“None,” she said. “I was too tired to look last night.”
“Then have a seat, lass, and I’ll see what his tastes run to.”
She sat and watched him. He was far too old and jaded tofind himself made nervous by a woman, but it had been a very long fortnight. That was surely the only reason his hands were less steady than he would have liked them to have been.
Patrick MacLeod had gifted her enough food to last a week, which spoke well of his generosity. It was odd to be the unwitting beneficiary of that, but there was nothing to be done about it. It was also odd to be preparing to sit down to breakfast with someone he didn’t know whilst that someone was wearing nightclothes and wrapped in a shawl, but perhaps she didn’t realize what she was wearing. Perhaps she didn’t care.
Perhaps he was just a comfortable sort of lad who put all around him at ease with his delightful self.
He eventually set down two plates of eggs, sausage, and fried tomatoes in as much of a nod to traditional English fare as he could make, then sat down across from her with the intention of making polite conversation.
“You’re wearing pajamas,” was what came out instead.
Truly, he needed to make a change in his life. Too much time in medieval Scotland had obviously done his table manners a disservice.
“I thought you might make off with my cheese if I left you in here unsupervised long enough to change.”
He almost smiled. “I cooked you breakfast,” he pointed out.
“And eyed that cheese with undisguised admiration.” She looked at him knowingly. “You can’t deny it.”
He wondered if it were possible to fall in love at first sight. “Caught,” he said, then he smiled and applied himself to a decently fashioned breakfast made from ingredients provided by a man he hoped he would never encounter at the local greengrocer.
His life was complicated.
But what he’d had to work with had led to a decent meal, even if he did say so himself, and he was pleased to see that his companion wasn’t above tucking in with a decent amount of gusto. He wasn’t above it, either, which led to more eating and not a great amount of conversation.
“You are a very good cook,” she said finally. She sat back and sipped her tea. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” It was on the tip of his tongue to say that he imagined anything would have been better than what that poor Southerton woman could produce whilst having to liveunder the same roof with her husband, but he stopped himself just in time. He shouldn’t have known anything about where his breakfast companion had been staying, because he shouldn’t have been loitering in the garden of her inn.
Never mind anywhere else she’d apparently recently been.
He looked at his hostess and supposed there was no time like the present to trot out decent manners.
“I suppose introductions are in order,” he said. He held out his hand. “Nathaniel MacLeod.”
“Emmaline Baxter,” she said, shaking his hand briefly, “but don’t call me that. There are lots of you MacLeods in the area, aren’t there?”
“It would seem so,” he agreed. “Either happy marriages or not enough to do during long winters; I never can decide which it is.” He helped himself to his own tea. “Here for vacation?”
“In this cottage or in Scotland?”
“Take your pick.”
She pulled her shawl more closely around herself. “I’m running away,” she said. “Well, maybe less running away from something than running to something better. Scotland seemed like a good destination.”
He could understand that well enough, given how much running he’d done over the course of his life.
“What about you?” she asked.
“Ah,” he said, grasping for something undemanding and mostly honest to say, “I was born here.” It was a bit more complicated than that, but he wasn’t sure how much detail she would care for.
He’d been born in Inverness, in hospital, though his ma hadn’t been at all keen on the idea. She put her foot down with his younger sister and had her in a medieval crofter’s hut, to his father’s dismay. His older brother had been born in the States, something he still complained about.
As he said: complicated.
“I’ve been a bit of a gypsy,” he said, settling for fewer details than more, “but I’ve been here in the Highlands for the past few years. Needed somewhere to land, and this seemed as good a place as any.”
