Scotland to the Max

by Grace Burrowes

  “Kiss me,” Max said. “You’re less likely to yell that way, and so am I.”

  Good God in a plaid nightgown, she could kiss. Her mouth was diabolical, plundering his wits and his almighty determination to make this last. She sank onto him one relentless slide, teasing him with her tongue all the way down.

  Then she started to move, and Max could only hang on and try to think of a formula to express the effect of the adiabatic lapse rate between the elevation of the Hall and the elevation of the castle parapets.

  Air cooled as elevation increased, but Max was growing hotter by the second. “Jeannie, slow down.”

  She sped up.

  “I won’t last… God, that feels… sublime.”

  She’d shifted the angle and groaned against his shoulder. Something stumbled through Max’s too pleasure-drunk mind to qualify as a thought:

  Her breasts. Fine notion, and when he applied a hint of pressure, Jeannie’s groan drifted into a sigh. She did not yell—she didn’t need to yell for Max to know she’d found satisfaction yet again. As much as he wanted to spend the next twenty years with her on the ever-so-comfy couch, he didn’t dare.

  Her breath fanned past his ear. “Maxwell Maitland, you are so…” She kissed his cheek and stroked his hair.

  “I am so not done with you. Hold on.”

  He shifted them, still joined, so Jeannie was on her back. The couch was the perfect length for him to brace his feet against the armrest, and bliss was too tame a word for the pleasure of making love with Jeannie.

  Max kept it sweet and slow for a while, giving Jeannie a chance to catch her breath.

  “I have two more condoms,” Jeannie whispered. “Don’t hold back on my account.”

  While Max had a plane to catch. The sheer, howling frustration of that put an end to his lazy loving. Jeannie hooked her ankles at his back, and Max got serious.

  “This is too…” Whatever thought Jeannie had intended to express got lost in a deep, wet kiss. “Max, I’m going to…”

  “No yelling,” he managed just before his restraint broke, and any pretenses of finesse shattered with it. He gathered Jeannie close and gave himself up to transcendent satisfaction. She clung to him with a gratifying desperation, and when Max drifted down from an intimacy beyond description, she pulled his discarded flannel shirt from a corner of the couch and draped it over his back.

  “I did not precisely yell,” Jeannie said some minutes later. “It was a very near thing.”

  Max left off nibbling her earlobe. “Same here.” He held her, trying to hang on to the glow, the peace, the sense of a world put right, but they were on a couch in the project office, the baby asleep in the next room, and trouble awaited them in the morning.

  “You have to get up first,” Jeannie said, stroking his backside. “I will look fondly upon this couch all the rest of my days.”

  Max wallowed for the duration of three more caresses to his butt, then shifted off of her. By the glow of the desk lamp, they tidied up and dressed, though with each restored article of clothing, Max felt the weight of reality settling more heavily.

  “We should probably pack up the playpen,” he said, stashing Jeannie’s underpants in his pocket.

  “So Sutherland won’t make a fuss. Right. Are you going to keep my unders?”

  “Yes, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind. What did you do with the—?”

  “Flushed it.” Bad for the old pipes, but Max was damned if he’d leave that evidence in the trash for Sutherland to come upon.

  “Henry will soon be ready for his middle-of-the-night bottle,” Jeannie said. “What will you do about the reports?”

  The solution to that problem popped into Max’s head all of a piece, which was one of the benefits of taking a break from any challenge. He fired up the laptop and took the chair behind Jeannie’s desk.

  “You give Henry his bottle, and I’ll upload the reports to the secure storage box.”

  Jeannie fished a half-size baby bottle out of the diaper bag. “What good will that do?”

  “Funny thing about the storage box,” Max said, logging in. “If you’re not using the server it initially associated with your computer’s address, it will ask for two-factor ID and a password reset.”

  “I recall reading that, but what’s the—?” Henry made a noise louder than a sigh, not quite a whimper. “That child…”

  She went into the next room and emerged with a sleepy baby in her arms. “Your pillow-fort friends are gone for now, my boy, but they’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Henry beamed at Max and waved a fist, and Max spared a moment to resent the hell out of Sutherland’s tantrums when a happy baby deserved cuddling and nuzzling.

