So yeah, Iain was right. The wisest course of action would be to work until she couldn’t work anymore. Then use the money in her savings account to make sure she’d have everything she needed when she checked herself into one of those hospices in the brochure.
However, Milly found herself answering, “Why? I guess because I’m a 25-year-old virgin who’s never been farther from my childhood home in Albany than Scotland. I guess because I know exactly where my father came from in New Zealand, but I’ve never been there.” Hot tears threatened to spill as she said this. The truth of how little she’d lived horrified her even as it speared her on to do better by herself. “I have a little money in the bank—not a lot, but enough to go a few places. Like New Zealand. So that’s what I want to do. I want to go somewhere else that’s not here…finally connect with my father…see things while I still can.”
Iain stiffly took a tissue from the box on his desk and handed it to her. “Don’t cry, Millicent. I can’t bear it.”
No, he couldn’t. Iain hated drama. And tears. Another thing that wasn’t up to his standards. And right now, he was looking everywhere but at her, like he was embarrassed for both Milly and himself.
“I’m sorry,” she said, taking the tissue and hastily wiping away the offending tears. “I’ll go type up my two-week notice, okay? I can email it to you, so I don’t have to come in here again. I just wanted to tell you in person before I sent it.”
He gave her a long, measured look before saying, “HR tells me most of our employees don’t bother to read their contracts before signing them. I’m surprised to find you’re one of those employees, Millicent.”
She lowered the tissue. “Wh-what do you mean?”
“I mean if you’d bothered to read your contract in full, you’d know AlgoFortune requires a minimum of thirty days’ notice if you wish to quit.” He leveled her with a cool look. “Not fourteen, but thirty. Exactly. So write your letter if you want, Millicent, but if you leave this job in anything less than thirty days, you’ll be doing yourself a great disservice. Because after our lawyers have finished with you, you won’t even have that little bit of savings you need to go flitting about on your quest to ‘see things.’”
“What?” she asked, her heart skittering around her chest. “I don’t understand. Why—?”
“Let me make it very clear for you then, Millicent,” he answered with a frank flick of his eyes. “Employees who quit in the middle of a project do not meet my standards, which is why I had that clause put in every hiring contract. You will stay on until your thirty days are up, and not a day less, or I will sue you for everything you have. Now do you understand?”
Milly could only stare at him in shock. Seriously…how could anybody be this cruel?
But he merely responded to her shocked expression with, “I am still waiting for your verbal response, Millicent. Do you understand you need to stay on at this job for thirty more days or I’ll be forced to sue you for breach of contract?”
For heaven’s sake, she was only an assistant! The pitiful woman everyone in the office called Milly Mouse. Why on earth would he sue her just to make sure she served out a ridiculous thirty-day contract? She opened her mouth to ask that very question.
But then a bolt of clarity struck her, and she suddenly understood something she’d only suspected before. Iain, for all his good looks and success with the ladies, cared little for anyone outside himself. Less than little in fact. Especially when it came to her.
Milly’s cancer was an inconvenience. And if there was one thing that wasn’t up to Iain’s standards, it was being inconvenienced.
“Yes, I understand,” she said, her voice sounding dull and flat even to her. Because boy did she ever. Most people wouldn’t be this cruel. Most people would have, at the very least, expressed sympathy. But Iain wasn’t most people. And he had no problem showing his true colors…at least where she was concerned.
“Good,” he said, voice clipped as if he were the aggrieved party in this conversation. “Now, it appears I won’t be finished with this code before my retreat. But I promised to have it to GUI by tomorrow. I’ll take it with me to finish, and then you’ll have to come ‘round tomorrow morning and pick it up. 4:00 A.M. sharp.”
Milly crooked her head, offense giving way to surprise. “Are you serious?”
Thing is, while she’d arranged for countless deliveries to his million-dollar flat in New Town, she’d never been there. Or known him to invite anyone else to visit him there. In fact, her instructions were to always, always, make reservations at a nearby hotel for his dates.
