Scotland or Bust Read online

  “Amy!” Harrison said.

  He looked at Nicole, waiting for her to storm from the room, but she just looked at his sister with her head cocked to the side.

  “Uncalled for, but excellent burn,” she said.

  “Thank you. So. You’re not a prostitute, then? Disappointing. I’ve never met one before,” Amy said.

  “No one is a prostitute!” Harrison said.

  “All right, no need to shout,” Amy said, finally glancing up at him, eyes darting to Nicole with vague interest.

  His mother shrugged. “Really, Harry, what are we supposed to think when we come in to find you naked with a woman in your bed? You’re always so busy. I can’t imagine you taking the time to get a woman into bed the old-fashioned way, so it seems a perfectly reasonable assumption to me.”

  Someone needed to kill him. Now. He looked up at the ceiling, praying a large chunk of stone would fall and crack him right on the head.

  Didn’t happen.

  He sighed. “Well if you wouldn’t come in unannounced, you wouldn’t find anything,” he said, grabbing the blanket to throw it off before remembering he was, indeed, naked beneath the covers. “And to be honest, I’m a little offended for us both that you automatically assume that if there’s a woman in my bed it’s because I’m paying her to be here.”

  “Well, if she’s your assistant, then technically you are paying her,” Amy said.

  “Not for sex!”

  “So you are having sex.”

  Harrison gritted his jaw so hard his teeth ached. The vein in his forehead was beginning to throb again. He kept expecting it to burst and put him out of his misery, but so far no luck.

  Nicole raised her hand, and his mother looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Yes, dear?”

  “We are not having sex. He is paying me, but not for sex. As I am not a prostitute. As I said before.”

  “But you are naked in bed next to my naked son, correct?”

  Nicole took a breath like she was going to answer but turned to Harrison instead. “Your family might benefit from a Dr. Phil episode on boundaries.”

  He snorted. “You have no idea.”

  Austin ambled in carrying a heavy tray laden with a teapot and cup. He glanced at the two of them, naked in the bed, and turned back to the door without batting an eye. “I’ll fetch another cup, sir.”

  “No, Austin, that’s not necessary…” But the butler had already left the room. Harrison sighed again and turned back to his mother. “Why did you come barging in here?”

  “I haven’t seen you in a year,” his mother said. “And you’ve already slept the morning away. I got tired of waiting. Besides, as I said, I certainly wasn’t expecting to come in and find you otherwise occupied.”

  “We weren’t occupied.” The look on his mother’s face said she didn’t believe a word of it, and he couldn’t really blame her considering how things must look.

  “It was a misunderstanding,” Nicole said. “I got confused after a midnight bathroom run and climbed in the wrong bed. Nothing else happened.”

  Though, that didn’t explain why her clothes were on the floor instead of on her. But Harrison thought it better to keep that thought to himself.

  “If you all will excuse us, we can get up and…” Before Harrison was able to finish his father wandered in, his paper in his hand. Fucking hell.

  “Morning, son. Nice to see you,” he muttered, before showing the paper to his wife. “Have you seen this, Francie? Another article about the rutabaga crisis. Such a shame.”

  “Yes, dear,” his mother said in a bored, placating tone that suggested she hadn’t heard a word he said. Or had already heard it far too many times. “Thomas, our son has a guest. Don’t be rude.”

  “Oh? Pleased to meet you,” he mumbled. Then he glanced up and peered at Nicole over his glasses. “Prostitute?”

  His mother shook her head. “No, love. Assistant.”

  His father snorted and turned back to his paper. “Such a shame, Francie, look here,” he said, tilting the paper in her direction. “I love rutabaga.” He slumped down into a chair near the fire where he continued to read his paper.

  Harrison glanced quickly at Nicole who was watching his family with wide eyes filled with something that may have been amusement or horror. Or perhaps a mixture of both. He knew the feeling.

  “All right. I really must insist that everyone leave so Nicole and I—”

  An unholy screech echoed from the doorway, and Harrison winced. His grandmother charged into the room, brandishing her cane.

  “For shame! Ye’ll anger the spirits, fornicating right under their noses.”

  “Oh dear God in heaven,” Harrison said, rubbing his face.

