Eloise shrugged. “You know I don’t work out very hard. Stay soggy if you’re going to be so particular. But really, what do you think about that guy?” She whispered the last two words as if saying a bad word in front of their mother.
Miranda’s desire for comfort won out over vanity and she pulled the mostly dry gym bag out from under Eloise’s desk to see if there was a cuter top at least. She’d offer the huge sweatshirt to the Highlander. “I don’t think anything about him yet,” she said. “I only got one question out before you bellowed for me.”
“I don’t mean for the study. Don’t you think it’s odd that both our phones are missing and the front door lock won’t work?”
“I do think it’s odd, but what does that have to do with him?” Miranda pulled a form-fitting black tank top over her head, wondering if it showed too much. She’d put a lab coat on over it, of course.
“Our phones are missing,” Eloise enunciated.
“Didn’t you say yours might be in your car?”
Eloise huffed. “Sure, maybe. Okay, so my phone could possibly be anywhere. That’s true I don’t know where it is a good deal of the time. But how often does your phone go missing?”
Miranda frowned as she tugged on the yoga pants that were slightly too snug. “Not too often,” she said.
“Not ever,” Eloise told her. “It’s always either on your desk or in your drawer. The door is broken so that we’re trapped in here after a near deadly fire. All after some random weirdo shows up and we’re not sure how or why.”
“I think weirdo might be a little strong. The kilt is weird, I’ll give you that.” But he certainly looks good in it, she mused before getting back on track. “Dr. Deenan sent him. You said so yourself.”
Now Eloise flapped her arms. “No, he jumped on that after I said it and I can’t check the messages with the electricity down. But he doesn’t know her, I’m sure of it. He thought she was a man.”
“He doesn’t need to know her. He could have gone to her P.A. and still been referred to us. Her P.A. is a man.” Miranda put her backup lab coat on and put her hands on her hips, both to show her exasperation at her assistant and to make sure it didn’t ride up too much and show her butt in the too-small pants. “Eloise, you’re being silly. He was locked in with us during the fire. He helped us.”
“How?” she demanded. “He couldn’t open the door.”
“He nearly died rescuing your damn monkey. I thought he was dead for a minute.” That still rankled her. She knew she hadn’t imagined his lack of a pulse.
Eloise stuck out her lip. “Ambrose isn’t a monkey,” she said weakly. Miranda thought she was out of arguments when Eloise gasped and grabbed her arm again. “Oh my gosh, what if he didn’t rescue Ambrose?” The girl actually turned red and started to hyperventilate. She lowered her voice to a wheezing hiss. “What if he murdered Ambrose and stashed his body and we’re next?”
For a fraction of a second, Miranda’s stomach dipped and she glanced toward the lab. What if he had grown impatient and was listening at the door? What if Eloise’s accusations were—
“Stop,” she said forcefully, both to her sister and herself. “Sit down, breathe, and then think. What would possibly be the point of that? Who would murder an orangutan? This is what comes from all those true crime documentaries you watch.” She put air quotes around documentaries and shook her head.
“You’re right,” Eloise finally concurred. “What if he came here to try and liberate Ambrose? He could be one of those radical militant animal rescuers who don’t mind taking out people to meet their goal.”
Miranda closed her eyes and prayed for patience. She decided the best course of action would be to completely ignore the last thing Eloise said. “Keep looking for my phone. And why don’t you make a sign to hang out the window. Someone has to patrol this area every now and then and maybe they’ll see it.”
“You’re going back in there with him?” she whispered.
“It may get pushed back a little because of the fire, but I still need to organize a human trial or I’m going to lose everything. So yes, I’m going to complete my interview.”
“Be careful, then.”
Miranda tucked the massive sweatshirt and her clipboard under her arm and left without a backward glance.
