He pursed his lips. “Don’t think that idea hadn’t already crossed my mind, but I don’t think you’ll need to fall on your sword quite yet. I’ll have my attorney send one of his errand boys to do your dirty work for you.”
She smiled in spite of herself. “Very kind. And very expensive-sounding.”
“Considering the vast sums of money I pay him for his services, I think the man can splash out himself for this. Let’s find a place to sit for a bit and I’ll make a couple of calls.”
“Is there an art supply store nearby, do you suppose?”
“I imagine so.” He paused and looked at her backpack. “No purse?”
She was tempted to avoid the question, then decided there was no reason not to be honest. “It’s my go bag.”
His mouth fell open a bit. “Your go bag?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “Just in case.”
“I don’t suppose you have chocolate and packets of crisps stashed in there, do you?”
“No, just money, a copy of my passport, and survival rations. I have junk food in this other bag.”
“Interesting.”
She wasn’t about to tell him about Bertie Wordsworth, spy-turned-chauffeur, who had instilled in her the compulsive need to have that kind of thing always ready. It was better to let the identities of her father’s rather eclectic staff remain safely unmentioned.
She let Nathaniel put her backpack in his car with her things from Mrs. McCreedy’s, then didn’t argue when he stopped a quarter hour later in front of a shop that looked as if it might have just what she needed.
“Need cash?” he asked.
She stopped with her hand on the door handle and looked at him. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “I have plenty.”
“Exercising my rusty chivalry.”
“It doesn’t seem all that rusty to me, but thank you, still.”
He smiled. “I’ll settle the car nearby. Find me when you’ve finished.”
She nodded, then got out before she could think too much about his offer and weight it with more importance than she should have.
Rusty chivalry.She wasn’t sure she’d ever experienced even that. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, which perhaps said more about the sort of guys she’d been dating than she cared for it to. It was time to make a change, definitely.
She browsed inside the shop for a bit, picked up a few things to use in keeping herself busy, then paid with cash. That she was having to do that was less frightening than it was annoying—and most likely unnecessary. The only people who had any idea what she was planning were unfortunately her parents. The only thing in her favor was that she hadn’t left them with an itinerary past where she intended to stay for the first week. Throwing them off the scent would be easy enough.
She stepped outside and took a deep breath before she started thinking about that too much. She saw Nathaniel’s SUV down the street a bit and started toward it. It was only as she got closer that she realized he was on the phone and he didn’t look at all happy. He caught sight of her, smiled, then opened the door for her. She tossed her stuff in the front seat,then decided that giving him a bit of privacy was probably the chivalrous thing for her to do.
She grabbed the smaller of the sketch pads she’d bought, liberated a pencil from a pack, then went to look for a bench to sit on. That was one thing she thought she might come to truly appreciate about Scotland. It might have been cloudy and threatening rain, but there were benches set in strategic places in spite of that. She took a plastic shopping bag and plopped it down on the bench, then sat and considered what might hold her attention long enough to sketch it.
The first thing she saw was Nathaniel MacLeod, leaning against the side of his damp Range Rover, scowling into his phone. He would certainly do for the moment. She opened up her book, took pencil in hand, and let her imagination run away with her. The beautiful thing about sitting on a damp bench in a place where it currently threatened rain was that she didn’t have too many expectations for her art.
She’d been drawing for as long as she could remember. She had branched out as time went on, feeling a definite pull toward creating things with more than just pen and paper, which had likely been what had led her to jewelry. There was something about the riotous colors the earth could produce, aided and abetted now and again by technology, that had sent her careening down paths she hadn’t intended to take.
She paused. All right, so she’d started off her jewelry career maybe a bit earlier than she wanted to admit courtesy of an unhealthy fascination with Friendly Plastic, but that had pointed her in the direction of seeing what she could heat up, which had left her with countless tiny pinpoint scars on her hands and forearms from her adventures in metalsmithing.
Where that left her at the moment, she couldn’t have said. She just knew that there was something extremely healing about getting back to her artistic roots with the simplest of tools. And it had to be said that Nathaniel MacLeod was a stunning model, even if he moved so much that she was tempted to call out for him to stop.
He finally got off his phone, cursed quite enthusiastically for a moment or two, then shoved his phone into his pocket. She looked down to see what had come of her attempts to put him on paper, then froze.
She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t been paying attention to what she’d been drawing, but there before her was the man she had seen coming out of the mist, the one who had appeared, then disappeared.
Nathaniel MacLeod.
