by Gwyn Cready
Two
Piper Cornish Advertising Agency annual costume party,
Dream Hotel, Manhattan, present day
His sins, in no particular order:
Drunkenness. Would that be classified under Gluttony or Sloth? Gerard Innes was not a religious man, but he felt the amount of twenty-five-year-old Macallan single malt he’d consumed in the last hour probably qualified him for both.
Pride. No question. He had given a killer presentation today, which was not in itself out of the ordinary, but it had won Piper Cornish the Highland Distilleries account, their largest client ever.
Greed. He considered this thoughtfully and rejected it. He would accept his sins without complaint, but love of money was not one of them. What drove him to succeed was the work, the look in his clients’ eyes when they recognized his unadorned brilliance, and the power to move people to act.
A partygoer dressed as Cinderella brushed by him, her blue skirts brushing suggestively over his feet. He had come straight from the client’s boardroom, which meant he was dressed only as himself. Though the room’s darkness made it hard to see specifics, she gave off an altogether satisfying sense of being plump, blond, and agreeable.
“Who are you supposed to be?” she asked, the beauty mark she had drawn on her cheek disappearing into a bottomless dimple. “Adonis?”
Lust. He had forgotten Lust.
“I would have to be considerably more undressed for that, would I not?” He sipped the Macallan.
Above their heads, the swimmers in the hotel’s see-through pool made their way across the glittering turquoise water. Half the women were topless, and two of those were bedmates of Gerard’s from previous parties. He hoped neither of them spotted him. He was, as always, in search of new adventures.
A lovely pale brow lifted. “Maybe you just need a little help getting into costume?”
“Do you work for Piper Cornish?” he asked, leaning closer. She smelled faintly of licorice and he wondered if she would taste of it as well. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around.”
“No. Hunter, Hammond, and Hayes. I’m the manager of training there.”
Not a colleague and not a client. Just the way I like it.
“You’re Gerard Innes, aren’t you?” she said.
“I am.”
“This pool is like something out of a science-fiction fantasy. Do people even realize how amazing it is to be watching people swim over your head?”
Gerard laughed. “Probably not.”
A waiter passed and she squealed. On his platter stood an army of tiny pink confections.
“Look!” she cried, snagging two and dropping one into his hand. “It’s a little gift box! And yours is a tiny rose!”
The pleasure on her face made him smile. “Tiny being the key word, I guess.” He popped his in his mouth. “A bit sparing though, don’t you think?”
“It’s like eating joy.” She swallowed and touched the thumb holding the Macallan. “May I?”
He wasn’t sure what he was giving permission for, but it didn’t really matter. He was not the sort of man who said no. She took the whiskey and drank.
“Whoa!” She coughed a few charming coughs. “That’s a big drink.”
“Aye,” he said in his grandmother’s Highland burr. “And a wee bit rough.”
Message received, she gave him a loopy smile. “Now you taste mine.”
Her cup was filled with something green. He took a long sip. Absinthe. “Now that’s a dangerous drink.”
“I like dangerous.”
He thought of the bottle upstairs. What was the point of waiting? It seemed the perfect start to an enchanting night.
“Would you care to adjourn to my suite?” he said. “I have something there I think you might enjoy.”
“Oh, do you now?”
When they reached the bright lights of the lobby, it was clear Cinderella was not at all ready for the ball. She had evidently begun her drinking many hours earlier and could barely stay upright as the elevator made its ascent. When she began to slip down the wall, Gerard picked her up and tucked her over his shoulder.
He laid her in his bed, turned out the light, and heaved a long sigh. Willing she might be, but the rules of the game required her to possess the ability to move and assent.
Ah, well. Needn’t detract from the glory of the day. And there are far worse things than sleeping next to a pretty woman.
The ancient, squat bottle on the nightstand seemed to call his name. It had come from the personal collection of the chairman of Piper Cornish. A bottle of whiskey from one of the oldest crates ever sold at auction. Over three hundred years old and worth thousands of dollars, it was a thank-you for his work that day. If it lived up to its reputation, it would make the twenty-five-year-old Macallan seem like a tepid glass of lemonade in comparison.
He grabbed a glass hanging upside down over the top of the water pitcher and plunked it down on the nightstand. Then he grabbed the whiskey. The aged cork slid out with a satisfying, soft pop. Three centuries of slow evaporation had reduced the contents to little more than half. He closed his eyes and brought the bottle to his nose, taking in the smell of green, loamy hills as well as the grittier scents of smoke and sea air. He’d been to Scotland once with his grandmother, as a child, and the experience had never left him. The bottle’s label, if there had ever been one, was long gone, but even in the glow of light from outside his window, he could make out the word stamped into the glass: Kerr.
He poured himself an amount worthy of the work he had done, lifted the glass in a private toast, and drank.