Chapter 7
As soon as Miranda left to speak with her assistant, Toren jumped up and began rummaging through Dr. Harrold’s desk, desperate to find something that might tell him where he was. The doctor had a small schedule book that he flipped through and found what had to be that day’s date. He breathed a grateful sigh even as he marveled at all the years that had passed since his untimely demise at Culloden. He knew it was a good long time, could tell by the changes in clothing and speech of the people who visited the moor. By the arrival of automobiles and the planes that buzzed overhead now and again. So many years. No wonder he’d grown fuzzy headed and morose.
He did the math needed to come up with a believable birth year for when she returned. It wasn’t as if he could tell her his actual date of birth. He rifled through more drawers until he came up with a newspaper that was a few days old.
“Chicago?” he muttered, scanning the paper. He knew from their flat accents that Miranda and Eloise weren’t Scottish or even English. “Illinois. I must be in the states, then,” he said.
People from all over the world visited Culloden Moor, but he never imagined he’d end up so far away from it. He hadn’t imagined much for himself in the last few hundred years. Now he found he could think of all sorts of things he’d like to do. Which brought his thoughts back to the pretty doctor who could return at any moment to ply him with more questions. He should at least know why he was here along with when he was born.
He continued rummaging and found a folder full of notes in tiny, illegible handwriting that made his eyes cross trying to work it out. Another folder turned up a few pages in not only another language, but another alphabet. Toren’s father had been a soldier, then turned brewer when he married and settled down. Toren thought he’d take over his family’s business when he returned from war, though of course he’d never returned. He knew much about brewing ale and his mother had made sure he knew how to read and keep accounts, but as for the world outside his village, he knew very little. It made him ashamed, knowing he’d failed to impress Miranda with his physical prowess when he couldn’t get the door open. The woman was a scientist. There was no way he’d ever impress her with his mind.
He turned his attention to Ambrose’s cage, picking his way around the sodden ceiling tiles and puddles on the floor. A lab animal, was he? Did that mean he’d been experimented on, perhaps learned to hate humans? It made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck knowing the beast might be looking down on him, waiting to pounce. The young lass Eloise seemed quite attached to him, though, so perhaps the experiments weren’t cruel. He rattled the bars of the sturdy metal cage and shook his head sadly. No one, not even a fearsome ginger beast like Ambrose should have to live such a way.
He thought about his last moments at Culloden, when the English searched through the fallen, cruelly ending the lives of those who still had breath in their broken bodies. He watched it happen to a few men in his line of sight. It had seemed as if they moved in slow motion, slogging toward him with garbled shouts he couldn’t make out. He knew he was near death, felt a fever already coming over him. Then again, he’d lost all concept of time, fading into blissful unconsciousness, only to be awakened now and then by a particularly gruesome scream. He might have lay in the muck after being trampled for days, not hours. He knew he could have found out how long the battle had raged by going into the visitor center that had been built at Culloden Moor to educate the visitors, but he didn’t have the courage. Once had been enough.
When the English soldier finally made it to him, he still had hope he’d be taken prisoner. Even after what he’d seen, he still had that hope. He knew he should believe in death before the dishonor of being
taken prisoner by his enemies, but he truly didn’t want to die. His father would eventually ransom him and he’d be reunited with his loved ones, back in the village he’d so loved as a child. Days, weeks, or years behind bars would have been preferable to the death he received at the hands of that soldier. No lashing or iron bands could have been so terrible as all those years he’d spent aimlessly haunting the moor.
He patted the bars of the cage. “Perhaps ye dinna have the worst of it after all, Ambrose, laddie.”
***
Back in the lab, Miranda found the Highlander inspecting the hinged locking mechanism on Ambrose’s cage. All of Eloise’s silly hysteria suddenly didn’t seem so silly. He looked awfully interested in the cage. When he turned to look at her with a dark scowl, her stomach turned over.
“I wish the front door lock was as simple as this one,” he said, the scowl relaxing off his face. Or had he forced it away? Was he disgusted by Ambrose’s cage?