But now he wasn’t even referring to his flat. “You want me to come to your home in the Highlands?” she asked. “Like, the house where you grew up?”
Iain gave an impatient jerk of his head. “Nay, not there. My brother’s taken over that place. I have another residence I keep for myself. As I said, I’ll expect you there at 4:00 A.M. on the dot. I won’t be there to meet you in person, of course, as I’ll be camping. But I’ll leave the algorithms on a thumb drive in my home office. All you’ll need to do is go inside and fetch it off my desk.”
Fetch it. Like a dog…
“I see. Okay…” she said. Wanting to ask him another question, but having no idea what it should be.
“You can go now,” he said, dismissing her before she could say anything further. Then he went back to his computer, furiously typing as if he were angry with her for wasting his time.
Love at first sight.
Milly again recalled their first handshake. The way Iain had smiled down at her when she’d offered him her hand at the start of the interview. “Hello there, Millicent.” His billion-watt smile had hit her like a freight train. And she remembered how her heart had sped up, her stomach suddenly overtaken with the sensation of falling.
Love at first sight. She remembered that phrase floating into her head, and the accompanying girlish thought that it perfectly matched the feelings in her chest, rocking her down to her very soul.
And for moments on end, Iain had held her slender hand in his much larger one, gazing down at her with a look so soft, she wondered if he could be experiencing the same thing.
But then his nose had flared, sniffing at the air like he’d smelled something rank. And just like that, his smile was replaced by the hard mask she’d come to know well in the years she’d worked for him. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder if the man she’d glimpsed in those first few seconds was maybe lurking beneath his seemingly hard and unfeeling exterior.
Well, now she knew the answer.
Iain Scotswolf was a 100% bastard. He didn’t have an ounce of like for her, much less love. The man obviously gave less than two craps about her, and she’d been a fool to spend over three years of her life secretly hoping it might be otherwise.
Chapter Three
“What. A. Dick.”
“Tara…” Milly said as she popped a Sainsburys’ Chicken Tikka Masala ready meal into the microwave in their flat’s tiny, narrow kitchen.
“No, Milly. Don’t Tara me! You told him you were dying and that’s how he responds? I just CAN’T with that douchebag. UGH!!!”
“It’s okay, Tare…” Milly said. Not because it was, but because her friend sounded violently upset, and Milly didn’t want her to put that much energy into this.
Thing is, Milly didn’t have many friends. Because friends, as it turned out, were surprisingly hard to make and keep when you’d spent large swaths of your lifelong friend-making years in the hospital. As a result, she’d been shy and almost pathologically frightened of speaking up (Magnus’s dubbing her Milly Mouse at their first meeting wasn’t kind, but it also wasn’t entirely inaccurate). And by the time she’d finally made it to Scotland for a summer-long business and technology internship at the Royal Scottish Bank, her social skills were so underdeveloped she didn’t even begin to hope she’d make any friends there.
But her friendless days were over from the moment she met Canadian Tara Hami
lton at the RSB orientation. They had nothing in common. Tara was a self-professed anti-Canadian.
Rude, bold, and strong—in body and personality. She was biracial, like Milly, but her black father and white mother were still together. Like really together. They did cutesy things like wait with each other by the phone when their daughter was expected to make her scheduled call home.
Near the end of their internships, Tara and Milly had both landed jobs in Edinburgh—Milly at AlgoFortune, and Tara at the Royal Scottish Bank—and decided to move in together. They’d been best friends ever since.
Now, three years later, Milly, the shy nerd with zero confidence whose whole face turned red when she was called on to speak, still had no idea why Tara befriended her. But she was so glad she did.
However, as much as she treasured her best friend, Tara wasn’t perfect. At the top of her list of flaws was a nasty temper. While Milly might feel the same as Tara deep inside where she’d carefully buried most of her feelings years ago, she’d literally had to pull her best friend out of bar fights on Trivia Pub Quiz nights and make a dash for it.
