She understood that. She also suspected she was beginning to understand other things as well. “I couldn’t help but eavesdrop on that conversation,” she said mildly. “I heard several terms the average guy doesn’t generally use while simply hanging out on a freezing November morning. Any brushes with law school you’d like to come clean about?”
He looked like he was near to hedging, then he sighed heavily. “I have my degree from Columbia and I passed the bar in New York. I would rather starve than work for a firm, though.”
She was unsurprised. “And your undergrad?”
“I read Medieval Literature.” He shrugged and smiled faintly. “I like old things.”
She imagined he did, regardless of how they seemed to affect him. She smiled. “I think your path to this spot is just as convoluted as mine.”
“I think you might be right,” he agreed. He looked up the street, then back at her. “I think I definitely want lunch, but perhaps a bit of a walk first. I’m restless. Would a little ramble toward the castle suit?”
“Absolutely. Especially if we can visit a couple of those shops that sell tartans on the way.”
“I’ll splash out for a shawl for you,” he said gallantly.
“Fergusson colors?”
He shot her a look. “I’m not going to dignify that with a response, never mind that my mother was a Fergusson.” He shut his phone off and put it in his pocket. “I’ll do whatever you like as long as I can pretend I dropped my phone down a storm drain. I need some distance from—well, just some distance.”
She made a noncommittal sort of noise, then walked with him back to their hotel. She understood wanting to get some distance from life. It was, after all, the main reason she’d flown halfway around the world. She wondered what Nathaniel was trying to escape from.
She also wondered why antiques, from dead trees to worn blades, left him so unsettled. There was something going on in his life that seemed very odd indeed.
It was none of her business, of course, but the man had made her breakfast when she’d needed it and was currently gifting her a couple of days in a beautiful medieval city. Nosing about in his private affairs with good intentions seemed like the least she could do in return. That dagger was a very tangible clue, and she wondered how she could ditch him long enough to go have another look at it.
She had the feeling she would regret it if she didn’t.
Chapter 12
Nathanielleaned against the wall outside the hotel, considered the gray sky above him, and wondered if the present moment was perhaps one of those times when a man simply had to cross the border and get himself out of Scotland.
That wasn’t something he considered lightly. He had, of course, lived in England whilst at school, and he continued to keep a flat in London simply because he did so much business on that end of the island, but he much preferred to keep himself safely north of Hadrian’s Wall. That he was even entertaining the idea of heading south in an effort to escape his life spoke volumes about the sort of day he’d had so far.
Seeing a dagger in the present that he had lost in the past—a dagger that bore a mark he had no trouble identifying—and seeing it in a place where it definitely shouldn’t have been had come close to leaving him in a swoon.
There were strange things afoot in the world.
Those things were, he had to admit, almost enough to leave him convinced that perhaps Edinburgh was simply not far enough to escape his doom. He might have to take his life in his hands and cross the border. Perhaps if he didn’t move too quickly, he wouldn’t startle the natives unduly. Heaven knew he could sympathize with being unsettled by strange things, having had his own brush with things that shouldn’t have belonged to his safe, sensible life.
He jumped a little when he realized Emma was standing next to him.
“Sorry,” he managed. “Distracted. Lunch now?”
“We probably should,” she said. “I think you had a serious case of low blood sugar back there in that museum.”
He nodded, because he wasn’t about to tell her that his near collapse in the shop had been less from lack of sustenance than it had been a full dose of shock over seeing that blade.
His blade, as it happened. The one he’d had made by Malcolm’s blacksmith half a year ago. It had been made to suit his hand, obviously, and he’d reached for it scores of times in the past. There was just one problem with seeing it, seasoned as it seemed to have been by hundreds of years of time, in that man Campbell’s most treasured case.
That blade was also currently sitting in the back of his closet, bright and relatively new.
He supposed the answer could be as simple as someone having made off with it in thefuturein the past. It was possible the thief had died of shame shortly thereafter and the blade had gone missing for several centuries. No doubt someone in the present day had found the old thing lying beneath the rubble in an inherited shed andvoilà, in no time it had been handed off to a man in Edinburgh whose business antique blades was.
“Nathaniel?”
He dragged himself away from his uncomfortable speculations. “Aye?”
“There’s a guy fifty feet to your right who’s looking at you as if he’s seen a ghost.”