Three
Duncan had returned to the inn considerably later and drunker than he had wished the night before. Their banker’s port had been watered down with cheap wine, and the man had not only refused to discuss more favorable terms on the loan for the canal, but he had also taken it upon himself to lecture Duncan on the ways he might pinch pennies on it, including the replacement of concrete with cheap stone and the use of a lock construction business owned by the banker’s brother-in-law. All in all, the evening had left Duncan with a throbbing head, a roiling gut, and the certainty of having wasted four hours. He called for a pot of hot coffee, and as he settled into a chair, the reflection of the doors of Undine’s and Serafina’s bedchambers in the long cheval mirror in the corner reminded him he still had Serafina’s cargo mess to untangle. Och. There were times he missed the twenty-first century more than others, and this was one of them.
He’d been yanked out of his own time like an unwilling rabbit out of a magician’s hat. Espresso machines, smartphones, V-8 engines, his job on Wall Street—all of them lost to him when Abby had decided she needed a strong arm and scattered Undine’s powerful herbs across the field of a battle. Of course, there were some benefits, he admitted, thinking of Abby’s warm body tucked against him this morning and the scent of gardenias that rose from her hair. But it had taken him a long time and a lot of hard work to get over the ego-crushing blow of waking up in a world where the only things that counted were the size of your sword and the fortune of your father.
The hardest thing for him now was not having a single person with whom he could reminisce—no rehashes of the latest Manchester United game, no head shaking about the prime minister or the president. Only Abby and Undine knew of his past—discretion was important in a world where they wouldn’t stop burning witches for another half century—and they talked to him about the life he’d left. But talking didn’t mean they’d laugh when he did his imitation of Obi-Wan Kenobi or hiss when he pretended Lance Armstrong had gotten a raw deal.
He opened his sporran and pulled out the broadsheet that had been stuffed in his hand last night as he and Abby made their way home along the Mile. Broadsheets would never take the place of online access to the Times as far as he was concerned, but he was counting on the inevitable attac
ks on the English and Queen Anne to enliven his morning. Some things, at least, were timeless.
* * *
Gerard opened his eyes and immediately shut them. He explored his psyche tenuously. He was not hungover—surprising given the amount he’d drunk. Instead, he felt as if he’d slept a deep and boundless sleep that had lasted not just the night but the day, the week, and quite possibly the rest of the fiscal year. In his head, he heard the voice of his first boss, a Frenchman named Brisbois, who had introduced Gerard to the pleasures of old single malts. “Gerard,” he’d said, giving the name its Gallic due, “you cannot rush the moment. Good whiskey is like a woman of the world. She opens her robe slowly.” Even with his eyes closed, he could tell Cinderella was still there, breathing heavily beside him. He was naked, however, and how he got that way gave him a moment of concern.
Had she returned from the land of Nod clearheaded enough to make love?
Maybe. It would certainly explain the liquidity of his legs and the vague but undeniable sense of self-congratulation bubbling through him. Though if they had made love, why didn’t he remember? The bits of the night he could capture, like a boy gamboling after lightning bugs, seemed rather to involve a different sort of woman—fiery and imperious rather than blond and accommodating—Catwoman, not Cinderella.
Still half-asleep, he brought the back of his hand to his nose, and there she was, the woman he remembered. Not licorice, nor anything remotely sweet. Instead, he smelled juniper and rosemary and the peat of the Kerr whiskey. His cock thickened in Pavlovian accord. What exactly had transpired?
He slitted his eyes, which didn’t help. He must have taken out his contacts before they’d started—or perhaps after they finished. The room was a pastiche of soft, mutable blurs.
I need coffee.
He reached for his glasses, which he couldn’t find. He had a faint memory of leaving them in the other room but couldn’t summon the wherewithal to abandon this blissful fog.
“Why is the room moving?” the woman moaned. “Am I on a bloody, goddamned ship?”
He summoned a few sympathetic blinks. Absinthe was not a drink for amateurs.
She rolled away, pulled the pillow tightly over her head, and moaned again.
Glasses. Coffee. Email. Gerard’s hierarchy of needs. He threw his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. Whoa. Apparently three-hundred-year-old whiskey wasn’t something to be toyed with either.
He stood and nearly toppled. His legs felt like slowly melting rubber. He steadied himself.
Glasses. Coffee. Email.
* * *
Duncan flipped the broadsheet over. He was enjoying the writer’s delightfully full-bodied allusion to Her Majesty as a “prickle-backed badger” when Serafina’s door opened.
A naked man stumbled out.
The broadsheet dropped from Duncan’s hand.
The man rubbed his eyes vigorously, patted down the console table, and mumbled, “Well, she may open her robe slowly, but she goes down like a thousand-dollar whore.”
In three strides, Duncan had the man by the shoulders.
“You have five seconds,” Duncan said, breathing fire. “What would you like to say before you can’t say anything ever again?”
The man blinked. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Bad choice.” Duncan flung the man against the wall.
“Are you out of your mind?” the man cried.
“Aye. Where’s Serafina?”
“Who the fuck is Serafina?”
Duncan head-butted him. “Next one, and your nose is going to look like a relief map of New Jersey.”
* * *
Gerard had spent fifteen years dealing with clients who’d done everything from threatening his mother (already dead) and demanding sex (Gerard kept an open mind, but the guy hadn’t brushed his teeth since the advent of cable), to rear-ending his car over a commercial shoot that ran over budget (the client lost two teeth, Gerard won a Palme d’Or, and the bill was paid in full). He didn’t know if this kilted Highlander on steroids was a jealous husband, jilted boyfriend, or overprotective cube-mate, but in Gerard’s mind, what Cinderella did before the clock struck midnight, or after, was nobody’s business but her own.