And right now, she had no doubt her extremely loyal friend was more than capable of hunting Iain down and punching him in the nose if she didn’t get in front of this.
As if to confirm Milly’s fears, Tara grumbled, “That bastard’s lucky I’m visiting Brian, or I’d come up there, find out where he lives, and shove that hiring contract right up his ass.”
And that brought up issue number two. Which was almost, but not quite, as big an issue as her foul temper. Just a few weeks after moving to Edinburgh, Tara had met a sketchy English musician at a pub. And from what Milly could tell, he was the worst. Like, completely-undeserving-of-her-amazing-best-friend the worst.
He always made Tara visit him in Liverpool, never once deigning to make the journey to Edinburgh to hang out with Tara and her friends. Nearly three years into their relationship and Milly had yet to meet the guy, let alone see a photo of him. In fact, she wouldn’t even call what Tara and he had a relationship. More like a long-distance booty call made worse by Tara’s slavish devotion.
As strong and loyal a friend as she could be, Tara was a complete doormat when it came to Brian.
And Milly had learned early on that her otherwise smart friend would not budge on the topic of Brian. Tara visited him whenever he called, and once there, nothing would bring her back until Brian let her go.
Case in point: Milly’s phone call to her best friend to tell her she 1) only had eight months to live, and 2) could not quit her job without getting sued for the last bit of money she had. And Tara, rather predictably, threatened to do physical damage to Iain but didn’t so much as offer to come back to Edinburgh to commiserate with her dying roommate.
But it wasn’t Tara’s job to comfort her, Milly reminded herself, hating the wave of self-pity that passed over her as she pulled her dinner out of the oven. “Tara, it’s okay. Seriously. Two more weeks won’t matter in the scheme of things,” she said, trying to convince both Tara and herself.
“No, it’s not okay! It’s messed up, and I just wish—” Tara suddenly cut off. “Sorry, Milly, Brian’s calling me. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you at work first thing tomorrow, okay?”
Milly opened her mouth to tell Tara she probably wouldn’t be at work first thing tomorrow since she had to drive all the way to the Highlands to pick up the thumb drive with Iain’s rough code on it. But Tara hung up before she could get the words out.
Milly hated driving in Scotland. Despite having lived there for nearly three years, she just couldn’t shake the feeling she was driving on the wrong side of the road every time she got behind the wheel—a wheel that was, from her perspective, located on the wrong side of the car. It was probably because she didn’t have many opportunities to drive all that often. In fact, the only reason she’d even bothered to get her international license and learn to drive a stick was that an assistant who couldn’t drive wasn’t up to Iain’s standards.
Her job occasionally called for her to use one of the company cars to pick up and drop off items at different tech outfits located all around the city. And now it called for her to drive into the Highlands to pick up a thumb drive so the software development team could get as much work done as possible on it before the bank holiday weekend.
Funny, she hadn’t thought she could feel any worse than she had walking out of the doctor’s office. But driving to Iain’s childhood village in the dead of night to pick up a thumb drive? Wow. Her life, what was left of it, was hitting new lows all over the place.
However, Milly’s depression began to lift after she negotiated the Vauxhall Astra up a narrow mountain road. As it turned out, Faoltiarn, the Highland village where Iain grew up, was a charming postcard of a town with a large mountain on one side and a shimmering loch on the other.
It was still very dark out, but the full moon hung heavy as a spotlight overhead, working in conjunction with the smattering of streetlights to illuminate the collection of darling stone shops on either side of the main street. Even though it was almost June, the small village reminded her of something out of a Christmas card, with their dark green detailing and multiple windows sporting the same red plaid found on Iain’s kilts.
The main street soon gave way to a wider graveled road which wound lazily around the eastern side of a glittering loch. The side closest to her was dotted by little white stone cottages with thatched roofs. And on the other side of the loch…no, that couldn’t be right.
