by Lynn Kurland
She smiled because the thought was so ridiculous. “I can’t believe I have lads. And while they might have caused some soiling of that fancy suit Sheldon was wearing, I think you did enough damage all on your own.”
“The phone is a powerful thing.”
“So is snooping—”
“Which you won’t do any more of,” he finished pointedly. He paused and considered. “Feel like a trip to London on the way home?”
“What’s in London besides your Vanquish?”
He smiled wryly. “My office. I thought you might want to see how my ill-gotten gains are earned.” He paused. “You know. For future reference.”
She nodded, trying not to put any more weight on the moment than she should. She watched him pull up flights on his phone, then freeze. She watched his face, but his expression gave nothing away. He finally let out his breath slowly, then turned the screen toward her.
“What do you think?”
She was starting to gain an appreciation for the weirdness of his life. “Flight 1387,” she managed. “Well, I think I’m glad it doesn’t leave until tomorrow.”
He shivered. “Agreed. Well, we’ll take it and let time wait a bit for us. How do you feel about sushi for tonight?”
“Disgusting.”
“Good,” he said, sounding relieved. “I’ll tell Gavin you’re insisting on steak. He tends to roll right over me when it comes to choosing places for supper.”
“I’ll protect you.”
“I have the feeling you just might, lass.”
She hoped her duties in that regard would never be more difficult than nixing a restaurant in a city full of them.
She had the feeling time might have a different opinion entirely.
Chapter 22
Nathaniel stood at the window of his office with a choice view of the Tower and stared out at the street below him. It was a view he quite liked, actually, but he had always appreciated the endless movement of humanity in a big city. London had always felt less like a large city than a small one that had sprawled over enough acreage to give it a formidable place on the map. He enjoyed his little corner of it, loved his little flat in Notting Hill, was happy to step outside his door and encounter coffee and shops instead of medieval lads and swords.
That wasn’t to say he didn’t consider his home to be the Highlands, though, for he did. He craved the heather and the sea and the endless sky. He loved the fact that he could go walking for hours and not see another soul. That was made slightly more complicated by his having continual brushes with a more unvarnished Highland experience, but what was there to do about that? He couldn’t seem to solve it on his own, Patrick MacLeod seemed perfectly content to wait for him to come to terms with his double life and ask for aid, and he honestly wanted nothing more than to exchange his sword for a much smaller piece of metal to go around a certain gel’s finger.
He leaned back against the wall and looked at the woman in question. She was sitting at his desk, flipping through binders full of projects that he had funded. He’d considered the idea as he’d been sitting in that expensive conference room of MacLeod Surety Company, wishing his grandfather had something else to do to keep himself busy, and wondering why Gerald was finding himself lurking in places he shouldn’t have been.
He’d put off thinking about Gerald on their last day in New York in favor of simply enjoying a life that felt normal. He’d had a lovely dinner with a brother he realized he spent far too little time with, watched that brother and a woman he fell harder for every moment he was with her get along as if they’d known each other for years, then slept through some show about witches and the rehabilitation of the same.
He hadn’t wanted to admit to being nervous about anything at all, never mind how Emma might truly feel about him, but he couldn’t deny that he had been. He still was. He’d listened to Emma tell Gavin a few of her father’s more noteworthy escapades as a corporate raider and he’d been very clear on how she viewed the same. That was not a woman who cared for destruction.
He supposed Patrick MacLeod had a point: medieval Scotland was likely not the place for Emma Baxter.
They’d landed at dawn and he’d happily caught a cab to his flat and made her breakfast before he’d given her his bed for a nap.
Lunch had been something off the street before they’d caught the Tube to his office. She’d been quiet on the way there, which he understood. It felt as if a monumental hurdle was there in front of them both.
He’d turned her loose in his office and let her choose what she wanted to look at without trying to influence her in any way. It was probably best she form her own opinions about his work. Given her background with her father and her recent experience with the less noble members of his own family, he thought it might be all that would give him any hope with her.
He’d hijacked his partner’s office and done a bit of business, occasionally leaned into his office to see if Emma was still there, then left her to her own devices.
He’d finally given up pretending to work and taken to pacing, though that hadn’t taken up as much time as he would have liked considering the modest nature of his office. His partner’s office was enormous, which suited him, but Nathaniel didn’t particularly care for sitting behind a desk. He preferred to meet with clients in coffee shops or in the park.
Well, that and he spent so much time on the road, as it were. A fancy office seemed like a waste of money when he was rarely there—
He realized suddenly that Emma had paused in her perusing and was looking at him.
Tears were streaming down her face.
He looked at her carefully. “Good?” he asked.
She pushed back from his desk and stood up. He leaned back against the wall because he realized that, beyond any reason, he felt as if he’d known that woman forever and forever wasn’t going to be long enough to keep knowing her. If she pitched him now—
He stopped thinking when she walked to him and stopped in front of him.