  “Doesn’t running around the battlements butt naked anger the spirits?” Nicole muttered. He ignored her and focused on the bigger problem.

  “Granny, we weren’t doing anything…” he started, but she was having none of it.

  “Ah, Bertram, be glad ye aren’t alive to see this,” she said, addressing the air above her head. “Yer own grandson, defiling our marriage bed with a harlot.”

  “This isn’t your marriage bed, Gran—”

  “Ah! My heart can’t stand the shame of it!”

  “People really need to stop calling me a harlot,” Nicole said.

  “I called you a prostitute,” Amy said.

  “Helpful, Amy,” Harrison said with a glare. “Thanks.”

  “Anytime.” She didn’t even look up from her phone.

  Meanwhile, Granny was in front of the fireplace preparing for a full-on attack of the vapors, muttering in Gaelic, as she tended to do when in a major kerfuffle. Another reason to hate Scotland. His grandmother had been born and raised there and was the most superstitious woman he’d ever met, even for a Scot.

  She clutched her chest and fell to her knobby knees, keening and wailing loud enough to wake the dead. Which might have been her intention, considering the number of times she addressed his dead grandfather.

  “Mother!” Francie said, rushing to Granny’s side. Even Amy and her father looked up with a spark of interest. His grandmother’s lips were starting to go purple.

  Lovely. That’s all he needed was for his grandmother to drop dead because she’d found him in bed with a woman. Not that he really believed she was in danger of dying. The old woman had beat more health scares than anyone he’d ever heard of. She was probably immortal.

  Harrison sat forward enough that the sheet dropped a few inches, letting the cool air in to goose-pebble his skin.

  Nicole frantically tugged the covers, and he realized he had nearly exposed her as well. She yanked the covers back to her chin and nodded at the commotion by the fireplace. “So, apparently she’s one of those people who believes sex is only permissible if we’re married?”

  “You’re married? Excellent!” Granny immediately ceased her fit and looked back at them with interest before ambling to her feet, clasping her hands with joy, and embarking on a new litany of surprised protestations.

  “Oh, this is so wonderful! Bertram, did ye hear? Our grandson finally married.”

  “Wait! No,” Nicole said. “I didn’t say—”

  But Granny was already on a new tirade, this time praising the heavens for her grandson’s good fortune.

  Nicole turned to him. “How did she hear that?”

  He took a deep breath and spoke loud enough to break into his grandmother’s celebration. “We are not married.”

  “Nonsense. You’re too good a boy to be fornicating without the benefit of a priest. Ye must be engaged at least.” She raised her hands to the air again. “Our grandson will be getting married,” she amended, her gaze boring into him with both iron-willed strength and sheer insanity all at once. “And to such a nice girl. Not a harlot at all, thanks be to Jesus. Jumping the gun a little on the marriage bed, I’ll say that at least and I’m not condoning it mind, but as long as a priest is in the near future—and it better be near, sonny, mark my
words or yer immortal soul is still in peril—why then it’s just wonderful news. And we could have the wedding here, couldn’t we, Francie? With all the guests coming—ooh, we could dress them up as the book characters! The wedding scene is always my favorite, and the guests will love it and I’ll get to see my grandson wed before I die, Bertram, isn’t that wonderful!”

  “Wait,” Nicole tried again. “Wait, no, we aren’t—”

  “Don’t bother,” Harrison said with a sigh. “She can’t hear you.”

  “Then how did she hear what I said the first time? I could barely hear myself.”

  “Granny is…tricky.”

  Nicole frowned. “Is she deaf?”

  Harrison shrugged. “The doctors say no. Honestly, we’ve never been able to tell for sure. She certainly seems to be, except for the times when she can hear things no one else would be able to. But she’s got selective hearing at the very least. If she doesn’t want to hear you, she won’t.”

  “Well, she hasn’t stopped staring at me since she walked in,” Nicole said quietly, leaning closer to him to keep anyone else from hearing. “Maybe she should take a picture. It’d last longer.”

  “Thank you, dear.” His granny whipped a smartphone out of the pocket of her skirt and snapped a picture before either Harrison or Nicole could say a word. “Oh, lovely,” she said, gazing down at it.

