the north, her hands sweeping across the moving digital images on the screen. “Does she have the power to control the weather?”
    How did she explain this one? Despite how foreign the future must be for Ian, he learned fast. “She’s not controlling the weather, she’s telling it,” Kenna said. “We have ways of predicting the weather so we know when it’s going to rain or snow and what the temperature will be.”
    “Then this is nothing new,” he concluded. “We had this in my time as well. We knew it was going to rain when the gulls came in off the sea.”
    Not quite as scientifically accurate, but then, who the hell was she to argue? She knew nothing of his time. If Ian had known his land well enough he’d probably notice if one rock was out of place, and he’d damn well know what kind of weather to expect. “It’s the same idea,” she said. “People nowadays are too busy to watch birds. We watch the news instead.”
    “I like this news. It is a good thing for people to watch.”
    Kenna couldn’t argue watching the news was informative, but it was also so depressing that she didn’t usually bother with it. Not on a regular basis anyway. Right now it was probably the best thing for Ian to be watching. Between the stories and the commercials, he was quickly absorbing the twenty-first century.
    “And coming up next this morning, we’ll