The Presence. Heather Graham
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mud. It will do for the moment,” MacNiall said. He turned and leaned against the counter, looking at her. “What are you supposed to ask me?”
“Well …”
“Well?”
He might be in jeans and tailored denim, leaning against a counter with a coffee cup, but she could well imagine him in something like a throne room, taking petitions from his vassals.
She stared at him a minute, determined that she wasn’t going to be so intimidated. They weren’t living in the feudal ages, after all.
“We had booked a large tour group for tonight. We don’t want to have to cancel.”
“What?” His question was beyond sharp. It was a growl.
Maybe she shouldn’t have been quite so blunt. He had slept in a chair in her room last night, but that hadn’t made them bosom buddies.
“Look,” she said impatiently, wondering what it was about him that goaded her own temper so severely. “You know that we’re really in a mess here. And if you take a good look around, you’ll have to admit that you owe us.”
“I owe you?” The words were polite, but it was quite evident that he found the mere idea totally ludicrous.
So they were right! she thought with a wince. She was quick to become defensive and then offensive with the laird. But she had gone this far with a brash determination. There was little to do other than play it out.
“Yes,” she said with conviction. “We’ve worked on walls, done masonry, fixed electric wiring … scrubbed on our hands and knees! Quite frankly, we’re more deserving of such a place—at least we’ve put love and spit and polish into it. How you could own such an exquisite piece of history and … let it go like this, I can’t begin to imagine.”
She could see the outrage and incredulity slipping into his eyes. Though he didn’t move, every muscle in his body seemed to tense, making his shoulders even broader.
Inwardly she winced. Great, she thought. So much for playing it out!
She was supposed to be talking him into allowing them to operate their tour, not offending and angering him.
“So now you’re an expert on maintaining a Scottish castle,” he said.
She stared into her cup. A sudden and vivid recollection of falling into his lap came to mind. Her fingers against his flesh, pressing into his … lap. The easy way he rose and simply deposited her down …
Last night his behavior had been courteous—and kind. She realized then that she was attracted to him, and somewhat afraid of him, as well. And her hostility toward him had everything to do with her inner defense mechanism.
Ryan suddenly burst back into the kitchen. Toni was certain that he hadn’t been far away, that he’d been listening in.
“Toni isn’t explaining this very well,” Ryan said, turning toward her with a fierce frown. “We really did do a lot, and not just cosmetic work. We did some structural work, as well. Honestly—”
“Yes,” Bruce said, staring at Toni.
Her heart quickened.
“Pardon?” Ryan said.
“Miss Fraser wasn’t particularly eloquent in her plea, but I do see that you’ve done a lot of labor here. And I quite understand that you’re in a bad position. Your group can come. Apparently you’re going to need the money.” He poured his coffee down the drain and exited the kitchen.
Ryan stared at Toni in amazement. Then he bounded toward her, drawing her from the chair, grinning like a madman. “Yes! Yes!”
Gina came in behind her husband. They hugged one another, dancing around the kitchen.
In a moment Thayer was back in, and then David and Kevin. They were so pleased, Toni wondered if they realized that they hadn’t gained anything but a single night. And though it would keep them from sleeping on Thayer’s Glasgow apartment floor for the next week, it would far from recoup their investment.
“We’re going to cook up the best breakfast in the world,” David said.
“We might want to start by brewing a new pot of coffee,” Toni told them, and she couldn’t help a grimace toward Gina. “Laird MacNiall just dumped yours down the sink.”
“Really!” Gina said.
“So your coffee sucks!” Ryan said cheerfully, kissing her cheek. “You’re still as cute as a button.”
“Get out of here, the lot of you,” Kevin said. “Shoo! We have to cook.”
Toni rose to leave, and as she did so, she glanced at the paper Thayer had left on the table when he’d first come in. The headlines blazed at her: Edinburgh Woman Still Missing. Police Fear Foul Play.
“Wait! Not you, Toni,” David said.
She looked over at him. “What do you mean, not me? You all insult my cooking!”
“But you’re the best washer, chopper and assistant we’ve ever had,” Kevin told her sweetly. “And then there’s the table. We should set it really nicely.”
“Wait, I get to wash, chop and be chef’s grunt?”
David set his arm around her shoulders, flashing her a smile, his dark eyes alive and merry. “Think of it as historical role-playing. Everyone wants to be the queen, but you have to have a few serfs running around.”
“Serf you!” she muttered.
“The others will have to clean up,” he reminded her.
“All right, there’s a deal,” Toni agreed. She walked over to the table and picked up the newspaper, sliding it under the counter so that she could go back for it later.
“Laird MacNiall?”
Bruce had been at his desk—where, he had to admit, the lack of dust was a welcome situation—when the tap sounded at his door. Bidding the arrival enter, he looked up to see that David Fulton was at his door.
“Aye, come in,” Bruce told him.
Fulton was a striking fellow, dark and lean. His affection for Kevin was evident in his warmth, but he also seemed to carry a deep sense of concern for the rest of his friends, as did they all.
Bruce was surprised to discover he somewhat envied the repartee in the group. The gay couple, the married couple, Toni Fraser—and even her Scots cousin. They were a diverse group, but the closeness between them was admirable. Riding with Ryan that morning, he had gotten most of the scoop on the group, how they had met, and how they had first begun the enterprise as a wild scheme, then determined that they could make it real.
“We’re really grateful to you,” David said. “Anyway, we like to think that we’ve prepared a feast fit for a king—or a lord, at the very least. Would you be so good as to join us?”
Bruce set down his pencil, surveyed the fellow and realized his stomach was growling. He inclined his head. “Great. I’ll be right down.”
He waited for David to leave, then opened his top drawer and set the sheets he’d been working on within it, along with the daily news.
He didn’t close the drawer, but studied the headline and the article again, deeply disturbed. The phrase all leads exhausted seemed to jump out at him.
Jonathan Tavish was fine enough as a local constable, but he hated giving up any of his local power, and he just didn’t have the expertise to deal with the situation that seemed to grow more dire on a daily basis.
Down in Stirling, Glasgow and, now, Edinburgh, they believed that the girls were seized off the streets of the main cities, then killed in other locations and finally—with the first two, at least—left