Her Scottish Mistake (A Perfect Escape)

by Michele De Winton

  She needed to be smarter about it, though. When he’d looked inside her bag she was sure he was going to run a mile. She’d figured the shaker of pepper was over-the-top, but what had she known about Thailand, really? Her brother had shown her a story on the internet about a woman getting kidnapped and ending up in some religious cult. Now that she was here she could laugh about it, but she was doing all sorts of things she wouldn’t have back home.

  And it’s not like you haven’t joined a lust cult over McDashing. One you’ve created all by your good self. She stole a look up at Blaine. Yep, holy mother of hotness.

  His eyes were gazing out the window, but she could still see their brilliant hue. True sapphire. Something she’d never seen on a human before. They were almost animal in nature, wouldn’t have been out of place on a snake in some wild National Geographic spread. She chuckled thinking about Bevan trussed up, in nothing but a loincloth and a snake on the front cover of her blog. That would get her some hits for sure.

  “Seen something funny?”

  Dear God, I laughed out loud? “Oh, not really. Just thinking about something one of the waiters said yesterday.” Blaine smiled and the little crinkle around the edges of his eyes only made her ovaries flip-flop harder. Stop it. He lied about who he was. Stay focused and be careful.

  “Want to know what I was thinking about?” he asked in his stupid-making accent.

  Janie nodded, not trusting herself to not blurt out something ridiculous.

  “I was thinking about being with you. How easy it is.”

  Too easy. “Me, too. Well, sort of. I mean, it’s lovely.”

  His smile broadened. “I’m glad.”

  He leaned in, and Janie tilted her head back and shut her eyes, ready to see if the 100 percent interested was going to translate into anything newsworthy.

  “Look, we’re here.”

  Janie blinked her eyes open, and Blaine opened the car door for her and waited for her to descend onto the dusty sidewalk. Holding her head high, Janie stepped out of the cab and reminded herself that this was it. Her trip of a lifetime. McDashing was a great sweetener, but there was no point mooning over the what-ifs of her time with him at the expense of the rest of the “attractions.”

  Taking a deep breath, she looked at where they were. Calling what she was standing on a sidewalk was a complete overstatement. The dusty road petered out into an even dustier town square of sorts with scattered buildings and the tip of a temple just visible behind it.

  “Where the heck are we?”

  Bevan turned back to her and winked. “You asked him to take you to a small village where there would be food. And a temple. That could have been anywhere. Are all Americans as trusting as you?”

  “Remember my brother? And the rape whistle?”

  “I’ll take that as a no then.” He laughed. “I’m glad I met you before your brother encouraged you to try to pack a gun. You have no idea how nice it is to meet someone who is entirely without skepticism. Or at least is willing to enjoy what the world has to offer instead of trying to milk something from it.”

  Janie bit her lip. Don’t say anything, don’t say anything. “Thanks, I think.”

  “Oh, it’s a good thing, for sure. So, trek up the temple to work up your appetite? Or a snack first to build up your strength?”

  “Anyone would think you thought I was all about food.”

  “I just know you wanted to try everything. You got me excited to try everything, too. Come.” He took her hand.

  Yes. Yes to trying everything. “The temple doesn’t look that far away.”

  “Oh, we’re not going to that one.” Blaine waved a hand as if the golden cones in the near distance were nothing but impostors. “We’re going to another one. Never know your luck, there might even be snakes in it. We have to go through some caves to get to it. Best we eat first.”

  “Hang on, how do you know there’s another temple? And caves?”

  “Checked with reception. And tweaked your directions to the cab driver when you weren’t looking.”

  Janie raised an eyebrow. “Seems like there’s a pattern emerging on these trips,” Janie said. “Should I be worried? What’s with all the caves?”

  “No swimming, promise,” Blaine said with a grin. “Perhaps it’s a Scottish thing, although I doubt it. Only thing any Scotsman did in a cave was hide, and that’s not really my style. But anyway, did I disappoint yesterday?”

  No, you most certainly did not.

