He pulled away from the temptation to trot out and hoist a sword in her defense—again, something he realized uneasily that he’d already been tempted to do. She was a mystery and one he had no interest in investigating further. He had enough of them in his own life without adding another to the mix.
“And I’ve lost my phone. I think events are conspiring against me.”
It’s Fate,he wanted to call out, but decided it might be best to just keep that thought to himself. No sense in drawing attention to himself unnecessarily.
“Let’s go borrow a flashlight and we’ll come look around the garden one more time,” Sunshine said. “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.”
Nathaniel wondered if it might be wisest just to drop the phone and run. If he were especially clever, he might manage to just set the damned thing on the front step and bolt before anyone was the wiser—
“We’ll fix the other, too,” Madelyn MacLeod offered as they made their way back inside. “Patrick can make that happen.”
Nathaniel suspected Patrick MacLeod could make all sorts of things happen. He stood there and contemplated what the lord of Benmore might need to be fixing for longer than heshould have. He realized what he was doing when he saw three lassies with torches returning to the outside.
There was no time like the present to get the hell out of Dodge, as his American cousins might have said.
He supposed, as he sprinted past the front door, that his direction had been ill-advised, but he wasn’t at his best. He didn’t want to look and see if he’d been spotted, but damn his curiosity if it didn’t get the better of him. He cast a quick glance at the trio of women standing just inside the doorway.
They were looking at him as if they’d just seen a ghost.
He decided it was best not to try to sort that for them. He vaulted over a hedge of roses, cursing the rip in his jeans and the cuts on his hands that he earned as a result, then ran bodily into a black Range Rover. He should have remembered it was there given that he’d seen it not a quarter of an hour before, but he was, as he’d noted before, not at his best.
The window was down, which he didn’t think was a particularly good thing. He was fortunate he hadn’t landed in the lap of—
Well, hell. That was Patrick MacLeod’s Range Rover, and that was the young Himself sitting behind the wheel. Nathaniel pulled himself back from where he’d been plastered half inside the man’s car, grasped the roof to hold himself upright, and tried to catch his breath.
“Need help, mate?” Patrick MacLeod asked politely. “Oh... ah—”
Nathaniel thought he might best serve His Lordship by reaching out and helping him retrieve his jaw from where it had suddenly fallen to his chest. He had the feeling that Lord Patrick’s condition had less to do with the potential damage to the car than it did the fact that he might as well have been looking in a mirror.
Patrick’s mouth moved, but no sound came out.
Nathaniel supposed he had an unfair advantage, having given the potential for the current encounter a great amount of thought beforehand, but he wasn’t above using that advantage ruthlessly. He smiled pleasantly.
“Lost my cat, what?” he said in his best Etonian accent. “Must continue the search, sorry.”
Then he did the wisest thing he’d done all day: he turned right and fled.
The man’s headlamps went on, but Nathaniel didn’t linger in their light. He bolted back up the way to the pub, met Keith at the back door, and tossed him twenty quid.
“Your change—”
“Please, nay,” Nathaniel said, with feeling. If he had to hear any numbers he didn’t want to hear, he would simply sit down on the ground and weep. He took his supper and jogged back to his car, praying he wouldn’t see anything else he didn’t want to see. The Yank’s phone burned a hole in his pocket, but he ignored that as well.
Altruism? What absolute rot it was. Never again.
He would have to get her damned phone back to her, but it would have to be done without kicking up a fuss. He should have just dropped it in the garden and let her find it, but the grass had been damp. He would just have to wait until the next day, then take it and leave it somewhere she could find it—perhaps at Mrs. McCreedy’s.
He got himself out of the village without encountering any stray noblemen in black SUVs, then continued on his way home without pausing to check his email or do any of the business he should have been doing. It would keep, and so would the phone in his pocket.
He would worry about the rest in the morning.
Chapter 5
Emmastood on the front steps of the inn she had just checked out of and wondered if she would spend the rest of her time in Scotland seeing handsome men popping out of shadows while never getting to actually meet them.
There was something about the guy she’d just watched run past her, though, that was uncomfortably familiar. She wasn’t ready to swear to it, but she suspected he was the one she had seen earlier in the day, in the forest. The obvious difference was that he was darting across front gardens and leaping over hedges instead of stumbling out of medieval battle scenes, but it was hard to deny how much he looked like that guy with the sword. She was almost tempted to ask Sunny and her sister if they’d seen him before, but then she would have had to explain where she had seen him before and she thought that might just make her sound more crazy than she already felt.
“Let’s go grab dinner at my house,” Madelyn MacLeod said, “then we’ll get you settled.”
