Scotland for Christmas

by Cathryn Parry

  Jacob did what he was trained to do. It was a split-second decision, made without thought.

  He reached in front of the girl, covering her, shoving her out of the line of fire, and he took the bullet meant for her. He felt it slice into his neck, felt himself go down.

  On the pavement of the New York City street, Jacob put his hand to the entry wound, and there was so much blood. He thought of his mom. He thought of his siblings and Daniel. And he thought of Isabel. He felt a great rush of love for all of these people.

  But there was buzzing in his ears, and he felt weak, and the blood didn’t stop coursing. The last he remembered was that all went dark.

  * * *

  ISABEL WAS LEAVING a closed roundtable discussion in her adviser’s office when she heard the news. A fellow student filing out of the office ahead of her in line turned on his smartphone and read the headlines. “Someone from the president’s family was shot at,” he remarked.

  “That’s terrible,” Isabel said. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Yes. A Secret Service agent is down.”

  And then Isabel was shaking, fumbling with her phone, turning it on and dialing Jacob’s number.

  “Isabel?” A female picked up the phone, not Jacob. She was sobbing.

  “Who is this? Where is Jacob?” Isabel asked.

  “It’s Emily. Jacob’s been shot.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ISABEL PRESSED HER knuckles to her mouth and swallowed a scream. This couldn’t be happening! She’d just seen Jacob—she’d left his home this morning, and he’d been fine. She felt a fear so terrible she’d never dared imagine it.

  Her knees buckled, and she found herself kneeling in the middle of the busy corridor.

  “He was guarding the p-p-...” Emily was crying so hard that she couldn’t say the word.

  “Where are you?” Isabel asked. “Where is Jacob?”

  “The h-hospital. Saint something.” A voice in the background pronounced the correct name.

  “I’m coming,” Isabel said.

  “My mom’s here, too. And my dad.”

  Isabel wasn’t family, and she didn’t have the right to go to him—but she was driven by something she couldn’t explain. “Please tell them that I need to be there, too.”

  And then she didn’t hesitate. She stood and sprinted as fast as she could to the street and craned her neck searching for an available cab.

  Her phone rang, and it was Jacob’s number again. “I’m on my way,” Isabel said to the person she assumed was Emily.

  “This is Eddie. I’m with Emily at the hospital. Where are you?”

  “I’m outside my campus trying to wave down a taxi. How is Jacob?”

  “Go back to the lobby,” Eddie directed. “I’ll be right there to get you.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Yeah, I do. Jacob would have my balls if I didn’t.”

  She laughed nervously, desperately wanting to believe he’d be okay. “You’ve seen him? How is he doing?”

  “Isabel, I have to go.” Eddie disconnected without answering her questions.

  She didn’t have long to wait, though. When Eddie picked her up, he put a siren on the roof of the SUV and blasted through traffic like an emergency vehicle.

  They parked in front of the hospital with the ambulances, and once on the pavement, he took her arm and hustled forward, flashing his ID as he guided her into the building.

  Inside the family waiting room, Emily was crying quietly. Jacob’s mom appeared shaken and pale. Daniel sat by her side, looking concerned.

  “He’s in surgery,” Daniel said to Eddie. “We don’t know any more than that. There are officials assigned to us, but...” He glanced anxiously at his wife.

  “I’ll bring you back an update,” Eddie promised. Then he hurried away.

  Isabel stayed in the background out of respect. She set about making herself useful, partly to keep her mind off Jacob and the horrible thing that had happened to him, and partly because helping was the right thing to do. Jacob would want her to be kind to his mother, especially. Isabel quietly brought drinks over and found a box of tissues.

  Time passed slowly. Daniel had purposely asked for the televisions to be shut off, mainly because the news story about the shooting seemed to break into every show. Given that the reporters engaged in speculation more than fact, Isabel thought that it hurt the family more than helped. The name of the shooter hadn’t been released yet, but privately, Eddie told them—in more colorful language—that he was a young man with apparent mental health issues. Politics did not appear to be a motive. Isabel felt thankful, for Jacob’s mom’s sake, that the only video footage they’d seen was of the empty crime scene. Blocks of Manhattan had been barricaded off, and sirens flashed everywhere. Also thankfully, Jacob wasn’t identified by name.

  “This is what I was afraid of,” Jacob’s mom murmured. She said it over and over, rocking in her seat as if comforting herself.

  “Let’s take a walk to the hospital chapel.” Daniel put his arm through hers and led her to the door.

  Isabel moved to the couch beside Emily. “Where are your two brothers?” she asked gently.

  “Zach is in school and so is Danny. My mom didn’t want to pull them out. But I was with my dad in study hall when the call came in, and I made him take me with him.” Emily gripped Jacob’s phone and scrolled through screens. Isabel realized she was looking at his photos.

  “He only has three,” Emily said. “He has hundreds and hundreds of songs, but just three photos. See, look.”

  She showed Isabel a photo of Emily in her team-uniform jumper.

