Roses in Moonlight (5 page)

“Take Oliver.”

Derrick looked at Cameron quickly. “But you—”

“Have a perfectly terrifying security detail,” Cameron said with a shrug, “all of whom have seen battle in one form or another and haven’t a clue as to who I am in truth. Sunny and I are perfectly safe. Besides, the lads have been working for you for almost a year now. How is this different?”

Derrick sighed. “I don’t know. It feels dodgier than usual for some reason.”

“Then take Oliver for security and Ewan for his charm. Or spare yourself the annoyance and leave Ewan in Scotland. Either way, call on the lads as you need to, of course.” He studied Derrick for a moment or two in silence. “What exactly is it that bothers you about this?”

Derrick dragged his hand through his hair, then looked at his cousin. “Have you ever felt like Fate was breathing down your neck?”

Cameron looked at him for a moment or two with absolutely no expression on his face, then he laughed. He was still laughing as Derrick cursed him and left his office. He pulled the door shut quietly behind him instead of slamming it because it was his laird inside, after all, and he was nothing if not a deferent vassal. He looked at Oliver, who had apparently found a plug next to a comfortable chair.

“Let’s go.”

Oliver unplugged his phone and got smoothly to his feet, his expression utterly impassive. Oliver at his most enthusiastic, as it happened. Derrick said good-byes all around and walked with Oliver from the building. He waited until they were outside before he looked at his partner in anti-crime.

“We’re going after the lace.”

“I suspected as much. North?”

“North.”

“Taking the Vanquish, are we?”

“No,” Derrick said, with feeling. “I don’t want some random thug dinging it.”

“Very well, I’ll meet you at the station, what?”

“That’d be lovely.”

“Destination?”

“Newcastle, but we’d best buy tickets for Edinburgh.”

“Throw ’em off the scent, eh?”

Derrick grunted. “Somehow, I doubt anyone’s going to be following us.”

“Best to be sure.”

“Care to see to that?”

Oliver smiled. “I imagine I would.”

Derrick checked his watch. “It’s three.”

“Train leaves at five, gets us there by eight, if you like.”

“You frighten me,” Derrick said honestly. He truly didn’t like to think about the thoughts that ran through Oliver Phillips’s brain. Too terrifying.

“I like to have all possibilities considered,” Oliver said easily.

“And you have the train schedules memorized.”

“I’m not the one with the photographic memory,” Oliver said with a shrug, “but I do the best I can.” He walked off with a “cheers, mate” thrown over his shoulder.

Derrick only shook his head and went to find a taxi. He might have had a perfect memory, but Oliver, well, he had a nose for things that had saved Derrick more grief than he wanted to think about at present. There was a lad Jamie MacLeod would have appreciated for his particular skills.

He gave the cabbie his address and sat back to consider his near future. He would pack up a few things he kept at his very small, very discreet flat, then be on his way. There was no need to ring Lord Epworth because as Cameron had already indicated, he had already accepted the charge to find the earl’s little piece of lace. How could he not? The lace was spectacular and the earl was one of those who truly valued his collection of antiques. His grief over its loss had been genuine and almost unassuageable. Derrick had agreed to the rescue whilst His Lordship had still been wringing his hands.

Half an hour later he was walking into his flat and up the stairs to his spare room. It looked like a prop room in a very busy theater, but that was only part of what hid behind walls and inside trunks. He owned thousands of pounds’ worth of all kinds of technology, though he had to admit his hack-proof phone and small tablet had become his tools of choice lately. And aye, he knew his gear wasn’t hackable because part of the way Peter kept himself busy every day was trying to break through Derrick’s layers of security. The man would have likely been in prison if anyone with any power had known what he could do. Either that, or Her Majesty’s spooks would have gang-pressed him into service for the cause. Derrick was simply happy to know Peter was for them and not against.

He filled a backpack with the usual things he never went without: colored contacts, facial hair, wigs, easily changed clothing that would radically alter his aspect. For the rest, he would rely on skills he had paid dearly for but never used for anything but his business—

He turned away from that thought before it blossomed into anything that would distract him from what he needed to do. The past was dead and buried and he preferred it that way.