“Oh, yes, ha ha,” she laughed weakly. It sounded false and forced and she wished she’d never listened to a word her harebrained sister said. “That would be nice. But Ambrose barely spends any time in that thing. He has the run of the lab when we’re here and only gets locked in at night for his own safety. He, uh, was locked in today because I had people in to interview. People tend to get upset when an orangutan randomly wanders into an office.”
He laughed at this. A nice, sincere guffaw. Then raised a brow. “Why would ye have a creature like that in a place like this? Is that common practice in this day?” He grimaced and ran his hands through his hair. “I mean … what I meant was…”
She was flustered at his fishing for information about that damn dirty ape. “Ambrose was a rescue from a fairly dodgy zoo. It was closing down and they were advertising him out to labs for testing. Eloise found out about it from one of her friends and begged me to take him so he wouldn’t actually be experimented on. It turns out I can use him as a tax write-off until we can find him a reputable sanctuary.” She gulped for air after nervously blurting out Ambrose’s entire history in one breath.
He looked relieved and grinned. “So ye dinna torture the wee creature.”
“Of course not. He wouldn’t even be useful in my trials. We have to go straight to humans since so much of it is psychological and self-reported. He’s mostly a pain in my… well, never mind. At any rate, here you go.” She held out the sweatshirt. “This might fit you, if you’d like to change your shirt. My research partner Bergen isn’t as tall as you but he might have some scrubs in one of his drawers somewhere if you want to get out of that wet, uh, kilt.” For reasons she couldn’t fathom, she felt her cheeks heating up. It couldn’t have been thinking about him getting out of his kilt.
He took the sweatshirt but patted his plaid. “Thank ye, but this dries quickly. Good wool from the Highlands.”
He slipped the folds of the good, Scottish wool from his shoulders and easily slid out of his wet shirt. She felt her insides turn to mush along with her mental faculties as she took in his muscular chest. There were actual lines along his abs that she could count. To her horror she found herself counting them as her mouth went slack with wanting to kiss those hard ripples. She clacked her teeth together before any drool could escape as he wrestled the sweatshirt over his head. It clung to him much like she found herself wanting to cling to him. Her cheeks heated up and she tried to hide a smile when she saw it said “Girl Power” in bright pink letters across the front.
He looked down to see what she was staring at and she was grateful for the embarrassing slogan, thinking he might not guess she had been gawping at his body. He shrugged and stretched his arms, pulling the fabric tight across broad shoulders. “’Tis a good sentiment.”
She was surprised that such a big beefcake brute was fine with wearing such a girly shirt. She also felt something else. Gratitude? Maybe he wasn’t just a muscle-bound pretty boy. Maybe they did have something in common. She threw caution to the wind and decided to test him a little.
“You believe in women having positions of power, then?” she asked, wishing her voice didn’t come out quite so prodding. But why shouldn’t it? It wasn’t as if she were trying to flirt with him.
He eased himself onto his chair and nodded, rubbing at his stubble with a faraway look in his eyes. “The leader of my regiment was a woman,” he said with a fond tone to his voice.
A rush of jealousy swamped her, making her recoil. What in the heck was that about? “Your regiment?” she asked, pushing it down. “You were a soldier?”
“Aye,” he said. “Colonel Anne MacKintosh was a fine leader, a brave woman. Someone I admired greatly. Truly someone to look up to.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. He looked so bereft her idiotic jealousy faded and she had to resist the urge to pat his hand.
“I’m sorry?” he repeated.
“You spoke of her in the past tense. I assumed she died.”
He frowned and rubbed his chin some more. “Aye, I suppose that’s so. It’s been a long time. I didna see her fall, but it must be true by now at any rate.”
Now his strangeness was back in force. She couldn’t just attribute it to his accent or cultural differences. What he said was an odd thing to say, period. Right when she was beginning to respect him, too. Well, she didn’t need to respect him or even like him for him to qualify for her study. That was what she needed to concentrate on. She sat opposite him and referred to her clipboard, trying to get her thoughts together and tamp down the unaccountable disappointment she felt.
Stay on track, she told herself.
