by Lynn Kurland
“I know the type,” he said. Actually, he was related to that type in the person of his illustrious paternal grandfather. He didn’t particularly fancy talking about that grandfather, who he’d fairly recently made a second career out of avoiding, so he pushed on to other things. “I am not a scorched-earth sort, if that eases your mind any.”
“Your friend seemed to like you.”
“He has no taste,” Nathaniel said, “so I’m not sure I would take his opinion very seriously.” He blew past a trio of lorries cluttering up the road, then settled in for a long drive made with reasonable adherence to the speed limit. “Your father sounds like he’s made enough to buy himself a nice little runabout. Along with the lads to polish it up, no doubt.” He shot her a look. “You needn’t give me details if you don’t care to.”
“Oh, I’ll complain about him all day,” she said with a faint smile. “Tell me if you get bored.”
“Not any time soon. Press on, lass, and pray let him have dealt out just deserts to someone who deserved it.”
She snorted. “I’m not sure he’s deep enough to factor that into anything he does, but I’ll be happy to share some of the juicier details.”
He had to admit after listening to her for a good part of the journey south that her father sounded like a first-rate—well, perhaps there wasn’t even any point in calling the man uncomplimentary names. He was someone, Nathaniel decided, who he wouldn’t want to share a meal with. He might, however, want to see if there were something of his grandfather’s that Emma’s father might want. Watching those two scrap over a choice piece of property might be worth the effort of setting the meeting up. Something to tick off his to-do list at some point, definitely.
“So let me understand this,” he said slowly. “Your da paid for law school and had the keys to your Jaguar—”
“A perfectly restored ’67,” she interrupted. “And he hadn’t paid for school, I had paid for school with an inheritance from my grandmother. The car was my prize for passing the bar.” She sighed deeply. “It was a beautiful car.”
“Of course,” he said. “So, you had passed the bar, he was holding out your keys, and then tell me again what you did? I’m sure my ears failed me at that point in your story.”
“I told him I didn’t want to be a lawyer,” she said. She paused. “I might have told him to go to hell as well. I’m a bit foggy on that part.”
He glanced at her. “Foggy?”
“A bit.”
He suspected she wasn’t. “He disowned you?”
“Yes. After that, he drove my car onto his dock and pushed it into the lake. Then he billed me for the big, fat ticket he got for polluting.”
He considered. “I’m not sure what bothers you more, but I’m starting to suspect it wasn’t being disinherited.”
“Nah, I didn’t care.” She shrugged. “My father’s complicated. He has an MBA from Harvard, but what he really wanted was a law degree. None of my siblings wanted to go that route, so I was his last hope.” She smiled briefly. “He wasn’t pleased with my career path change.”
“So if you didn’t want to be a lawyer, what did you want to do?”
“I wanted to make jewelry,” she said. She shot him a quick look. “I’m not sure how serious that sounds, but I do have my undergrad in art. I wanted to make art in a way that it would change whoever was wearing it, if I can put it that way without sounding too far out there. I was on the verge of really having things take off when I met Sheldon.”
“I’m getting the feeling that wasn’t a good thing.”
She sighed deeply. “Unfortunately, no, it wasn’t. I decided that making peace with my father was worth a shot, Sheldon was exactly his sort of potential son-in-law, so I ignored the red flags and got involved with him. When he offered to broker some semi-serious investment money for me, I took him up on it so my father would stop complaining about my choice of occupations.” She shrugged. “I leaped when I should have looked.”
“Semi-serious money?” he asked, because that was what he always asked. He smiled briefly at her. “Sorry, I’m nosy.”
She smiled briefly. “I am, too. Let’s just say it was more than I had in my savings account but less than I could have sold that Jag for.”
He nodded. “Understood. So, you had seed money, you had your business, and your father was happy with your choice of boyfriends. What then?”
“I woke up,” she said simply. “I dumped Sheldon and he called the loan. It was nothing more than I deserved for not reading the fine print, I guess. Sometimes people do stupid things when they want things to work out.”
“Sometimes people take a chance on trusting,” he countered.
“I’m an almost-attorney. I should have known better.” She sighed deeply. “It was either just pay him outright or forever have him looking over my shoulder to see what my business was doing. I wanted to be free, so I paid him.” She looked out the window. “It’s a funny thing, though. If I hadn’t chosen that path to walk down, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
He knew all about innocent paths that led to places one couldn’t have imagined, but he supposed the present was not the proper time to be offering that observation.
She looked back at him and smiled. “I will say, for the record, that my path has led to my riding in a Lamborghini while Sheldon’s most definitely has not.”
“Silver linings all around,” he noted. He imagined there was more to the story and he suspected that a decent amount of money had left Emma’s account to go into the unpleasantly persuasive Sheldon’s, but perhaps the specifics of that were better left unexamined.
“It’s too bad I can’t just shove him into some sort of phone booth and have that transport him to another location,” she said. She was silent for a moment or two. “Or maybe another time.”