She leaned up and kissed him softly.
“Well,” he managed as she smiled briefly at him, then walked back over and sat down on his chair. “Well.”
She ran her fingers over the last page of that particular binder. Those were his micro loans, little bits of money that no one else would have cared about but changed lives in places where people didn’t often go. It was his favorite book, as it happened.
“You,” she said, looking up at him, “are not my father.”
He sat down across the desk from her in the client’s chair that was also hardly ever used. “I don’t think so.”
She leaned her elbows on his desk. “I hereby give you permission to destroy him in a round of golf.”
“Only one?”
“You’re one of those, aren’t you?” she asked in disgust. “I bet you’re hiding an entire closet full of saddle shoes and Izod golf shirts.”
“The game was invented by my people,” he said archly. “I am only celebrating my heritage.”
“Rubbish.”
He smiled and relaxed for the first time in hours. “So,” he said carefully, “what do you really think?”
She looked at the binder in front of her, flipped back through the pages with a reverence that moved him more than he thought he might want to admit, then gently closed the book. “I think you’re a dreamer.”
“And you approve?”
“Very much,” she said. She smiled. “I want to hammer my dreams into metal. You want to give people the chance to breathe their dreams into life. That’s pretty heady stuff there.”
He was fairly sure he swore. He knew he blustered about and tried to draw attention away from the fact that his eyes were stinging with the same enthusiasm they might have if he’d just plunged his face into a patch of nettles.
She leaned back in his chair and simply stared at him.
>
“You’re lusting after me in this ridiculously expensive, hand-tailored Italian suit, aren’t you?” he managed.
“You were wearing that to your grandfather’s offices in New York,” she said. “You’re in jeans now.”
He supposed he was fortunate he wasn’t trotting around without his trousers, something he found himself worrying about more often than not. Too much time in a saffron shirt with the only need for a plaid being clan pride and a bit of warmth on a chilly day.
“Don’t become too attached to that suit,” he said, latching on to a less tender topic gladly. “I only own three of them and I’m not buying any more.”
“Not even for a wedding?”
He considered. “Perhaps for a wedding. If it’s mine.”
“What would you wear for slumming in Paris?”
“Are we slumming in Paris soon?”
“I’ve never been, but I think there’s ample scope for an artist’s imagination there.”
“If you get me to Paris, I’m donning poet’s clothes and never getting out of them again.”
“What sorts of things do poets wear?”
“If we’re Scottish, we wear the plaid,” he said, “in our clan’s colors, and all around us admire and wish they were Scottish as well.”
She smiled. “You and your national pride,” she said. “Very attractive. It worked for those half a dozen flight attendants fluttering around you all the way back over here.”
He sighed, but couldn’t help a bit of a smile. “If they only knew the extent of the madness that is my life. You, darling, have a very strong stomach to even stand to the side and watch it.”
She looked at him seriously. “Do we need to go back to Scotland?”
“I think perhaps we should,” he said. “We could take a sleeper to Inverness, then pick up your car.” He looked at her sternly. “I will be following you all the way home, so you can set aside any thoughts of slipping off to do any investigating on your own.”
“Where would I go besides that cottage next to yours you keep trying to kick me out of?”
He pursed his lips. “I’m never going to live that down, am I?”
“We’ll see how the rest of the winter goes.”
He supposed they would, though if he had anything to say about it, he would have his problem solved far sooner than the full arrival of a hard winter.
“Feeling pulled?” she asked.
He had to get up and pace a bit. “I might be.”
“I’m ready whenever you are.”
“Let’s go find some dinner, then we’ll catch a late train.” He didn’t add that he was almost tempted to try to sleep for a change. He wasn’t going to be worth anything to anyone if he didn’t and he was finding that he had a very good reason to want to stay alive.
He helped Emma put books back in their proper places, let his secretary know he was on his way out of town for a few days—grateful he didn’t have to explain the same yet again to his business partner—and didn’t waste any time getting to the station with Emma.
There was something he loved about being on a train. It was the perfect combination of the opportunity to sleep along with the chance to think. He sat in a comfortable seat, held Emma’s hand, and watched the moonlight spilling down on the countryside they passed through. He glanced at Emma to find her watching not the countryside but him instead. He smiled.
“Enjoying the view?”
“If I thought you were really that conceited, I would tease you about it.”
“I’ve no doubt you would,” he said. He shifted to look at her. “I texted Patrick earlier to come get his little runabout you’ve been using.”
“Thinking of stranding me in my cottage now, are you?”
“We’ll pick your car up on our way home,” he said. “And just so you don’t think I’ll be turning my back on you any time soon, I booked us all the way through to Inverness. I’ll have Brian pay one of his flunkies to go fetch mine from the airport in Edinburgh.”