“Date of birth?” she asked. He told her and her eyes shot up from her notes. He was only twenty-three years old. His physique, the way he carried himself, the untold stories that swirled in the blue depths of his eyes, all made him seem much older. That put her solidly four years older than him. Not a big deal. No deal at all, really. Why did she feel like such a crone, then? “Do you like older women?” she asked in the same clipped voice she used to ask his name and birthdate. It was most definitely not a question on her thoroughly deliberated questionnaire. So much for staying on track. “Never mind, don’t answer that,” she said hurriedly.
But he was already grinning. “I dinna mind,” he said, a twinkle in his eyes. He was on to her! He knew she had asked because she was older and she was interested in his answer. Did he know she was older because she looked like a haggard old maid? Why was she thinking this way? Her face flamed as he continued to smile at her. “I dinna mind the question or older women,” he said. “A true connection between people belies things as inconsequential as age.”
She nearly swooned at his answer. She’d never been so happy when her annoying sister chose that moment to slam into the lab and interrupt them. Saved by the brat.
“I brought some food,” Eloise said, pushing a filing cart with a tray on top of it. She pulled up a chair and plopped down between them. “How’s the interview going?”
Thankfully, she turned her suspicious look toward Toren so Miranda had time to stop blushing. She must have still been a bit pink because Eloise raised an eyebrow at her when she turned to her. Miranda scowled and turned her attention to the food. Eloise had rummaged two yogurts, a banana and an apple, a packet of crackers, and three protein drinks. Three plastic spoons sat beside the array of delicacies, making the whole presentation that much sadder.
“Help yourself, girl power,” Eloise said, smirking at Toren’s borrowed sweatshirt.
He nodded gravely and took the apple. “Thank ye for the loan of the dry shirt. ’Tis much appreciated, lass.”
Miranda watched Eloise squirm under his politeness and decide to change the topic. “Still no sign of Ambrose. I stood on my desk and stuck my head up in the ceiling but it’s way too dark to see him if he’s up there.” She took a yogurt and opened it, then stared at it, sighing deeply. “I hope he didn’t find a way out. He won’t make it on the outside, he has no skills for the real world.”
Miranda sn
orted and then tried to look abashed when both of them turned shocked stares on her. She must have failed because Eloise shook her head in disgust and took an angry bite of yogurt.
“Oh, come on. I’m sure he’s fine. You know how good he is at sneaking around. He’ll come out when he’s ready.”
“You can’t know that,” Eloise sniffed, simultaneously slurping up more yogurt.
Toren took a big, crunching bite of his apple and Miranda tried not to slip into a coma from watching his strong jaw working, the slight bit of juice that clung to his full lower lip. He patted Eloise’s shoulder.
“Ye’re fond of the wee beastie, are ye?” he asked.
“I told her not to get attached. It’s only temporary until we find him a sanctuary,” Miranda said, aimed at Eloise. They both ignored her. As much as it rankled, her heart was warmed as she watched the big Highlander try to comfort her sister.
“He’s sweet and really smart. Human level smart,” Eloise said. Once again Miranda couldn’t help snorting in derision.
“Why d’ye hate poor Ambrose so?” Toren asked her. She gasped, not knowing how to defend herself against the two animal lovers.
“I don’t hate him,” she sputtered. “I’m the one who rescued him.”
“She hates him,” Eloise said. “He really is good at sneaking around. He startles her sometimes is all.”
“Startles me? He threw a knife at me.”
“It was a butter knife,” Eloise explained to a wide-eyed Toren. “It barely nicked her.”
“His intent was malicious. He’s the one who hates me,” Miranda said, feeling more foolish by the moment. She was trying to preserve her honor against an orangutan. “He steals my food, too,” she said. After a moment of utter defeat, she couldn’t stand looking at them anymore and burst out laughing. “What?” she demanded, trying to stay serious. “He’s a horrible little turd, and yes, I guess I hate him.”
The look on Toren’s face at her childish outburst made her laugh all the harder. Eloise joined in, filling him in on some of Ambrose’s unholy terrors.
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