  “Sa wat dii khrap.”

  Janie looked up at Blaine as an almost-perfect pronunciation of the local form of hello came out of the Scotsman’s mouth. The wizened old woman behind two steaming cooking pans beamed at his effort.

  He caught Janie gawping. “What? You think you’re the only one with a guidebook?”

  She shut her mouth promptly. “No. I just didn’t know…” What? That he was an actor and could probably whip out a multitude of accents? “I guess I didn’t know you’d be able to pull off such a good Thai accent because of your Scottish one.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “And your Texan drawl is any less thick?” he asked in an exact imitation of her own accent.

  “How did you… Wow.”

  His face darkened a second, as if he regretted showing off his gift at accents. Huh. So no doubts now. He was definitely Blaine, not Bevan, and he was clearly not from the tourism department.

  He handed her a hot roti and a foil-wrapped ice cream. “This doesn’t exactly look authentic,” she said, and managed a laugh.

  “Oh how wrong you are.” Blaine nodded to the woman behind the stall, who indicated with an assortment of wild waves and twirling gestures that Janie was to wrap the hot roti around the ice cream bar and eat the two together before the one melted the other.

  As she took her first bite, Janie’s taste buds just about exploded. There was something salty and sour in the roti, lemongrass or perhaps kaffir lime leaves, she decided, and combined with the rich vanilla of the ice cream and the fast-melting crisp shell of chocolate, the thing in her hands was almost as tasty as McDashing.

  “How did you find out about this? It’s soooo good.”

  “I think she likes it.” Blaine nodded at the woman behind the pans, and she cackled in delight.

  Janie turned to her. “Seriously. This is going to kill me from the inside out, but I don’t care. That’s how good it is.” She took another bite, and a giant dollop of ice cream landed on the edge of her top, just short of her cleavage.

  The woman waved a hand at Blaine. “I think she’s telling me to clean you up. Ironic, wouldn’t you say, given how we met?” he asked with the laughter not far from his voice.

  Slowly, hella slowly, his finger trailed the line from her shoulder down toward her cleavage, and the combination of his heat and the ice cream’s cold seared Janie’s skin so she thought her ovaries might do more than flip-flop and actually explode. He scooped the ice cream up and popped the finger in his mouth. Janie’s eyes ate up the movement hungrily, some very un-Little Acre impulse in her daring her finger to follow his; to tease the piece of chocolate away from the corner of his mouth, to let him lick the remaining ice cream away from her hands, to kiss the sticky, fragrant mess on the inside of her palm. Their eyes locked, and in that moment she knew he felt it too. Whoever he was back home, he was definitely all-in interested in her, right here, right now. One hundred percent.

  “You go now. Temple. Monkeys.”

  Janie followed the woman’s pointing finger and saw, just at that moment, a tiny baby monkey swing down from a tree and scamper up a set of stairs cut into rock that disappeared to nowhere. Monkeys?

  “The lady is right. Are you ready for an adventure?” Blaine asked.

  “You brought me to the Monkey Temple? I was going to put that on my list but I didn’t think I’d be able to fit it in. Although this doesn’t look like it did online.” For a moment Janie forgot about her quest to work out more about Blaine and just squeeed at the ide
a of being surrounded by a gazillion years of human and animal history.

  “I have no idea if it’s the Monkey Temple, but it is a temple. And I have been assured there are monkeys. Lots of ’em. I hope you like monkeys as much as you like snakes, because to be honest, those wee suckers make my skin crawl.”

  Janie laughed at his grimace. “Excellent.”

  The stairs led up a trail cut into the rock of the hillside which quickly became more and more treacherous. “Okay, this is definitely not the Monkey Temple,” Janie said, coming to a panting, sweaty, decidedly unflattering stop. “They have hundreds of tourists going up to it every day. No way Mr. Smith & Wesson from Texas would even make it this far.”

  “True.” Bevan turned to her. “But we’re almost there. I can see the top. And I need you to protect me from the monkeys.” He winked, and Janie was left in no doubt that he didn’t need any protection from any monkey and the top was not as close as he was making out.