  “I texted him that selfie, like, on Thanksgiving night. And here he has Mom and Dad. That was from their twentieth anniversary when we all went to dinner in the city. And this...” She flicked the screen to the photo of Isabel. Taken last night, he’d shocked her. She’d posed for him in a silly head shot. They’d been laughing even though, deep inside, she knew it was bittersweet because she would be leaving for home soon.

  “How did you get your brother’s phone?” Isabel asked.

  “Eddie brought it to me. He told me to hold on to it for Jacob.”

  “Eddie’s a good friend.”

  “This is you.” Emily tapped the photo on the screen.

  “Yes.”

  “There are no pictures of Eddie.”

  “Well, Jacob sees Eddie every day.” And he hoped to join Eddie on the job in Washington, so that would continue.

  “I have about a thousand photos on my phone,” Emily remarked. “Everybody does.”

  “You need to consider his line of work. Jacob is very aware of his privacy.”

  Emily crossed her arms. “This is how Jacob’s father died. Doing what Jacob’s doing now.”

  “I know,” Isabel said quietly.

  “It’s why he does this job,” Emily said. “It’s so obvious.”

  Leave it to the sixteen-year-old to say what nobody else would. Isabel remembered being that age and having those feelings.

  Isabel continued to sit with her but said nothing. Listening was what Emily needed.

  “Mom wants him to use his education and do something safe and reliable. He almost has a graduate degree, did you know that? He could finish it, take the bar exam and be a lawyer. But he won’t.”

  Isabel knew, but she remained silent.

  “He knows how much Mom hates guns,” Emily said. “She won’t let them in the house. He locks his work gun in the car when he comes to see us. I hate that he does a dangerous job like this. It’s so selfish.”

  “He helped that girl,” Isabel murmured.

  “The president’s daughter, you mean?”

  Isabel looked at her hands. “Yes. He probably sa
ved her life.” She waited a beat. “That’s important to him.”

  Emily put her head on Isabel’s shoulder and for once didn’t speak. She seemed to be digesting what Isabel had just said. Finally she said, “Would he listen to you, Isabel?”

  Isabel just kept staring at her hands. Her manicure was chipped. She’d been so busy squeezing everything into her life, including Jacob, that she wasn’t perfect anymore. She didn’t know who she could influence and who she couldn’t anymore, either.

  Her eyes watered. Jacob could influence her, that was certain. She might never go to sleep, at least for a long time into the future, without thinking of him.

  Please let him make it through surgery.

  “Can you make him stop this job, Isabel?” Emily pleaded.

  “He loves what he does,” Isabel said helplessly.

  “Does he? Or does he feel like he has to do it? Does he feel like he can do it better than anyone else? Because that’s what he acts like. He’s so impatient and...intense with us sometimes.”

  Yes. That’s what Jacob was...what he had been to her that first day she’d met him in her residence, before Alex had broken up with her, and Jacob, in his zealousness to get her to Vermont so he could talk with her uncle, had been forced to share the pain he’d felt when his fiancée had left him.

  In doing so, and in going to the wedding with Isabel, it was as if...Jacob had calmed down. And then, these past two weeks in New York, especially since he’d confessed to her the truth about why he’d wanted to see her uncle, he’d acted...happier. More honest. More comfortable in his skin.

  She could help him. He’d told her what he was looking for, and she could have done more for him. She still could do more.

  Eddie roared into the waiting room dragging along a surgeon dressed in hospital scrubs. With a swift glance, Eddie took the measure of the situation. “Where are your parents?” he demanded of Emily.

  “Is Jacob okay?” Emily fixated on the surgeon, with his bare arms and his serious expression.

  “Yes, he is.” Eddie planted his feet and addressed Emily like an adult. “Your brother is going to be fine. The bullet passed through part of his neck and damaged some blood vessels. There was a lot of blood, but the damage has been repaired. He’s awake now. I’m going to bring you in to see him with your parents. Where are they?”

  “They went to the chapel down the hall.”

  “Great,” Eddie said to the teen. “Now, you lead Dr. Sharp to them. He wants to explain to them specifically what he did for Jacob. Then he’ll take you all to see Jacob.”

  Emily stood. Eddie held out his hand, palm up. “Pass me his phone.” Emily handed it back over and then left with the surgeon.

  “Walk with me,” Eddie muttered to Isabel. “He asked to talk to you, and I’m going to sneak you in.”

  “Jacob asked for me?” Isabel skipped to keep up with him. Eddie grunted at her. He strode at a brisk pace down the wide corridor.

  “What happened today?” she asked Eddie when she’d caught up.

  Eddie was grim-faced. “You know this is the first time we haven’t been on a team together in years? Well, I was in the office doing transfer paperwork and videoconferencing with Donna, who is being led all around the mulberry bush in Maryland by a psycho real estate agent. And then the news came in.” He glanced sideways at Isabel. “This—an agent down—is something we all take very, very seriously. There are dozens of us here, concerned and providing security in any way we can. There are also investigations—plural—already under way. We got Jacob’s phone out for him—an EMT had it—otherwise, it would have been in an evidence locker and Jacob never would have gotten it back.”

  He glanced at Isabel. “I have to ask you. Did he call you from his personal phone number at all today?”

