by Lynn Kurland
The crowd turned to look and he pulled Samantha into the ring of mushrooms with him. He was more relieved than he wanted to admit to find himself not facing a crowd of adoring fans but a very wide-eyed Oliver Phillips. It was all he could do to keep himself from pitching over into Oliver’s arms. Actually given that Oliver’s hands were quite suddenly on his shoulders—rather painfully on the right—he wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t already done some pitching.
“Let’s go,” he said, feeling increasingly dizzy. He had the feeling that weakness hadn’t come from his little journey through time. “Hurry.”
“Car’s on the way. Miss Drummond, if you could possibly—”
“Of course.”
Derrick felt Samantha put her arm around his waist. Oliver took his other side, his right side, and that almost sent him into oblivion from the pain.
“Sorry,” he managed. “Don’t mean to bleed on you.”
“I think you should stop wasting energy talking,” Samantha suggested.
He agreed, but he didn’t have the energy to say so.
He knew he had at some point gotten into a car—hopefully one belonging to Cameron—then out of that car—hopefully stopping somewhere he would want to stop. He had a vague thought pass through what was left of his wee small brain that it would be a shame to bleed all over the reception area of the Ritz, but that was driven out by Oliver’s loud disgust over the ridiculous lengths method actors were willing to go to. Samantha’s agreement was, he thought, perhaps a bit too enthusiastic to be considered polite, especially since it was his method acting they were disparaging, but it was getting him through the hotel lobby unquestioned, so he wasn’t going to argue.
He had no idea how they got him upstairs and down the hallway to their suite. Samantha opened the door and helped Oliver get him inside.
“A little help, my laird,” Oliver said, his voice fading into the ether.
So Cameron was there. Derrick wasn’t all that surprised. His cousin was always concerned about the state of his vassals.
“Was he wounded again?” came the voice from very far away.
“No,” Samantha said, sounding as if she were across town. “I think he probably should have stayed in bed another day or two.”
“Stubborn fool.”
Well, that was offensive, but Derrick couldn’t latch on to the words to say as much. In fact, he was having trouble holding on to anything. He did manage to look at the floor, but that was probably only because his head was too heavy to hold up any longer.
His last conscious thought was that, considering the velocity with which he was going to encounter it, that carpet, lovely as it was, was going to leave a mark on his face.
He suspected he would be too unconscious to care.
• • •
He woke to the sun streaming in through the window, which meant it had to be late afternoon. Again. He was starving, which he supposed meant that perhaps more than just a couple of hours had passed. He lay perfectly still, taking inventory of his body to see how it might betray him currently.
To his surprise, he felt almost human. Good was stretching things, but functional was not. He turned his head to find Samantha Drummond sitting in her usual spot in the chair pulled up reasonably close to the bed, her legs hung over the side, her fingers poking around on his computer.
“I’m going to have to change that password.”
She didn’t look at him. “As well as delete a few things.”
He frowned. “What few things?”
“Half a dozen romance novels, an equal number of mysteries, and a very interesting book on medieval healing practices.” She looked at him then. “You might want to hang on to that last one.”
He supposed he might. “Have you been using my credit card?” he asked sternly.
“Everyone thought I should. Was I wrong not to put my foot down and refuse?”
He studied her for a moment or two. “You’re different.”
“Using a strange man’s credit card while he’s unconscious and drooling will do that for a girl.”
“I never drool.”
“I don’t imagine you know what you’ve been doing,” she said, sounding far more smug than she should have.
He shifted uncomfortably but a thrill of fever didn’t go through him. Progress had been made, thankfully, but perhaps not quite as much as he would have hoped for. He started to move, but Samantha set his computer down on the table and jumped up.
“Here, let me help you.”
He wasn’t used to being the one in the bed, as it were, and it took all his reserves of politeness not to growl at her when she put a few pillows behind his head and helped him sit up just the slightest bit.
“Thank you,” he said briskly.
“Bet that was hard.”
He managed not to glare at her, but that was only because his discomfort at needing help was tempered by a quite proper sense of gratitude.
“I’m not at my best,” he allowed. “I apologize.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m about ten minutes away from chucking the remote at you and telling you to get your own damned soup.”
He blinked, then smiled. “That sounds like something Sunny would say.”
“It was something Sunny said,” she said. “Apropos, don’t you think?”
“Very.” He didn’t dare move his head too much, so he continued to look at her. “Have you checked the lace?”
“Yes. Would you like to do the same?”
He held out his hand and had a snort as his reward.
“Not on your life,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument. “Lord Robert brought gloves, if you think you can get one on. And then, and only then, will you touch this lace.”
“You historians are bossy.”
She pursed her lips but said nothing in reply to that.
He accepted a glove, fumbled with it, then had help in becoming properly attired for the examination of priceless artifacts. He looked the lace over, then shook his head as he handed it back to her.
“Why he doesn’t keep it in a vault, I don’t know.”
