1
Lindsey glanced up at the clock on the wall. Twenty past six. The others had long gone. When the cafe shut they just took off their aprons and left. Why couldn’t she do the same?
She was going to tell him. She’d had enough of being walked over. Like her mom kept reminding her, she needed to stand up for herself. If he wanted the place spotless before she went home, he could start paying her overtime.
She wiped her brow, turning to find her boss had finally put in an appearance. Richard was known for two things, trying to touch up the staff and vanishing as soon as the rush started, only returning to count the money in the till at the end of the day.
He hunched over the notes, the fluorescent lights shining off his bald patch, making him look like a human bowling ball.
“Lindsey,” he said, adding the contents of the tips jar to his pile of cash. “I’m running late. You don’t mind locking up for me tonight, do you?”
One more lot of tips into his pocket. That was the icing on the cake. Come on, you can do it. Stand up to him. He needs you more than you need him. “Well, actually, I was going to see my mom and I need to renew my bus pass-”
“Great. Knew you wouldn’t let me down. Safe key’s in the office. See you tomorrow.”
“But-.”
He was already gone, slapping her ass as he went, the door slamming shut before his mid-life-crisis-mobile roared into life outside.
Great. Well done. Superbly handled. You let him touch you again. And how about that for confronting him. I need a new bus pass? How about pay me for last week already? How about stop stealing our tips? Nope, you just let him walk all over you. Again.
Her hands curled into fists as anger rose up inside her. She soon swallowed it back down. What good did it ever do to get cross about stuff like this? She’d only get fired and how likely was she to find another job? It had taken six months just to get pot washer for a perve added to her C.V. No one wanted a historian without a degree. No one wanted Lindsey MacMillan.
She glanced up at the clock again. An hour until the next bus. She might as well catch up on some reading rather than wait in the rain at the bus stop.
Retrieving her bag from the hook on the back of the staff bathroom, she dug out the book her mom had lent her and took a seat by the window, cars outside passing by in an endless blur as she settled into her book.
The rain grew heavier, slamming into the window hard enough to drown out the death rattles of the air con. She hardly noticed. She was too busy trying to work out what it was about the book her mom loved so much.
Why was Rhona MacMillan so obsessed with Tavish Sinclair? From what she could tell he was just one more medieval Highlander among many.
She had already finished the first couple of chapters in The History of the Sinclairs. Nothing so far suggested he was anything more than a murderer.
Raised in poverty, he had schmoozed through the world of the Sinclairs until he was on the verge of becoming laird, no mean feat in a time when primogeniture was everything.
Then for some reason, he threw it all away, killing a princess without a hope of getting away with it before being exiled from the clan, somehow avoiding execution. At that point, he simply disappeared from the history books.
She couldn’t see anything particularly exciting about his story apart from the section on the locket. After killing the princess he stole her locket and hid it in his childhood home. No doubt his plan was to retrieve it later to sell the ruby that she kept inside.
She already knew all about the locket. That was why her mother had bought Sinclair House. The seller could hardly believe their luck when mom had offered five thousand above the asking price for a crumbling ruin that had been on the market twenty years and was sinking into the ground underneath it. Lindsey thought her mother had gone mad when she told her about her purchase.
“That was the last of your savings!”
“But the first step to finding the ruby,” Rhona replied.
That was when she found out about mom’s plan. She was convinced she could find the locket where everyone else had failed. Then she could pay off the mortgage that was crippling her and save a historic house from demolition.
The house purchase had been a year ago and although the renovations were progressing, there was still no sign of the priceless locket. Money was running out.
In the last couple of months, work had ground to a halt. The work had cost much more than they could afford, even with Lindsey’s help. Rhona’s money had long gone but she still clung onto the hope of finding the locket.
“It’ll be worth a fortune,” she kept saying. “Once I find it we can do up the whole place so it’s exactly how it was in his time. Won’t that be a fitting tribute to an innocent man?”
Lindsey didn’t have the heart to mention the flaw in her mom’s plan. If Tavish Sinclair was innocent of murder, as she believed, then why would he have stolen and hidden the locket?
There was a drawing of the locket filling half the page in the book in front of her. It was a sketch originally done on parchment and long faded but it gave her a good idea of how it had looked. Small, easy to hide, hard to find, the kind of thing that could easily remain hidden forever.
What would life have been like if her mom had never found out about Tavish Sinclair? Would they still be living in the tiny flat in London? Or was fate always going to bring them up to Scotland where the only work she could find was in a high street cafe that worked her too hard and paid her too little while she tried to avoid her boss’s wandering hands.