  “No. He never does anything like that on work time. Other than that one occasion when we, er, went back to his flat...” She felt herself blushing. “He only phones me after hours,” she finished simply.

  Eddie nodded. By now they were in front of a closed hospital-room door, with a stone-faced agent guarding it.

  “For the record,” Eddie murmured to her, “I don’t know everything that’s going on between you two. He doesn’t confide in me like that.”

  “I didn’t think so. That’s not important now. What I most want is just to see him so I can know he’s okay.”

  Eddie gave a swift nod. “Great. But don’t be freaked out by the bandage—it looks worse than it is, or so the doctors say.”

  He pushed open the door and motioned her to pass by him. “I’ll wait outside. I can give you five minutes, but that’s all.”

  * * *

  JACOB STILL FELT groggy, but he was fighting for reason and awareness over the drugs they’d pumped into him. He had to tell Isabel these things he’d thought of, now, things that pressed on him, before he forgot how he wanted to say them to her.

  Eddie opened the door, and Isabel came bravely inside. Other than her complexion paling, she didn’t let him know how terrible he looked.

  She sat on the hospital bed and took his hands in hers. She ignored the bandages and the tubes and simply smiled at him. He’d never seen anything so welcome.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  She ran her cool fingers over his forehead. He had to concentrate to stay grounded. If he didn’t, he would forget everything he needed to say to her.

  “Isabel...” His voice felt so raspy.

  “You don’t have to talk.”

  “I want to.” He struggled to sit up more comfortably, and she helped him by plumping up the pillows beneath him. Her gaze dropped to the bandage on his neck. It must have looked horrible, but she didn’t react.

  “It’s valuable,” Jacob muttered. “What I do is valuable. He would have understood.”

  “Your father?” Isabel asked.

  Jacob nodded.

  She took his hand again. “I understand.”

  “I know you do. You’ve never...criticized me for it.” He lay back on the pillow because the surgery drugs were making him nauseous. “My family isn’t the same way, and that’s a problem for me,” he labored to say.

  “You don’t have to solve anything right now. Your only job is to get better.”

  Jacob squeezed her hand. He had to get this part out, especially. “I’ve got to go to Scotland and get those answers. I’ve got to find out what happened to him. For me.”

  Isabel clasped his hand tighter, waiting.

  He looked up at her, his vision somewhat swimming. “Will you help me? Take me to Scotland with you, and help with your uncle? Don’t...let anything stop us.”

  “Yes, Jacob, I will. If you’re well enough to travel, then the plans are settled. That hasn’t changed.”

  “No...” He shook his head. “This is the part you don’t know. Your uncle asked me to investigate you but I didn’t do it.”

  She stroked her hand over his.

  “Isabel, I know you idolize Sage. I never wanted to see you hurt, to hear anything bad about him.”

  “You shouldn’t talk now,” she said in a low voice.

  “Yes, I should. I was quiet for too long. Your uncle wants a trade. He wants me to investigate you to see if you leaked information to the press...in exchange for...the information I need from him. I didn’t do it, Isabel. Know that.”

  She squeezed his hand, silent for a few moments. “Thank you for telling me.”

  “I’m sorry I waited. Lying there in the street like that...I realized how much I love you. I love you, Isabel. I’ll always love you. No matter what happens.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ISABEL STAYED IN New York longer than she’d originally planned, until just a few days before Christmas when Jacob was cleared
to travel.

  She finished her exams, her papers and her presentations, but her heart was with Jacob as he recuperated in his flat. She spent every night with him. A nurse at the hospital had shown her how to change Jacob’s bandages. The nurse had also given her written instructions on caring for his wound, post surgery.

  Isabel had volunteered for this duty, after conferring with Jacob and his mum. It gave her pleasure to help him bathe and put the clean dressing on each evening. He grew stronger with every passing day, and she spent every moment with him that she could.

  He loved her. It was a truth that she carried around in her heart with her. Nothing dimmed the happiness and the purpose that it gave her. She didn’t have to be different for him to care about her. She was herself, and she didn’t have to pretend otherwise.

  So much had changed with her during her time in New York. One year ago, a call from her uncle summoning her back home to the company would have been the highest item on her priority list, the one thing that would have made her happy. But instead, her growing relationship with Jacob, coupled with his revelation about her uncle, had changed everything.

  Physically, her uncle’s actions toward her made her feel ill. She’d never given him any reason not to trust her. Sage Family Products had started with shampoos, body creams and bath salts created by her late father. Isabel had dedicated her life to carrying the flag for his idea and growing it into an even bigger success, often at the cost of her personal happiness. These extra days with Jacob were precious—time she wasn’t willing to sacrifice.

  In the end, wasn’t that why she’d lost Alex? Because she’d taken his presence for granted? She wasn’t going to do that anymore.

  As she and Jacob boarded her family’s private jet and headed out of New York, Isabel knew a day of reckoning was coming. When the plane landed in Edinburgh, she would be forced into making a choice between being “Isabel as usual” or “the new Isabel.” She could be safe and take her uncle’s side as she always had, or she could go out on a limb and champion Jacob.