But yes…there, nestled among the tall pines, stood a castle. A small castle to be sure, but nothing like the ruins she occasionally saw on the side of the road when driving around Scotland with Tara in her car (the car being the one and only positive to come out of Tara’s relationship with Brian). This castle stood three stories tall and even had a low perimeter wall.
Whoa! she thought, just as the car’s GPS informed her that her destination was ahead on the right.
Milly pulled the car to a stop in front of yet another cottage. It was slightly larger than the ones she had passed, but other than that, it looked just like all the rest—whitewashed stone walls, thatched roof, and super old.
As she got out of the car, a funny feeling came over her. Like maybe she’d somehow stepped out of her own time into a highland village from the distant past.
To add to the eerie ambiance, something that sounded an awful lot like the far-off howling of wolves punctuated the otherwise silent night. It had to be dogs since she’d read wolves had been hunted to extinction in Scotland back in the 1700s. And while there were a lot of discussions happening across Scotland about possibly reintroducing the European wolf, Milly felt confident no decisions had yet been made.
Nevertheless, the cries sounded a lot like wolves—at least to someone who’d grown up in upstate New York as she had—and they served as the perfect soundtrack to the “ancient Scotland” BBC documentary she’d apparently stumbled into. It was all Milly could do not to shudder as she walked toward the cottage’s dimly lit front door.
The door was unlocked, just as Iain said it would be. And walking through it gave her the feeling of having exited a time machine with the dial set firmly to “the future.”
So much for the old-timey vibe she’d had during her drive through the village. While Iain’s cottage appeared to be a few hundred years old on the outside, it was modern as all get out on the inside.
Milly tapped the light switch closest to the door, illuminating stylish, upscale furniture in every direction she looked, along with a large flat-screen TV above the fireplace, and three different video game consoles in the open plan living room.
From that point, locating Iain’s home office was easy. There was only one open door down the narrow hall off the main living area. The room it led to was lit by a small desk lamp. Inside, Milly found a wood standing desk with a white sticky note on it visible in the lamp’s warm circle of light. THUMB DRIVE was written across it in bold, black Sharpie.
Milly’s brow furrowed. The note—written in Iain’s distinctive all-caps handwriting—was very clear. But the thumb drive wasn’t there.
She scanned the desktop and then began searching the floor beneath the desk. It was while doing this that she solved one mystery. And stumbled into another.
Just a few steps away from the desk, tucked into a shadowy part of the room, sat a large cage. It resembled an oversized dog kennel, like the ones they’d set up in the hospital for the therapy dogs when they weren’t “on duty” and visiting patients.
There on the cage’s metal floor, she could see the thumb drive, its USB port gleaming in the low light. Great! Thumb drive found. Unfortunately, the thumb drive wasn’t the only thing in the cage.
A wolf stared back at her. A huge, silent wolf with silver eyes that seemed to glow in the room’s low light. The thumb drive lay next to its front paw.
Milly quite literally jumped back. Then had to reach out a hand to stabilize herself against Iain’s desk as she recovered from the shock of finding a caged wolf in her boss’s home office.
“Okay, what the hell,” she said out loud. Because who does that? Who keeps a wolf in a cage next to a desk with an important thumb drive on top of it?!
She started to call out to Iain, but of course, he wasn’t there. He was camping. Which meant she was on her own. In his cottage. With…his wolf.
Crap!
Milly didn’t believe in reincarnation, but she really had to wonder if she hadn’t seriously effed up in a past life. Because she was positive no other executive assistant on Earth had ever found herself in a situation like this.
Why the hell hadn’t Iain at least told her he just happened to have a pet wolf? Like, “oh hey, Millicent…don’t freak out but I keep it crated in my office when I’m not home.”
She stared hard at the creature, completely out of her depth. Milly had no idea what to do next. Knowing Iain, he’d expect her to retrieve the thumb drive and deliver it as promised, wolf or no wolf.
Her Scotttish King: (Howls Romance) Loving World Page 18