“Because then he can’t walk past it every day and look at something someone was wearing four hundred years ago,” she said. “I don’t blame him at all.”
He slid her a look. “The historian speaks.”
“Temporarily,” she agreed.
“How’s the Victorian piece?”
“Not fabulous,” she said. “You can have a look at it and form your own opinion.”
He took it, then couldn’t help but watch how she handled the lace. He had to admit he wasn’t at all surprised at the care she took. Obviously she had been very well trained, but there was something in the way she folded it that spoke of more than simple training. Whatever else Samantha Drummond was, she was a lover of old things.
He completely understood.
“Well?” she asked, looking at him.
He glanced at the embroidery, then shook his head—gingerly. “I wouldn’t waste my time with it.”
“Not worth enough money?”
“No, actually, it isn’t. What do you think?”
“My mother wouldn’t bother, either,” she said with a faint smile. “I was just testing your snob meter.”
He started to deny that he had one, then decided there was no point. He was extremely choosey about what deals he agreed to broker, but it was never the amount of money involved. Well, almost never. He looked at her.
“What do you think?”
“Your meter is performing beautifully,” she said. “I guess the drooling hasn’t damaged it.”
“Are you trying to humiliate me?” he asked crossly.
She smiled. “Nah, just a little payback. Lord Robert said you would enjoy it, so, again, since he’s an earl and I’m just a peasant, I thought I should take his advice.”
“Did he have any other astute suggestions?” Derrick asked politely.
“He said to throw the remote at you, not h
and it over, and to use your credit card a lot. I don’t think I can throw the remote at you.”
“But you’ve used my credit card quite a bit, is that it?”
“Again, it’s the earl/peasant thing. I didn’t dare argue.” She smiled briefly. “And I’m not serious. I’ll pay you back for the ebooks.”
“Of course you won’t.”
“And the other cashmere sweater.”
“Not that, either.”
“And the dress. It was unfortunately quite expensive, but I couldn’t get Emily to take it back.”
He knew he should have pulled up his bank account and shown her just how little a dent she possibly could have made in it, but he wasn’t sure he had the strength. The best he could do was shake his head.
“I’ll make payments,” he lied. “If you did want to do something in return, you could order lunch.”
“If you like.”
“And stay and watch a movie with me.”
She looked more shocked than he would have expected her to. It wasn’t as if it was a date. He’d been drooling in front of her for heaven only knew how long. He wasn’t sure he could date a woman who had seen him in that condition.
“What sort of movie?”
“Anything, and I mean anything, that doesn’t involve period costumes.”
She smiled. “I’ll see what I can find.” She handed him his tablet, then rose and walked toward his door. “Any preference for an early dinner?”
“Anything that doesn’t involve broth.”
She smiled, then left him to himself.
He managed to get himself in a sitting position, then swung his feet to the floor. Getting to the loo and back to bed wasn’t nearly as taxing as he’d feared it might be. No puking, no fainting, no needing to call for aid with his trousers in an embarrassing location. He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the lace sitting there, tucked safely in its plastic covering and topped by that truly worthless piece of Victorian embroidery, and shook his head. So much trouble for something a noblewoman of the sixteenth century wouldn’t have thought twice about losing.
But Samantha understood Lord Epworth perfectly. The man had scores of treasures, but that piece of lace was something special to him. He never would have hidden it away in a vault.
Derrick wondered how Samantha Drummond could possibly have known that. Perhaps she was more attuned to the historically minded collector than she let on.
• • •
Two hours later, he was pretending to watch a modern-day romance starring two of the most vapid actors he’d ever been forced to observe whilst actually thinking about a few things that puzzled him.
First was a question about why Samantha Drummond wanted to turn her back on everything she’d worked for to that point. He wasn’t unaccustomed to taking on different personae when it suited his purposes, so he could understand it on a certain level. After all, he’d abandoned Scotland in his teens to embrace a career that his parents most definitely hadn’t approved of. That hadn’t worked out very well for him, but since that was something he never thought on when he could help it, he let that recollection slide right by.
Perhaps she hadn’t had a choice about her profession, though that gave him pause as well. Had her parents looked at their own vocations, flipped a coin, then whomever had won had chosen Samantha’s life’s work for her? If that was the case, he certainly couldn’t blame her for wanting to leave it all behind right along with her parents. It was a pity, though. She was, from what little he’d seen, good at what she did.
The second was how in the world a woman reached the age of twenty-six without having told her parents it was time she left the nest. He couldn’t say he’d exchanged many words with Gavin past curses, so he didn’t even have a conversation there to aid him in solving the mystery. Perhaps as the last child she’d felt responsible for their happiness. Perhaps she was a spineless waif of a thing who couldn’t bring herself to tell him to go to hell, much less her parents.
Or perhaps she was simply too kind for her own good.
He looked at her sitting in her accustomed spot—in the chair, not next to him on the bed, as it happened—somehow not surprised to find she was blinking rapidly.