  “If I take another step I may expire.”

  “Let’s take a rest on that rock, the one with the flat top. Then we really will be nearly there, and I bet we’ll get a great view,” he said, and damn him and his stupid-making accent, but Janie found herself nodding and shuffling up the hill some more.

  As she collapsed onto the rock, however, she discovered how right he was about the view. Out in front of them stretched the coast. The golden-sand-laden, dripping-with-palm-trees, emerald-ocean-lipped coast. From so far up, the colors were somehow exaggerated, the bunching of trees a seething mass of green, the water a scattering of brilliant jewels glittering in the sun. The ocean floor was obvious too. The water was a brighter blue close to shore, but where the sand dropped away, the dark blue depths of the ocean became unfathomable to a girl from inland Texas. While he was gazing out to sea, she surreptitiously snapped a pic of his profile against the view on her phone.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, and when she looked up at Blaine and discovered his eyes on her, found that she felt beautiful too. Despite the sweat, despite her shirt sagging in the heat and being stained from the chocolate–ice cream extravaganza, despite knowing that he was so outside her world and had given her a fake name, Janie Milan felt more beautiful than she had in a very long time. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

  She took a deep breath and tugged at his shirtsleeve as if to look under it. “I can’t see any armor, but you are some sort of fairy-tale knight or something, aren’t you? You seem too good to be true. Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  He covered her hand with his. “From what you’ve told me you deserve a little fairy tale.”

  “Thanks,” Janie said, enjoying the simple warmth of having his hand over hers, but her brain screaming at her that he’d very neatly avoided the question.

  “I’m afraid I’m no knight, though,” he said. “Scotsmen don’t really do knights. That’s an English thing. We had lairds.”

  “Laird MacGreggor,” Janie said, going along with his story, the unfamiliar words on her tongue feeling strangely pleasant. “Is that an old name? Are you, like, part of the clans or something?”

  “Or something.” Blaine looked out to sea as he spoke. “The MacGreggors were persecuted in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds.”

  “Persecuted?”

  “Run off their lands. Stripped of their clan rights sometimes. They were dark days for many Scotsmen, but those who stood up for themselves, they fared the worst.”

  “Do you feel it in you? That old battle? The need to prove yourself? I don’t know, as a true Scotsman, or clansman, or whatever?”

  He looked at her as if she had stumbled into a cavern of his innermost thoughts uninvited.

  “I don’t mean to pry,” she said quickly. “It’s just no one in Little Acre has a history like that. Sometimes it feels like everyone came off the same boat, settled in a patch of sandy dirt without thinking about it, grew some beets, and, well, carried on.”

  The consternation on Blaine’s face lifted. “For someone who thinks of herself as a small-town girl, you are quite the perceptive lass.”

  You don’t know the half of it, McDashing. Her brain pictured herself taking Tina’s advice and banking a fat check from the proceeds of her newly lucrative blog, but her heart pictured him standing on top of a softly sloping grassy hill, a tartan kilt flapping gently at his knees. That steely look in his eye made sense when she put it at home like this. The hard set of his jaw, the contrast of his dark hair against the lighter tone of his skin. He could totally be Laird MacGreggor. It would make a killer headline too. She smiled.

  “The MacGreggor clan title is the only thing my parents left my brother and me.”

  Hold the phones. Janie looked up at him sharply. Was this another line? His name was Galloway. But the look in his eye was deep, dark, sincere. So either he was an incredible actor, or there was something more going on here. “What do you mean, left?”

  “They passed when we were young. We grew up in a string of foster homes, and the last one was the worst. Guy made us call him Pa, but he will never be any type of father to me. In the midst of all that shite, my brother and I made a pact to always follow the MacGreggor clan way. Fight for what we wanted, for what was ours, no matter who tried to take it from us.”

  Okay, so it was an old family name. “Sounds intense.”