He was tempted to do a little snooping online before he left for the station but decided against it. There would be time enough to delve more fully into the lives of his suspects whilst he was waiting for them to make a wrong move. It wasn’t his usual modus operandi, to leave things unexamined and uncovered, but, well, Fate was still standing right behind him, blowing her chilly breath down the back of his neck. He shoved his phone in his pocket, his tablet in his pack, then locked up and headed for the station. He would give his suspects a bit of a head start, just to make things more interesting.

He would have shaken his head, but he couldn’t bring himself to. He was going to have to figure out something to do with his life at some point besides chase bad guys. Because somehow, with all that chasing and rescuing, he never seemed to manage to rescue a girl. He had teased Cameron about his wedded bliss, but the truth was, he did envy him. Not only did he envy Cameron his happiness, he wanted something very much like it for himself.

One more job, then on to other things.

S
amantha
walked to the window of her minuscule garret room, pulled the lace curtain—not handmade, which she had expected—back and looked out over the street that definitely had a medieval sort of feel, which she hadn’t expected. She had been fully prepared to live in a shed if it meant she could put an entire ocean between herself and her former life, but this was definitely a step up. She was going to have to write her brother a very nice thank-you note.

She sank down on the little bench set under the window and looked at the people walking along the street below her, going about their business as if they had every right to. She watched them for a moment or two, then leaned her head back against the side of the window and closed her eyes.

She hadn’t dared think about it before, on the off chance that her plans went awry, but she was in the middle of perpetrating a strategy. It was almost ridiculous to think that at the ripe old age of twenty-six she was trying to figure out a way to cut the old apron strings, but that’s what it boiled down to. It wasn’t that her parents were bad people; they were just . . . difficult. Her older siblings had been a disappointment, so the burden of perfection had always rested on her.

She’d had enough of that, actually.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried over the years to assert her independence. It was true that she was still living in the bedroom she’d grown up in, but she had recently begun to refuse to sleep on a sleeper while accompanying her mother to conferences, insisting instead on a bed of her own.

She paused. All right, so it had been an extra bed in her mother’s room. She had put her foot down about penny loafers. She had gotten her master’s in historical textile preservation with an emphasis on Elizabethan offerings instead of Victorian. And she had begun to insist that her mother pay her for help with exhibitions instead of simply offering her room and board. She knew she should have gotten an apartment long before now, but every time she made noises about moving out, her parents looked as if she’d said she was going to ditch her conservative uniform of tweed and polyester for tie-dye and dreads. What was the last child to do but try to keep the peace?

The truth was, her parents weren’t terrible people. They just always both seemed to need an audience. Unfortunately, unlike her older brother and sister, she’d never managed to get out of the front-row seats, much less the theater.

Until two days earlier, that was.

She picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder. She had cash, a debit card, and a map Lydia had given her earlier that morning with useful places marked in red. Lydia had invited her to take the day and investigate the environs so she would be comfortable when they left her alone in their house for the summer. Life was good.

She jogged down the stairs, feeling remarkably fresh for it still being the middle of the night on the East Coast, and almost ran into Lydia bodily in the entryway.

“Oh,” Samantha said in surprise, “I’m sorry—”

Lydia put her finger to her lips quickly. “You have company,” she whispered. “I think you might escape—”

Or maybe not. The door to the salon opened with a flourish and there stood Theodore IV, ready to set sail for points she didn’t want to know about. She managed to suppress a flinch only because she’d had so much practice.

“Off we go,” he said brightly. “Thank you, Mrs. Cooke, for your hospitality.”

And that was that. Before she could say anything, Samantha was hustled out the door and herded toward a taxi. She balked at that.

“I can’t afford a taxi,” she said firmly.

Dory drew himself up. “As if I would ask you to pay,” he said huffily. “I’m treating today.”

Unless things changed later on, of course. Samantha was half tempted as he got in first to simply jump back, shut the door, and run down the street, but she supposed he would just follow her. She sighed, then climbed into the back of the cab with him. Last time. Honestly.

“Where are we going this morning?” she asked reluctantly.

“The Castle,” he said, checking his phone, “then lunch, then the bridge, then the Discovery Museum.”

Her feet hurt just thinking about it, but she supposed she wouldn’t waste breath saying anything. It would just add to her already unwholesome reputation for fragility.