  “Same to you, little dude. Just give me a minute while you down a pint.” Max clicked a few more keys, typed in a few commands, and watched half a menu fade into unavailability. “Technology is our friend.”

  “Sutherland is locked out of the files?”

  “When he tries to reset his password, he will be, though he’ll probably waste a lot of time figuring that out, and I can’t override his lockout for forty-eight hours. He’ll lock the whole online storage box if he tries to log in more than three times. Pete’s a great fan of cybersecurity.”

  While Jeannie gave Henry his bottle, Max folded up the playpen and shoved it between a pair of modular dividers.

  When Henry had graced the night air with a manly burp, Max shouldered the diaper bag and escorted Jeannie down the paths to the Hall. The going was slow, though the moon hadn’t set, and through the darkened wood and across the lawn to the Hall’s kitchen entrance, Max was plagued by two questions.

  First, how to link the two buildings. That issue beat like an ostinato in his head, and like most engineering problems, it wanted time and imagination to solve. Max had the imagination, but the time was running out.

  Which raised the second question: Why in the name of all that was profitable was Sutherland up to no good now? He wasn’t stupid, and he was greedy. Max planned to make all of the investors a lot of money with the Brodie Castle project. Sutherland was jeopardizing that profit, playing fast and loose with contract language, and beyond doubt compromising sound business ethics to get a competent and legally educated manager off the project.

  And Max had no idea why. Until that riddle was solved, he’d be fighting with one hand tied behind his back.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Why in the hell are all these men here?” And a few women. Pete still hadn’t grown accustomed to seeing women in hard hats, wielding jackhammers, power saws, and other tools. Every work site had a few, but the ladies seemed disproportionately well represented on the Brodie Castle crews.

  “They work here,” Max Maitland replied. “Are you ready to tour the cellars and dungeons?”

  A power saw started up that felt like it was cutting through Pete’s last nerve. Again.

  “Tell these damned crews to go home.”

  “Cannae do that, Mr. Sutherland,” the site foreman said. He was a big lummox in a dusty black kilt that went well with his unshaven cheeks and dark hair. “We’ve a shinty tournament next weekend and traded next Friday for this Saturday. The men take their shinty matches seriously.”

  “What’s shinty?”

  “You should try it,” Maitland said. “I’m sure the men can find you some equipment. It’s a sort of toned-down version of field hockey. Very genteel, takes a lot of finesse.”

  The site manager was seized with a fit of coughing, though this was not a dusty site.

  “Perhaps I will. I played ice hockey as a kid in New York, and you don’t forget the moves.” Most of which these yokels were likely to have seen only on their TVs.

  “The main entrance to the lower floors is over here,” Maitland said, leading the way to yet another staircase of spiraling stone.

  The jackhammer, which had been mercifully silent for the past ten minutes, started up in addition to the power saw. On a floor above,
at least three hammers were pounding in no discernible rhythm.

  And then—as if the roiling in Pete’s gut, the cesspit in his mouth, and the throbbing in his temples weren’t enough—a pair of somebodies began to sing in ragged harmony.

  “I don’t need to see the damned cellars. They will reek of mildew and dirt, and we aren’t putting any guests down there anyway.”

  The site manager crossed muscular arms and widened his stance. “The wine cellar is a work of art, the pantries show a genius for organization, and Countess Brenna herself oversaw the modernizing of the kitchens. Countess Eulie expanded them during the reign of Edward, and during the First World War, no less than six hundred wounded soldiers passed through the infirmary that Countess Mary made from the Hall’s servant’s quarters.”

  Maitland paused at the top of the steps. “During the Second World War,” he said, “Countess Lindsey set up the infirmary again, and the Hall still has the remains of an operating theater below the family wing. The number of wounded to pass through the Hall in its hospital days was in the thousands.”

  He said this as if ancient history had a bearing on the present project. “All very interesting, but I’ve seen cellars and basements before, and they are not a source of significant concern. We’ll build them out into functional spaces—storage, kitchens, laundry, whatever—and the public will never see them.”