  He shrugged. “No more or less than half the other kids in Glasgow. At least we got out of it alive. Plenty of kids didn’t.”

  Janie sat back. “You make it sound like you grew up in the apocalypse.”

  “You ever been to Glasgow? Sometimes I wonder if it is part of the apocalypse. There are kids there carrying knives before they get to school. Guess that’s part of what got my brother into the shite so bad.” He shook his head.

  “Is he in trouble?”

  Blaine nodded. “You wouldn’t believe it, but he made himself a Super-Scotsman outfit and went gambling. It would have been a right laugh if he hadn’t pissed everyone off with his over-the-top hero act and then lost all his money. Now he’s so deep in debt he can hardly see sunlight.”

  “And you have to bail him out?” Overprotective brothers was one thing she understood. Seemed like Blaine was one of the good guys at least where his kid brother was concerned.

  Blaine nodded, then caught himself. “But why am I talking about that? We’re in Thailand. On your trip of a lifetime.” Looking up, he nodded. “And I think break time is up. The natives are getting restless.”

  Looking to where Blaine was pointing, Janie saw three golden monkeys, sitting up on their back legs, watching them, their heads tipped at various angles and a fair few teeth on display. Damn, just when she was getting to something juicy. “Where did they come from?”

  “From where we’re going.” He stood up and held out a hand. “Are you rested, milady?” There he was again, the laird on the hill. She put a hand into his and let him help her up and off the rock.

  The monkeys disappeared up the track, but within a minute of them starting out she heard the babble of their voices. “How many monkeys are we talking about?” she asked Blaine.

  “I don’t know, but as long as they’re all the same size as the guys we saw, we should be good, right? Nothing that big is going to pose much of a threat.”

  Janie didn’t want to burst his bubble, but her guidebook painted dire warnings about mobs of monkeys attacking tourists for their lunch. And in Thailand, there was still the threat of rabies lurking under the skin of wild animals in some quarters. “Did you bring any food with you?” she asked him.

  “Only a couple of those roti from earlier.”

  “Well, if the monkeys start getting fractious, do me a favor and throw the roti in the opposite direction of us, okay?”

  “Sure. Not such a big fan of monkeys either, then? If you can love snakes, surely you can love anything.”

  “I like a cute little monkey as much as the next girl, but they’re still wild animals. And packs of wild animals don’t tend to
give a rat’s ass about whether you like ’em or not, especially if they’re hungry.”

  “Shite, fair call. Right then, you ready?” The path had wound up the hill almost to the top, and now they saw the entrance to a large cave, a sign in curling local script, and strings of prayer flags announcing the importance of whatever it was that lay inside.

  “Do we need a flashlight?”

  “Apparently not. Cab driver said there’s a hole in the roof, and candles.”

  “The cab driver had a lot to say when I wasn’t listening.”

  “Not my fault you weren’t paying attention. But don’t worry, when I checked it out with the resort desk they said yes, this place was legit. That is after they’d stopped trying to get me to go on one of their tours.”

  Reassured, Janie straightened. It didn’t look like any other tourists ever came here. Either a win for McDashing on making her Thailand tour dreams come true, or a smart move to get away from anyone potentially recognizing him. “Come on.”

  It took a second for her eyes to get used to the darkness, but when they did she could only just get her breath in. The cave was full of monkeys. Not just a dozen but hundreds. All of the golden variety they’d seen outside, but in a multitude of shapes and sizes.

  “Bloody hell, lass.”

  Bloody hell was right. If the monkeys decided to attack them, she’d have no chance of getting out without a scratch, with or without the true-blue Highlander beside her. “As long as we stay calm, we should be fine. The locals have obviously been coming here for centuries, so they’re used to people.” Certainly the monkeys didn’t seem bothered by their appearance, and as she looked around, Janie realized why. There were dishes of food laid out everywhere. These were some well-looked-after monkeys. “If we were in India, I’d say this was a shrine to Hanuman. But there aren’t that many Hindus in Thailand. Buddha, that’s what I was expecting with all those prayer flags.”