He considered a knee to the man’s balls, but the move would just supercharge his attacker, and Gerard decided, as he often did, that finesse made more sense.
Holding up his hands, he said, “I have something you’re going to want to hear, and you’re going to want to hear it because it involves you.”
The magic line. The words that turned grown men to putty.
The hold on his shoulders loosened.
“Look, I’m as eager to find her as you are,” Gerard said, summoning his finely tuned bullshit machine, “maybe more. Serafina’s great—sorry, she introduced herself to me as Sera; I didn’t make the connection. She and I talked half the night. I had no idea she was a stargazer. All this Perseids this and Leonids that. I tell you, it was fascinating. Unfortunately, she caught me yawning around one, and I think I might have offended her because all of a sudden she said she had to go. No excuses, of course, but I’d had this absolutely exhausting day, and I doubt even duct tape would have kept my lids up, if you know what I mean. Anyhow, I’d love it if you could convince her to at least consider our offer. That kind of curiosity and ease with people is something you just don’t see anymore. We’d be thrilled to have her on board at Piper Cornish.”
The idiot cocked his head, entirely flummoxed. “Did you say ‘duct tape’?”
Totally not the question Gerard had been expecting, but then again, nothing that morning had been what he was expecting. “I did, yes. I was beat.”
The man’s eyes glazed over and his arms dropped to his side. Gerard got the sense he could knock him over with a sharp poke.
“Undine,” the man said mysteriously, apparently to himself, the word choked out as if a vision of some terrifying Pict god had just appeared in his head. And then: “Shite.” He flew to a door Gerard didn’t remember being there.
Gerard ducked back into the bedroom, threw the lock, and bounded to the bed. “Your ship came in,” he said, shaking the arm clutching the pillow. “Unfortunately, it’s the Titanic. You have about five seconds to get your lifeboat in the bathroom and lock the door.”
“Mmphf,” came the voice, muzzy with sleep.
“Serafina, are you in there?” the Scot demanded, rattling the knob.
“Och.” The arm twitched. “Who is making all that bloody noise?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t been introduced to Paul MacBunyon?” Gerard yanked the covers off the bed.
He froze. The woman was not plump, blond, or Cinderella. She was a flaming redhead with pale legs that, in his foggy eyes, stretched out like two glorious lengths of beach beneath the azure blue of his Ermenegildo Zegna shirt, which, via some inexplicable dark magic, she was now wearing.
And he had never seen her before.
The woman swallowed a screech, banked herself against the headboard, and whispered fiercely, “Who the hell are you?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” he said. “This is my bed.”
Her chin dropped. “It is not!”
“Serafina!” The knob jiggled harder.
“You may keep the shirt,” Gerard said, “but if you could assist in the return of the rest of my clothes before Sasquatch breaks down the door, I’d be very grateful.” He tossed the covers aside.
She flung her hands across her eyes. “Mother naked, ye are!”
“Pot, kettle: black, black.” He scrabbled across the bed and peered over the side, catching another inspiring whiff of that juniper-rosemary combo. A heap of gray wool filled his heart with joy and he fished his trousers off the floor.
“Get out!” she demanded.
“That’s a fine thank-you.” He jumped
up and jerked the trousers on.
The door rattled harder. The man was using his shoulder now.
“What exactly would I be thanking ye for?”
“Last night.” He gave her a look that would translate even into her overwrought Robert Burns Scottish.
She braced her shoulders. “I did not!”
He brought his hand before her nose. “That’s your perfume, is it not?”
She gasped.
He shrugged. “I’m rarely wrong when it comes to that kind of thing.”
“What a repellent quality.”
“Look, I don’t know what brand of crazy you and your boyfriend have going on, but you probably should keep the weird cosplay to yourselves.” The next crash nearly brought the door off its hinges. “Do what you like, but I’m adjourning to the bathroom to hop on the phone to the concierge. I’ll tell you what else: they are not going to like the TripAdvisor review coming out of this.”
She drew herself even farther into the headboard. “Are you mad?”
“Mad. Blind. Shirtless. You name it. And definitely off whiskey.” He reached for the bathroom door but found only wall. “What the…?”
A splintering explosion of wood, and MacBunyon burst into the room. “You,” he said, pointing to the woman, an eerie calmness about him. “Out here.”
Gerard heaved a heavy sigh and moved between MacBunyon and the bed. The time for finesse was over. He lifted his fists. “Why don’t you start with me, big guy?”
The Scot regarded Gerard with a look of amusement and disgust. “Chivalry? Now? Seriously, man, do ye have any idea what she’s done to ye?”
“Duncan!” the woman said, aghast.
“There’s no reason to be ungentlemanly about it,” Gerard said. “We’re adults.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Duncan said. “Though if she did, which I doubt, and ye still felt the need to make that comment about her robe, perhaps you and I will have a little tête-à-tête when I finish with her, aye?” He added to the redhead, “I’ll wait out there while ye dress.”