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,