He was enormously grateful for the necessity of concentrating suddenly on the road. It gave him something to do besides face the way those words hung in the air between them.
The saints preserve him, as Angus MacLeod tended to blurt out when faced with a feisty Fergusson.
“Oh, look,” he said suddenly, “a village. I’m starved, how about you? We’re not far from Edinburgh, but I don’t think my poor tum will last that long. Also, I think I might spy a building of historical significance over there on the hill. Shall we?”
“That’d be great.”
He hazarded a glance at her because he was terrible at not knowing. He’d never had a present as a child that he hadn’t unwrapped days ahead of time, never read the beginning of a book without having read the final five pages, never not known exactly what he was walking into before he took the first step.
Unless it came to the past. That, he supposed, was the one thing in his life that came as a continual surprise.
He imagined he could add Emma Baxter to that list.
She wasn’t looking at him, but he was aware of how hard she was ignoring the proverbial elephant in the room. If she didn’t know what his other life looked like, she suspected. He would have staked his fortune on it.
Which left him back exactly where he’d started the morning: looking for anything to do to keep her mind off the past and on the present. A bit of lunch and a quick trip to that manor house over the way were going to likely be all that saved him.
He didn’t want to think about the explanations he would be offering if they didn’t.
Chapter 11
Go haime, gel.
Emma stood at the window of her hotel room and looked down at the people walking along the street below her. It was such a normal thing to be doing, that walking, yet all she could think about was what she’d seen in a forest two hundred miles away.
She had come to pull sea and sky and water into her soul so she could then pour them into metal. She had absolutely not counted on encountering any sort of metal that would be sharp enough
to save her life.
She had felt the weight of a dying enemy against her back. There just weren’t too many ways to spin that to make it seem like something else besides the truth.
And the truth was what she needed to find out before she went crazy from thinking it was all in her head.
She had watched Nathaniel’s hand the afternoon before as he’d been fiddling with his keys at the reception desk and wondered if that hand was the same one that had wielded the sword that had saved her life. She’d listened to him discussing accommodations with the lad behind the counter and tried to imagine that voice gasping out a plea for her to get the hell home. It was too bad she hadn’t paid better attention to both while she’d been in the forest.
As it was, the best she could do was replay the sound of that voice and the touch of that hand in her mind and soul until she thought she would go crazy.
She had distracted herself well enough the day before by driving with Nathaniel to Edinburgh in a car that had to have cost him a cool half million dollars if it had cost him a dime. She wasn’t unaccustomed to her father’s ridiculously expensive cars, but it had been a pleasure to watch a man drive a car he was obviously half in love with.
Hard not to like him for that.
She had balked at the price of her room, but he’d casually set his keys down in front of her without looking at her. She had assumed it wasn’t so she would take them and make off with his car—though she’d been tempted—but instead so she would remember that he could afford to put her up for a couple of nights. Having him also scribble No strings attached on the front of a brochure about the castle and slide it her way had pretty much sealed the deal.
“You can buy me breakfast,” he’d said as he’d handed her the key to her room.
She hadn’t argued. She had quite happily taken a gloriously decadent nap, enjoyed a lovely dinner, then shivered through a ghost tour conducted in temperatures that left her feeling extremely glad she was safely locked in the twenty-first century instead of freezing in a different, less-well-heated century.
She had woken that morning with plans to make very good use of her phone. If there was something unusual going on in Nathaniel’s neck of the woods, she was going to figure it out sooner rather than later. Bertie the spy would have been proud.
She sat down near the window, grateful for a rainy day that didn’t interfere with her screen too much, and started her search.
Benmore’s tourist website yielded all kinds of information about things to do in a charming Scottish village, but there was certainly no banner running across the screen indicating that there were paranormal deeds going on in the vicinity. She did find a studio run by a guy named Bagley where an interested party could indulge in fencing if desired, but that didn’t seem all that unusual. She filed the name away for future reference, then dug a bit deeper.
It took her almost half an hour of following obscure links to random places before she let out her breath and congratulated herself on the fact that she wasn’t crazy.
There was a discreet mention of a school specializing in swordplay run by one Ian MacLeod. There was also a single reference to wilderness survival being taught at that school by someone named Patrick MacLeod.
Bingo.
She knew she was making a bit of a leap by assuming that the school’s Patrick MacLeod was the same one she knew, but it was a leap she was willing to make for the moment. She supposed he and Ian could be just business partners, but they also could have been relatives. She supposed in the end it didn’t matter. What mattered was what they were doing.
She continued her search, but found absolutely nothing else about the place. She supposed that if it was a school geared toward teaching people how to use swords and survive in the wild, maybe the men and women interested in that sort of thing didn’t particularly want to advertise their enthusiasm for the same.
