green, but he supposed that couldn’t be helped. He took her hand in both his own, then stroked the back of it because he knew it soothed her. Heaven knew it as the least he could do in return for all the ways she’d run interference for him over the past seven months, though he would have done it anyway simply because he loved her.
They had spent the month they’d been engaged in Stratford in a large manor house with several bedrooms. He’d tried to send Oliver and Peter off to actually do some business, but they’d insisted they needed to lounge about uselessly on the off chance that some theretofore undiscovered ruffian appeared and tried to vex Samantha. Him, they cared much less about. He had apparently been all on his own.
Well, all on his own except for his future father-in-law, who had seemingly been delighted to accept an invitation to take up residence in one of the bedrooms—the one between Derrick’s and Samantha’s, as it happened—an invitation Derrick couldn’t quite remember having extended.
It had been surprisingly pleasant. He had offered Richard the keys to the Vanquish, Richard had complimented him on his performance during rehearsals, and father and daughter had occasionally gone for long walks together. Derrick had happily accepted the occasional invitation to come along. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised that perhaps it had been Louise McKinnon to be the fly in the soup. Samantha had come to terms with that without fuss, but she had seemingly enjoyed her time with her father who had accepted a sketch of the original Globe—looking particularly authentic, it had to be noted—with a brisk nod and a rough clearing of his throat. Relationship healed.
And when it came to him, Samantha had been ferociously protective. She had more often than not been the one to poach his earpiece and mic and work out with Oliver and Peter peace and quiet for him to rehearse. It had been a novel sensation, that of being looked after for a change. And she had sat through every one of his performances with tears streaming down her face.
They had married quietly in the village chapel the week after the show closed, with only his family and hers in attendance. Well, he supposed he counted the lads and the MacLeods in his family and she counted Gideon and Megan de Piaget, her great-aunt Mary, and her father in hers.
Cameron had thrown an enormous party for them at the keep, then done them the very great favor of taking his family and camping in Derrick’s boyhood home for a few nights, leaving them the castle itself.
Because he was a Cameron himself, after all.
He had thanked his laird very kindly for the concession a couple of days later, then taken his bride and gotten on with their lives.
Well, they’d spent a month backpacking through the Continent, looking at old things and famous art, but perhaps that was beside the point. Samantha wanted to be in Scotland when they weren’t in London and he had loved her for it.
And so they had set up shop in his flat until they could find something more suitable, he had gone back to work, and she had gotten to arting—along, of course, with agreeing to dispense her expertise in antique textiles. She had been given her own earphone and mic and proved to be very adept at distracting buyers with discussions of how best to display their new treasure whilst secretaries wrote out eye-watering cheques to Cameron Antiquities, Ltd.
The other half of their life they spent in Scotland in the house by the sea that had slowly accumulated first the necessities, then the comforts. Samantha’s flawless Gaelic had helped pave her way into the hearts of the villagers, along with periodic visits by her father, who had apparently over the years taken very seriously his own Scottish roots and the need to keep the mother tongue alive. Derrick supposed what had cemented things for them had been a visit from Samantha’s mother who had swept in like a banshee, offended everyone within earshot, then swept back out again, trailing shards of sharp things in her wake. Perhaps pity wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
“And here we are,” Rufus said brightly. “Ah, and someone to come get the door.” He looked at Samantha in the rearview mirror. “Break a leg, ducks.”
She smiled sickly and thanked him. Derrick got out first, then held down his hand to help her out. He