“You’re in a hurry.”
“I’ve never been in less of a hurry for anything, if you know what I’m getting at,” he admitted. “But I can’t deny that I feel like I’m late for an appointment.”
“I won’t go with you this time,” she said quietly.
“You’re damned right you won’t. You’ll sit by the fire like a proper medieval clanswoman and wait for your man to do his duty. This time and every other time until I solve this.”
“If you like.”
He wasn’t sure how that acquiescence, if that’s what it was, made him feel, but he was fairly sure it didn’t make him feel any better.
She had seen Gerald and potentially not in the current day. He wasn’t sure where to even begin with that. The last thing he wanted was to scour the MacLeod forest in any century looking for his daft cousin who likely wanted him dead.
He closed his eyes and enjoyed the feeling of Emma’s hand in his. He liked the idea of her having a car parked in front of the cottage down the road from his. It felt permanent, which he liked, but it left her near him, which he liked but didn’t like at the same time.
He was starting to feel torn in two in a way he never had before.
He had the feeling that the sooner he had his answers, the better.
Chapter 23
Emma stood in her small living room and looked at the wall in front of her. She still had things to add to what was already taped there, but it was a start.
She was looking for a pattern.
She contemplated what was there a bit longer, then forced herself to walk into the kitchen and get something to drink. She’d been staring at the same things all morning without anything new coming to her. Sometimes letting her mind work on the problem while she was doing something else was the way her best breakthroughs were made. The trouble was, she wasn’t sure what she could be doing. Walks were out, she couldn’t even check her email, and pacing in her house was about to drive her crazy.
She finally took her life in her hands and walked out onto her little porch. It was cold, very true, but she had the coat Nathaniel had bought her, as well as clothes she hadn’t needed but he’d insisted on purchasing for her anyway while they’d been in New York.
She had to admit dinner with his brother and a decent show that had had nothing to do with anything but someone else’s reality had been a welcome relief as well. She’d felt like they were just a normal couple out on an enjoyable date. She’d actually slept on the plane back to London, confident that she would wake up in the same century.
Those few hours spent in Nathaniel’s office, looking at his life’s work, had been something she hadn’t expected. He might have been as rich as a more charitable, friendlier version of Scrooge McDuck, but the things he did with his money were truly life changing for those he helped.
If she hadn’t been crazy for him before, she would have fallen in love with him right then.
It had been unsettling in the extreme, though, to come back to her little cottage, park that beautiful black Audi in front, then watch her, ah, friend who wanted to be much more than that tell her good-bye before some mystical time gate sucked him back where she definitely didn’t want him to go.
He’d exacted a promise from her before he left that she would, yes, stay inside, then pulled her door shut from the outside and rushed off presumably to do what he did. She hadn’t watched because, again, she’d promised not to open the door.
Well, not open the door very often, but she had supposed at the time that she was better off not to say as much.
She’d slept, but not much. The jet lag wasn’t as bad, but she supposed that had been because she’d never adjusted to the time change in Manhattan anyway. She’d been up before dawn, taken a little trip into town for groceries, then locked herself in her house to do what she could with what she had to hand. If
she’d paced a bit on her porch, well, who could blame her? She had firmly ignored the impulse to go off on a little exploration, which left her feeling very virtuous and trustworthy. She would have preferred sneaky and informed, but things were what they were.
What she had decided, though, was that it was past time to stop tap-dancing around the issue at hand. She needed answers and she knew how to begin to get them. She had found tape in a drawer and started to put together a storyboard.
She’d made illustrations of everything she personally knew about her journey into the past and put those up on the wall in the right order. She’d moved on to Nathaniel’s part in the craziness but quickly realized she only had a very cursory idea of what went on with him. He heard a certain set of numbers, he grabbed his sword and put on a plaid, then he went to do what he had to do.
She did make a note of how long he’d been doing it and she added way off to the right the new fact that 1372 seemed to have affected him adversely.
She also added in the fact that touching that dagger in Edinburgh had somehow subsequently allowed her to pop through a gate in the forest she definitely hadn’t been able to see in any kind of normal way.
That had been a couple of hours ago. She knew she should have been noticing things beyond what was just there, but in her defense, being tossed in a medieval dungeon had colored her perception of things a bit more than she was comfortable with. Subsequently spending time with her rescuer while he was in a very lovely suit, facing off with her own intimidating father, then having to listen to her former boyfriend blather on about things she couldn’t remember hadn’t helped anything, either.
She jumped a little at the knock on the door, even though she’d heard the car pulling to a stop on the gravel in front of her house. It was a Range Rover, though it could just as easily have been Patrick’s as Nathaniel’s. She’d heard Nathaniel’s be delivered to his house earlier that morning and knew she should have memorized the sound. That she hadn’t was undeniable proof that she was definitely off her game.