He glanced at her. “Foggy?”
“A bit.”
He suspected she wasn’t. “He disowned you?”
“Yes. After that, he drove my car onto his dock and pushed it into the lake. Then he billed me for the big, fat ticket he got for polluting.”
He considered. “I’m not sure what bothers you more, but I’m starting to suspect it wasn’t being disinherited.”
“Nah, I didn’t care.” She shrugged. “My father’s complicated. He has an MBA from Harvard, but what he really wanted was a law degree. None of my siblings wanted to go that route, so I was his last hope.” She smiled briefly. “He wasn’t pleased with my career path change.”
“So if you didn’t want to be a lawyer, what did you want to do?”
“I wanted to make jewelry,” she said. She shot him a quicklook. “I’m not sure how serious that sounds, but I do have my undergrad in art. I wanted to make art in a way that it would change whoever was wearing it, if I can put it that way without sounding too far out there. I was on the verge of really having things take off when I met Sheldon.”
“I’m getting the feeling that wasn’t a good thing.”
She sighed deeply. “Unfortunately, no, it wasn’t. I decided that making peace with my father was worth a shot, Sheldon was exactly his sort of potential son-in-law, so I ignored the red flags and got involved with him. When he offered to broker some semi-serious investment money for me, I took him up on it so my father would stop complaining about my choice of occupations.” She shrugged. “I leaped when I should have looked.”
“Semi-serious money?” he asked, because that was what he always asked. He smiled briefly at her. “Sorry, I’m nosy.”
She smiled briefly. “I am, too. Let’s just say it was more than I had in my savings account but less than I could have sold that Jag for.”
He nodded. “Understood. So, you had seed money, you had your business, and your father was happy with your choice of boyfriends. What then?”
“I woke up,” she said simply. “I dumped Sheldon and he called the loan. It was nothing more than I deserved for not reading the fine print, I guess. Sometimes people do stupid things when they want things to work out.”
“Sometimes people take a chance on trusting,” he countered.
“I’m an almost-attorney. I should have known better.” She sighed deeply. “It was either just pay him outright or forever have him looking over my shoulder to see what my business was doing. I wanted to be free, so I paid him.” She looked out the window. “It’s a funny thing, though. If I hadn’t chosen that path to walk down, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
He knew all about innocent paths that led to places one couldn’t have imagined, but he supposed the present was not the proper time to be offering that observation.
She looked back at him and smiled. “I will say, for the record, that my path has led to my riding in a Lamborghini while Sheldon’s most definitely has not.”
“Silver linings all around,” he noted. He imagined therewas more to the story and he suspected that a decent amount of money had left Emma’s account to go into the unpleasantly persuasive Sheldon’s, but perhaps the specifics of that were better left unexamined.
“It’s too bad I can’t just shove him into some sort of phone booth and have that transport him to another location,” she said. She was silent for a moment or two. “Or maybe another time.”
He was enormously grateful for the necessity of concentrating suddenly on the road. It gave him something to do besides face the way those words hung in the air between them.
The saints preserve him, as Angus MacLeod tended to blurt out when faced with a feisty Fergusson.
“Oh, look,” he said suddenly, “a village. I’m starved, how about you? We’re not far from Edinburgh, but I don’t think my poor tum will last that long. Also, I think I might spy a building of historical significance over there on the hill. Shall we?”
“That’d be great.”
He hazarded a glance at her because he was terrible at not knowing. He’d never had a present as a child that he hadn’t unwrapped days ahead of time, never read the beginning of a book without having read the final five pages, never not known exactly what he was walking into before he took the first step.
Unless it came to the past. That, he supposed, was the one thing in his life that came as a continual surprise.
He imagined he could add Emma Baxter to that list.
She wasn’t looking at him, but he was aware of how hard she was ignoring the proverbial elephant in the room. If she didn’t know what his other life looked like, she suspected. He would have staked his fortune on it.
Which left him back exactly where he’d started the morning: looking for anything to do to keep her mind off the past and on the present. A bit of lunch and a quick trip to that manor house over the way were going to likely be all that saved him.
He didn’t want to think about the explanations he would be offering if they didn’t.
