“You,” she said, looking up at him, “are not my father.”
He sat down across the desk from her in the client’s chair that was also hardly ever used. “I don’t think so.”
She leaned her elbows on his desk. “I hereby give you permission to destroy him in a round of golf.”
“Only one?”
“You’re one of those, aren’t you?” she asked in disgust. “I bet you’re hiding an entire closet full of saddle shoes and Izod golf shirts.”
“The game was invented by my people,” he said archly. “I am only celebrating my heritage.”
“Rubbish.”
He smiled and relaxed for the first time in hours. “So,” he said carefully, “what do you really think?”
She looked at the binder in front of her, flipped back through the pages with a reverence that moved him more than he thought he might want to admit, then gently closed the book. “I think you’re a dreamer.”
“And you approve?”
“Very much,” she said. She smiled. “I want to hammer my dreams into metal. You want to give people the chance to breathe their dreams into life. That’s pretty heady stuff there.”
He was fairly sure he swore. He knew he blustered about and tried to draw attention away from the fact that his eyes were stinging with the same enthusiasm they might have if he’d just plunged his face into a patch of nettles.
She leaned back in his chair and simply stared at him.
“You’re lusting after me in this ridiculously expensive, hand-tailored Italian suit, aren’t you?” he managed.
“You were wearing that to your grandfather’s offices in New York,” she said. “You’re in jeans now.”
He supposed he was fortunate he wasn’t trotting around without his trousers, something he found himself worrying about more often than not. Too much time in a saffron shirt with the only need for a plaid being clan pride and a bit of warmth on a chilly day.
“Don’t become too attached to that suit,” he said, latching on to a less tender topic gladly. “I only own three of them and I’m not buying any more.”
“Not even for a wedding?”
He considered. “Perhaps for a wedding. If it’s mine.”
“What would you wear for slumming in Paris?”
“Are we slumming in Paris soon?”
“I’ve never been, but I think there’s ample scope for an artist’s imagination there.”
“If you get me to Paris, I’m donning poet’s clothes and never getting out of them again.”
“What sorts of things do poets wear?”
“If we’re Scottish, we wear the plaid,” he said, “in our clan’s colors, and all around us admire and wish they were Scottish as well.”
She smiled. “You and your national pride,” she said. “Very attractive. It worked for those half a dozen flight attendants fluttering around you all the way back over here.”
He sighed, but couldn’t help a bit of a smile. “If they only knew the extent of the madness that is my life. You, darling, have a very strong stomach to even stand to the side and watch it.”
She looked at him seriously. “Do we need to go back to Scotland?”
“I think perhaps we should,” he said. “We could take a sleeper to Inverness, then pick up your car.” He looked at her sternly. “I will be following you all the way home, so you can set aside any thoughts of slipping off to do any investigating on your own.”
“Where would I go besides that cottage next to yours you keep trying to kick me out of?”