The thing that surprised her the most as they approached Newcastle’s landmark castle was the fact that the taxi dropped them off on a sidewalk that was immediately adjacent to the steps that led up to an enormous wooden set of doors. She stood on that sidewalk and looked around her in amazement. She had seen her share of pictures of castles, but they’d always been on a bluff, or out in the country. Outside of London and Edinburgh, she’d never truly considered that a modern city might sit around a structure that had been more or less intact since the thirteenth century.

She walked up stairs that had no doubt been walked up hundreds of thousands of times over those eight hundred years and felt something slide down her spine—and that wasn’t Dory Mollineux’s hand. She looked over her shoulder, but there was nothing there.

Weird.

She learned at the entrance that they were going Dutch, which she supposed shouldn’t have surprised her. So much for being treated that day. She pulled out enough money for her own entrance fee, then declined to buy a guidebook when invited to do so by her companion. If he wanted one, he could buy it himself.

They started on the ground floor with the chapel, but Dory didn’t seem to be particularly eager to stay there. In fact, she realized almost immediately that his idea of touring was to walk into a room of any size, nod, then stride on off to the next thing. She hadn’t paid her four pounds to sprint through the entire place, so once they hit the first floor and a room with exhibits, she put her foot down.

“I’m going to read all these,” she announced.

He blew his perfectly highlighted blond locks out of his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not being ridiculous; I’m poor and I’m not going to waste my money on something, then not look it over thoroughly.” She pointed to a bench surrounding a pillar. “Go sit on that if you’re bored.”

He looked at her with a slight frown, as if he couldn’t quite understand why she was forming words that didn’t include
of course
and
whatever you want
. He studied her for a moment or two longer, then walked off to sit down. She ignored him and decided to start at one corner of the room and work her way around.

Only the corner of the room she had selected was currently occupied. She looked at the man standing three feet from her and felt a sudden and unaccountable increase of temperature in the room.

All right, so she had seen men before, several of them. She had even gone out with a couple, handpicked by her parents, of course, and possessing pedigrees that would have made any blue blood worth his salt green with envy. There had even, in the long progression of males she had admired from a distance, been a few who had been tall, dark, and handsome.

But she had the feeling that just a glance from the man standing next to her would have sent all those guys off into therapy for years.

He was tall, substantially taller than Dory’s wishful-thinking not-quite six feet. He was wearing jeans, boots, and some sort of T-shirt that sported a sentiment in Middle English she would have translated if she’d had the presence of mind to do so. After all, she’d agreed to Latin and Middle English if her mother laid off her about Scottish Gaelic.

She couldn’t see the color of his eyes, but his hair was dark and his face was, well,
flawless
was the only word that came to mind. And she knew that his face was flawless because he had turned it toward her and was watching her gape at him.

She quickly turned away and walked toward the nearest case filled with artifacts. She had no idea what she was looking at. She read the words written there but found no meaning in them. She felt as if she’d just come down with a terrible cold, feverish, as if she needed a serious lie-down sooner rather than later.

It made her feel a little silly even thinking that, because she felt as if she were quoting directly from one of those contraband romances her great-aunt Mary had slipped her during high school, buried under balls of tatting thread and musty old patterns included to throw her mother off the scent. But there was no denying that the man standing over there, leaning over a case with his hands clasped behind his back, was absolutely stunning.

“Hurry up, Sammy,” Dory said loudly.

The annoyance was plain in his voice. She looked over her shoulder to tell him to keep his voice down—and stop calling her that name she loathed—when for the second time in as many minutes, she felt herself stagger in place.

There was a man standing right there next to Dory, a tall, distinguished-looking man with jet-black hair swept artistically back from his forehead. It wasn’t so much that he was wearing full-blown Elizabethan gear, including an enormous ruff, a heavily embroidered doublet, and a velvet cape tossed artistically over one shoulder, or that he was looking at her as if he found her rather lacking. It wasn’t even that she suspected that with only a hint of an invitation, he would break forth into a Shakespearean soliloquy right there in front of her.

It was that she had the feeling, crazy as it might have been, that she was looking at someone who just wasn’t quite of the corporeal world.

