“You’re the earl of Artane?” she asked, looking absolutely starstruck.
“Or so they tell me,” Stephen said with a smile. “And you are...?”
“Just a peasant from across the Pond,” she said. “Emma Baxter.”
Stephen laughed a little. “You should make a visit and meet my wife. She’s from Seattle, you know.”
“So am I,” Emma said breathlessly. “What a coincidence.”
Nathaniel wasn’t much of a believer in coincidence, especially when those sorts of things seemed to be piling up in increasingly large piles around him. He wasn’t about to credit Stephen de Piaget with anything nefarious, but he was more than happy to look narrowly at Fate and her favorite henchman, Father Time.
Barbados. Surely time couldn’t find him in Barbados.
“That would be wonderful,” Emma said. “Wouldn’t it, Nathaniel?”
He focused on the conversation and realized that whilst he’d been about the necessary work of wondering how long it might take to get himself to some tropical destination, Lord Stephen and His Lordship’s newest fan had been making plans to amble around the corner to Stephen’s favorite chippy.
“Ah, brilliant,” he said. “Thank you, my lord.”
“It’s Stephen,” the earl said, nodding up the street and starting off with them. He shot Nathaniel a look. “I should be honest and tell you that I’ve heard about you.”
Nathaniel ignored the chill that went down his spine, then he realized what Stephen was talking about. “Benmore’s a small village,” he conceded. “Hard to be a recluse there with much success. You do business with James MacLeod’s brother-in-law, Zachary Smith, don’t you?”
Stephen laughed a little. “And so I do. I’m not sure Robert Cameron has cornered you at any parties in London to invite you to give him funds for the preservation trust, but I imagine that’s just an oversight.”
“I’ve thought about investing,” Nathaniel admitted. “Just haven’t had the time to do anything about it yet.”
“We’re always here,” Lord Stephen said with a smile, “and always looking for a few quid to pour into some tatty old national treasure.”
Nathaniel nodded, then listened to Stephen and Emma discuss just how old and tatty those treasures could be. He wanted to be involved in the conversation, truly he did, but it was all he could do to choke down food he didn’t taste and drink whatever it was Emma had shoved across the table at him.
He had never been without that dirk in the past. It had saved his life countless times.
What in the hell had happened to him to leave the past without it?
It was quite possibly the oddest sensation he’d ever felt—and he wasn’t unaccustomed to things that were out of the ordinary. To know that at some point in the future that had already happened, he had lost the dagger that, along with his sword, had kept him alive—or, rather,wouldkeep him alive, because if it didn’t do what it was supposed to, he wouldn’t be breathing at the moment.
He realized with a start that he was still sitting at a little bistro table, Emma was missing, and Stephen de Piaget was watching him thoughtfully. He blinked.
“Where’s Emma?”
“Off to powder her nose, or so she said,” Stephen said easily. “Good of you to bring her south and show her the sights. She seems to have a fondness for history. I understand that you read medieval literature at university.”
“Aye, I did—”
Nathaniel felt the words drop off into the silence of the room, mostly becauseuniversitywasn’t something that translated intomedieval Gaelic, which led him to realize abruptly thatthatwas what the good lord of Artane was speaking.
“Ah,” he attempted, then he looked at the man sitting next to him. “Hell.”
“Hmmm,” Stephen noted.
Nathaniel took a deep breath. “Lovely Gaelic you have there.”
“Not learned at home, I assure you,” Stephen said easily.
Good hell, the man’s accent was flawless. Nathaniel wasn’t sure what the protocol was for the moment when one’s luncheon companion was speaking with an accent last used several hundred years in the past, but he decided there was no reason to add offense by not continuing in the native tongue. His native tongue, that was, not Stephen’s.
Though at the moment, he wasn’t sure whose native tongue it was.