Especially if they were indulging that enthusiasm in a different century—
She stopped herself before she finished that thought. Ian and Patrick MacLeod, if they were the MacLeods who lived around the corner from her, were probably just heavily into history. If they did run a training camp, who was to say they didn’t set up the occasional reenactment scenario to go along with their curriculum? Were they like Civil War reenactors, only pretending to fight a different war in a different century and on Scottish soil?
Was that what she’d seen?
And was Nathaniel MacLeod part of that?
She poked around a bit longer, but found only references to the village. From what she could see, it was nothing more than it seemed: a tiny town trying to band together to preserve a fragile economy. She had her own fragile economy she was trying to preserve, so she understood.
Oddly enough, there was nothing on the village calendar that hinted at anything out of the ordinary. No medieval fairs, no buddies getting together midweek for a little battle action, no covens of warlocks dressed in kilts.
She set her phone down and leaned back in her chair to let the details filter through her mind without trying to force them into any sort of pattern. Nathaniel hadn’t said anything about hanging out with Patrick or his brother or whoever else might have been family there in the forest. She definitely remembered Patrick having said that he didn’t know Nathaniel past his reputation of being the rich but perfectly harmless recluse up the way.
Unless they were all up to something they didn’t want anyone, including her, to know about.
She let that thought continue on into the garbage can of ridiculous theories. Maybe Patrick was busy with his family and had a commanding sort of presence because his brother was the laird. Maybe Nathaniel was just a private sort of guy indulging in some serious national pride and he didn’t want anyone knowing what he was up to.
Maybe it was just none of her damned business what either of them did with his time.
Go haime, gel.
She rubbed her fingers gingerly over her forehead. If she’d had any sense, she would have hopped on a plane that afternoon and run away from the whole situation.
Unfortunately, her stockpile of good sense had followed her ’67 Jag into Lake Washington on that crisp fall day almost four years earlier. She’d tried to replenish that cache with a scoop out of that pile of hidden crazy called Sheldon Cook, but even her mother had very briefly and under her breath agreed that that had been a mistake.
All she had was herself to ask for advice, so she pulled herself up by her metaphorical bootstraps and dispassionately considered her options.
She could go back to Seattle, march into the offices of her father’s archenemy—or one of them, at least—and promise all sorts of her own family secrets in exchange for their destroying Sheldon in court so he would never bother her again. She could find a job doing something that actually put food on her table. She could go teach art. She could go back to working temp stuff so she could save up enough money to . . .
To come to Scotland.
She laughed a little, because there was nothing else to do. If she had the perfect life and all the money in the world, she would still be exactly where she was. That she was sitting in a lovely little room courtesy of a decent guy who had a fondness for fast cars and junk food—well, maybe what she should do was just be grateful and keep her mouth shut.
Of course, none of that meant she couldn’t continue to let odd things show up now and again and sort themselves into the piles they chose.
She grabbed her jacket, shoved her phone in her backpack, and left her room to go downstairs. She made it all the way to the bottom step before she had to pause and look across the lobby at that very lovely, generous man who had offered to share a few of his favorite sights with her, no strings attached.
He was wearing black jeans, boots, and a cabled pullover sweater, topped by a slicker. He looked like he should have been starring in a romantic drama about either a modern Highla
nd laird in a spendy sports car or a gorgeous medieval clansman sitting in the chieftain’s chair. She could have seen him in either role.
She examined that thought as it rolled down in front of her like a drop of rain on a windowpane. Was that what he was doing? Prepping for a movie audition?
He turned his head and looked at her.
He smiled.
Well, if that’s what he was up to, she completely supported the idea. But until his movie came out, she would take advantage of his relative anonymity and his desire to meander over cobblestone streets. She stepped down the last step and walked across the small lobby.
Nathaniel pushed off from where he’d been leaning against the wall. “Breakfast?”
“Sounds wonderful,” she said.
“Do you mind if Brian tags along?”
“Of course not,” was what she said, but what she was thinking was, What a perfect chance to observe you while you’re distracted. Who knew what watching him have a little chat with one of his buddies over breakfast might reveal about him?
She soon found herself sitting with him and his friend Brian in a charming little coffee shop just up the way from their hotel. Breakfast was interesting, but watching Nathaniel talk to Brian about football was better. Apparently Brian had been born in Glasgow, but gone off to Oxford for school. She learned that those two disparate events warred within him and disqualified him in Nathaniel’s book from being allowed to have a definitive opinion on the sport in question.
“And what do you think, Emma?”
She realized Brian was talking to her. She smiled and shrugged. “No idea,” she said honestly. “I’m just here for the heather.”
“Nat, tell me you’re not going to leave the poor girl to tromp about the hills herself. At least take her to dinner now and then.”
Emma listened to them argue in a friendly fashion about the places she really should see if she intended to form a proper opinion of Scotland’s true glory. She couldn’t bring herself to protest, not that Nathaniel would have listened if she had. She would have to pull cash at some point, and maybe it was best to do it from Edinburgh. At least that way, if Sheldon had somehow managed to get access to her accounts, he would think she was traveling south.