  Maitland and the site foreman were exchanging an unreadable look. The foreman had an odd name—MacFleagle, Flannery, something with an F—but then, Pete had spent the evening drinking with some guy named Dinty and a woman named Morgan.

  Quaint as hell, while the hangover Pete had woken up with was serious pain.

  “Have ye seen enough, then?” the foreman asked. “We have ghosts too, you know. The first earl and his lady are often seen on the parapets under a quarter moon, and others say they’ve seen the pair of them fishing along the Dee. As a boy, I once—”

  Pete marched off toward the main doors, great wooden monstrosities that doubtless went back to the Crusades.

  “I don’t give a royal fart about some long-dead countess, no matter how exquisitely she folded the linen or how many drunken shepherd boys think they’ve seen her flying around the castle towers on her broom—”

  A woman called something from up above—gardyloo?—and a hammer sailed down to land an inch from Pete’s loafer.

  The power saw paused—“Sorry! M’ foot slipped!” the female voice called—and then resumed.

  “Maitland, this is not a safe work site if hammers can land on an investor’s head.”

  “It’s a safe work site,” the site manager replied. “But we insist on hard hats and escorts for a reason, Mr. Sutherland. You ought to be wearing boots as well, but you’ve been to enough work sites that you know that.”

  And Mr. Highland Fling ought to be wearing something other than a skirt.

  Pete kicked the hammer aside. “I’ve seen enough here. I suppose now we hike down to the Hall?” Where, please God, no hammers, jackhammers, power saws, or operatic hopefuls were to be found. “Maybe we should invest in a mule train, channel a little Grand Canyon charm to go with our flying countesses and fishing earls.”

  “You’re funny,” the site manager said. “Mr. Maitland, shall I have a wee wander down to the Hall with you, or stay up here where I can get some work done?”

  The question, while good-humored and deferential, held some vague insult.

  “Pete, do you have any questions for Fergus?” Maitland asked.

  Pete tried to get the damned door open—it had a huge, carved handle, but not a doorknob. The matching door didn’t budge either.

  “Over here,” the site foreman said, holding open a smaller door cut into the main doors.

  Pete had to duck through it, and the sunshine was murderous even with dark glasses, but at least the noise wasn’t as bad outside.

  Maitland and Fergus joined him on the front portico.

  “I don’t have any questions for Fergus,” Pete said, “but I do want whoever dropped that hammer fired. That was a lawsuit right there, if I’d been any other visitor. I expect better from your site management, Max.”

  Maitland plucked a sprig of some silvery-green plant growing out of a stone pot. “One of the advantages of doing business here is that nobody’s personal-injury-suit happy. There are no medical bills to speak of, and even you had to sign a release before we let you set foot in this castle this morning. Volenti non fit injuria.”

  “To one consenting,” Fergus said, “no wrong can be done.”

  Was he translating or sucking up to the boss? “In any case, I want that woman fired.”

  “Can’t do that, Mr. Sutherland,” Fergus said. “Enjoy your tour of the Hall, and do join us for a shinty scrimmage next time you’re in the neighborhood.”

  He disappeared through the little door, which for a guy with all his bulk should have been ungainly, but Fergus was nimble, and his departure would make the rest of the morning easier to manage.

  “Why can’t he fire somebody who throws tools around and nearly gets me killed?” Pete asked. “Is it some damned union thing?”

  Maitland started walking toward the project office, a pretty little French farmhouse sort of building in a corner of the courtyard.

  “No women are assigned to the carpentry crew this morning, and nobody’s scheduled to work on that balcony for at least a month.”

  “So you don’t know who’s responsible for the accident?”

  “That castle has belonged to the lords and ladies of Strathdee for centuries—we’re merely leasing it—and you had just insulted Countess Brenna herself. You’re in a haunted Scottish castle. You figure it out.”

  A scent filled the air, fresh, floral, bracing, like expensive soap. Pete wasn’t sure if he liked it or not, though he for damned certain didn’t like being told a ghost had almost dropped a hammer on his foot.