She tore her gaze away from him to look at Dory, who was still complaining that she wasn’t going fast enough. She pointed behind him and tried to speak, but realized fairly soon that while her mouth was moving, nothing but garbled babbling was coming out.

And then she watched the Elizabethan type lean over and flick Dory on the ear.

Dory leapt up, looked around him, then frowned fiercely. He looked at her.

“Who did that?” he demanded.

She felt a shiver start at the back of her head and work its way quickly down her back. She had spent her share of time with things of a vintage nature, watched more than her share of ghost-hunter shows, and been sure that the shadows that seemingly moved just out of her line of sight hadn’t been just her bangs tricking her, but she’d never imagined she would actually see—in broad daylight, no less—a . . . well, a
ghost
.

“Well?” Dory snapped.

She took a deep breath, then pointed at the reenactment guy standing behind him.

Dory looked over his shoulder, but the only other person within ten feet of him was the dark-haired man who had sent her pulse racing. That man glanced at Dory in a way that sent her escort sitting back down without comment. Samantha wasn’t surprised by the dirty look Dory sent her way, but she found herself completely unaffected by it, for a change. She was simply too busy gaping at the Elizabethan ghost standing there, looking down at Dory as if he’d been a bug.

She had to admit that in that, she heartily approved.

“What in the hell are you pointing at?” Dory demanded.

Samantha curled her fingers into her palm and dropped her arm down by her side. “Don’t you see him?”

“See what?”

Well, if he couldn’t see that guy standing right there in all his Renaissance glory, she wasn’t going to waste her breath talking about it.

“Um,” she began.

“You’re jet-lagged,” Dory said briskly, “and I’m done here. Hurry up before I leave you behind.”

She turned back to her exhibit, though she supposed now that she was wallowing in her independence, she would have to do something about the jerk behind her. After all, it wasn’t as if her parents could send her to her room for being rude to him. She was certainly old enough to run her own life.

She was beginning to regret not having come to that conclusion long before now.

She tried to read the exhibit information but couldn’t help surreptitious glances over her shoulder. Those turned out to be not nearly enough. She finally had to turn sideways and watch the spectacle. The man dressed in Elizabethan gear that Dory couldn’t see had apparently only just begun his work. He pestered Dory, tugging on his hair, blowing down the back of his neck, then finally rolling his eyes and delivering a smart cuff to the back of Dory’s head.

She was surprised to watch Dory fall off his bench and go sprawling, but perhaps there were things about ghosts she just didn’t understand. The exertion did seem to affect Mr. Doublet adversely, though. The shade put his hand on the pillar and gasped artistically for breath, but since that wasn’t anything she wasn’t used to from her own father, she didn’t think much of it. Far more interesting was what was left of Master Mollineux.

He crawled to his feet, then whirled around, his face contorted in fury.

“Who did that?”

Samantha opened her mouth to enlighten him, then realized there was nothing to enlighten him about. The man with the ruff flicked the lace at his wrists, sent a thoroughly supercilious look her way, then vanished.

She almost sat down hard enough to break the glass behind her.

Dory stopped turning in circles, no doubt looking for someone to blame, smoothed his hair back from his face, then swept the occupants of the room with a disgusted look and started for the door.

“Ten minutes or I leave you behind,” he threw at her as he left.

Well, if he was going to be that way about it, she just might have to linger for a bit longer than she’d intended to.

She leaned to her right to look around the pillar in the middle of the room, on the off chance that she’d missed something, but no one was there. She supposed she shouldn’t have expected anything else. Not only was she in England, she was in the bowels of a very old castle.

Along with her endless supply of mysteries and romances, her great-aunt Mary had been a connoisseur of all things paranormal. She had instilled a curiosity in Samantha that Samantha was sure would be her undoing at some point. She had just never thought she would have something of her own to report on.

She turned back to the exhibits, but the truth was, her mind just wasn’t on them. She was too tempted to ease over to where she’d seen her spectral rescuer working his magic on her primary tormentor. She glanced over her shoulder again, but there was nothing there to be seen. The only thing left in the room was a gorgeous man who was working his way over to her. She reached for a free brochure to fan herself because she was fairly sure she’d just seen a ghost, not because she was looking at the poster boy for Gorgeous Guys, Inc.