“You,” he said distinctly, “are a theatrical pushover.”
She laughed a little. “I know it was garbage, but it was a romance. How can you not like a little romance?”
“Because it’s rotten stuff. Sickly sweet. Bad for the teeth and tum.”
“Cynic.”
“Probably.”
She looked at him then. “But you’re willing to go to great lengths for things not created in the twentieth century. How is that not romantic?”
He waved her on to the telly before he had to answer, though he smiled a little as he did so, because there was just something about the woman that inspired it. Which led him to the last thing that made him want to scratch his head.
She could have made tracks for more interesting locales at any moment, yet she’d chosen to stay and nursemaid him. Guilt over having left lace where it didn’t belong? A nefarious desire to watch him at his worst?
Or from the goodness of her heart?
“How about a spy flick now?” she asked cheerfully.
“I won’t last through it,” he warned.
“Are you too tired, or would it be too boring?” she asked. “You, with all your supersecret gear and getaway cars.”
“Too boring,” he agreed. “Been there, done that.”
“Nod off then, Sherlock, and let me watch another chick flick.”
He didn’t think he was going to have any choice but to oblige her, though he definitely was going to have to solve at least a couple Samantha Drummond mysteries before he let her go back into the wide world to do her art. There were also a few details about the lace to wrap up, but he would see to those in the morning. At the moment, all he wanted to do was close his eyes and ignore what he was sure was going to be a three-hankie tale of love lost and won back.
That would also help him ignore the woman who was obviously going to enjoy it thoroughly.
Mystery that she was.
Chapter 15
Samantha flinched at the sound in the other room, then dismissed it. Derrick was still asleep, Oliver had promised her earlier that morning to be within yelling distance—she hadn’t asked how he was going to manage that—and she had the suite locked up tighter than Fort Knox. Maybe Derrick had fallen off his bed. She supposed she should have been concerned, but Sunny had been there just an hour ago and pronounced him fully on the mend. Samantha was convinced he was virtually indestructible, so she’d left him to his snoozing and gone inside her room to contemplate her future.
She wasn’t sure what sort of future she had stretching out in front of her, but her options seemed to be fairly limited. She supposed she might be able to get her plane ticket out of the Cookes’ house, but then again, maybe not. If she couldn’t, she had the money to buy a new one, but it would seriously dent her savings. All her cash was still taped to the underside of the nightstand, cash she had intended to last her for most of the summer. If she had to borrow anything from her parents, that would set her up for a fairly lengthy amount of indentured servitude in her mother’s current exhibit. Then again, since it was what she was accustomed to, she didn’t think it would be all that painful.
What would be painful, though, was giving up even the small amounts of freedom she’d enjoyed. She couldn’t say being on the lam, as it were, had been terribly comfortable, but at least she’d been on her own—for the most part. The part she hadn’t liked had been being on her own in, ah . . .
She could hardly say the words to herself, but there was no denying that the place she’d quickly visited two days earlier hadn’t felt all that, well, modern. While Derrick seemed to have lots of interesting friends, he surely wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of staging such an elaborate ruse to leave her thinking she’d been four hundred years in the past. What purpose would
it have served? She could safely say that the man’s overwhelming desire over the past few days had been to get his lace. She couldn’t imagine he was making that up.
Which left her pretty much where she was, sitting in an obscenely expensive suite at a ridiculously exclusive hotel, trying to get over the shakes she’d had periodically since she’d stepped back through that circle of mushrooms, then helped Oliver get Derrick into the back of that chauffeur-driven car.
She’d gotten rid of them the day before when she’d spent the evening watching movies in Derrick’s room. Maybe it had been the distraction. Maybe it had been feeling like she’d been a part of something more interesting than the endless cataloging of Victorian artifacts and the chewing out of low-level museum staff. Maybe it had been feeling safe—and that in spite of the fact that the one who could have protected her most easily had been unconscious and, yes, drooling.
She supposed what she had currently were less the shakes than they were simply restlessness over what to do at present. She supposed there was no reason for her to stay any longer, but she hadn’t wanted to simply ditch Derrick before she could—
Well, she had no idea what she intended to do. Thank him for the all-expense-paid trips to Elizabethan England? Apologize again for racking up stuff on his credit card? Ask him for his address so she would know where to send the checks to start paying off that debt?
And since she hadn’t been able to face any of that, she had instead done the unthinkable and arranged a still life on the table in front of her. She had taken out her sketch pad and a pencil.
And she was too terrified to use either.
“Interesting subject.”
She tipped her chair over backward in her surprise. In fact, she tipped it so far, that she went with it. She wasn’t sure if she was more hurt or embarrassed, but the haste with which she was trying to get herself back on her feet left her little time to think about it. She had help, which surprised her. Derrick kept his hand on her arm until he apparently thought she wasn’t going to fling herself anywhere else, then he let go of her and leaned over to pick up her chair. He held on to it for a moment or two, apparently trying to catch his breath, then looked at her.