  The tour of the Hall was eerily quiet, and the place was so damned big, and so full of staircases, ramps, and creaky elevators, Pete felt as if he’d been trapped in the labyrinth of Hangover Hell. The last stop on the tour was the earl’s apartment, which according to the contract would remain available to Elias Brodie and his family members or descendants throughout the lease period.

  The project controller lady was in residence—how convenient for Maitland. And whaddya know, she had a kid, a chubby little infant at the squally, squirmy stage, who appealed to Pete about as much as another glass of single malt would.

  “Did you get the reports?” the lady asked, kid on her hip. The baby was fussing, trying to get sticky little fingers wrapped around his mom’s hair.

  “No, as a matter of fact, I’ll need a hard copy. Something wrong with the internet at my rental cottage.”

  “We have internet here,” Maitland said, giving the kid a finger to grab. “Feel free to download. The internet password is MichaelandBrenna, all one word.”

  “We can set you up in the main kitchen and make you something to eat,” the woman added. “Lunchtime has come and gone, and few of us work well on an empty stomach.”

  For the love of God, not food. “The problem might be with the online storage box. Damned websites are always updating and getting out of sync.”

  Maitland got out his phone, punched a few keys. “You’ve locked the storage box, Pete. Did you forget your password?”

  “No, I did not forget my password. The site didn’t recognize my addy, or something. Just print me out a hard copy of the reports, and I’ll take tomorrow to study them.” Because somewhere in those reports was bound to be a data-entry error, a bad formula, something Pete could use for further leverage to get Maitland off the project.

  Pete would send the reports to Shayla, who could spot a mistake on a spreadsheet from forty yards out. She’d been the one to tell him to ask for the supporting data, though Pete still wasn’t sure what had been behind her request.

  “When did you lock the storage box?” Maitland asked, putting the p
hone away.

  “The storage box locked me out this morning.”

  “Then none of us can get into it for forty-eight hours, cybersecurity being what it is. You’ll need me and at least one other board member to override your lockout, but even we can’t do that until Monday morning.”

  “Then print out the original files that you generated prior to uploading.”

  “I don’t keep them on my laptop,” the woman said. “They all go to secure storage, per project protocol. You don’t look well, Mr. Sutherland. Is the jet lag catching up with you?”

  Pete did not feel well. He felt like blowing up this whole damned project, though Shayla wouldn’t be happy if he did that, and as of yesterday, Mrs. Sutherland had expressed an interest in the castle as well.

  “I have so many international frequent-flier miles I could practically buy the castle with them,” Pete said. An exaggeration, and most of those miles were Mrs. Sutherland’s trips to this godforsaken backward corner of civilization.

  The kid began to fuss, and Pete’s headache joined his bellyache, along with a thousand other locations of bodily misery. A wet sound emanated from the baby’s backside, and a stink worse than swamp gas hit Pete’s nose.

  “Somebody must have given him some cheese last night,” Maitland said. “Ye gods, little dude. We should hire you out for crowd control.”

  This amused Maitland, while Pete’s empty belly began to heave. “Maitland, let’s step outside, now.”

  “Nice to see you again,” the woman said. Cromer? Connaught? “Max, you should be leaving for the airport soon.”

  Pete got the hell out of Dodge before the stink, the good cheer, the damned storage box screw-up, and a surfeit of whisky overcame him. Maitland met him on the front terrace, where despite a pair of Tom Ford sunglasses, the Scottish sunshine bore holes in Pete’s skull.

  “This place is a nightmare,” Pete said. “Falling hammers, dirty diapers, old women dancing until midnight. I had to have been crazy to let you talk me into this project.”

  Maitland took a seat on the stone balustrade. “I’ve sent you weekly summaries as required, without fail. They show we are within budget and on schedule, if not ahead. The site meets every occupational safety and health standard applicable here, and I’m meeting with a landscaper next week to see if we can get going early on that phase before winter sets in. You should be doing backflips because this project is off to a great start. Who is pulling your strings, Pete? Does Maguire have somebody else in mind for the job?”