  “What the hell?” Nicole muttered, staring at him with wide eyes.

  He rubbed both hands over his face and groaned. “Sorry. I’ll make sure it’s deleted.” He frowned. “Though I’m not sure how she even knows how to use a phone. Amy must have shown her.”

  “Don’t blame me,” Amy said. “She googled.”

  His mother extracted herself from Granny’s ecstatic grasp and turned to them. “Why didn’t you tell us?” she asked, her smile nearly as big as Granny’s. “Trying to pass her off as your assistant.” She clucked her tongue. “Honestly, Harry, you always did keep too much to yourself. This is wonderful news.”

  “But…” Nicole started. Harrison grabbed her hand and squeezed. She stopped and looked at him with wide eyes. He leaned over and cupped her face, bringing her close so he could kiss her cheek and quickly whisper in her ear. “Another ten thousand if you go along.”

  Her eyebrows flew up. “Seriously?”

  “At this point, it would be a lot easier. And maybe they’ll all leave.”

  She shook her head but subsided back against the pillows once again without further protests.

  “Oh! The ring! We can’t forget the ring!” Granny charged at them, and Nicole shrank back against him. He couldn’t blame her. Knowing his grandmother, she could be planning on anything from jumping in bed with them to a tackle hug.

  Instead, she stopped at the bed, rummaged around in her bra for a second, and pulled out her engagement ring.

  “I’ve been saving this for you all these years, my boy.”

  “In there?” Nicole asked.

  “Safest place I know. No one has tried to get at my babs since 1973,” Granny said with a cackle. “Here,” she said, thrusting the ring at him. “Give it to your lassie.”

  “Well, Gran,” he said, not sure what the hell to do with the thing. “This isn’t exactly how I’d planned on presenting a ring to my fiancée.”

  “Och, I know. You can do it all fancy later. But for now, let me just see it on her.”

  She clasped her hands together, and he turned to Nicole, hoping she’d go along with it all. Having a near stranger put a warm boob ring on her finger while she sat naked in a room full of strangers probably hadn’t been on her agenda for the day. But he didn’t see a way out of it.

  Thankfully, she extended her left hand, and he slipped the ring on her finger.

  “It’s beautiful. Thank you,” she said, smiling up at him and then bestowing a brilliant smile on Granny. “I’m honored to wear it. Thank you so much.”

  “You’re so welcome, dearie,” Granny said.

  “All right! Let’s let these two get situated for the day. Everyone out!” his mother said, shooing the whole lot out the door.

  Harrison knew he’d opened a huge can of crazy ass worms, but if it bought him a few moments of peace, it was worth it. He rubbed his hand over his face. It never failed. Something nuts always happened when he visited his family. Though this was, by far, the most insane. And now he had a fiancée who was a total stranger, sitting beside him in his bed.

  Very, very naked.

  Chapter Seven

  Nicole hurried to keep up with Harrison, but it was difficult because she wanted to stop and look around at the castle as they passed everything. She had never been inside a real castle before and she wanted to see and touch and smell everything. Harrison didn’t seem to grasp just how exciting it was for her to be able to get an up close and personal view of something that had been around for so long. She’d always been a history lover, so to say this was her dream job was an understatement.

  “Don’t dawdle,” Harrison said as his long legs strode down the corridor. “We still have a lot of ground to cover, and we need to get it all finished today so we know what kind of to-do list we’re looking at.”

  “I’m trying,” she said, hot on his heels. “But I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  “You can explore later once we’ve got the list finished. The guests will be arriving in a couple weeks. We don’t have a lot of time to get everything fixed and ready to go.”

  “How many guests are you expecting?”

  “Not that many for this first run. About twenty-five. But we will have a soft opening with some friends of mine next week. That way we can work out any bugs that we haven’t caught yet.”

  Harrison came to a stop in front of a door which he pushed open and stood back to let her go in. Nikki looked around and tried not to let her mouth hang open. Now, this is what she’d expected when Harrison had said he lived in a castle. It was pure medieval luxury. The fantasy of every castle lover’s dream. Her room was okay, but it had a more modern touch, missing electricity notwithstanding. This room though, this was like walking onto one of the castle sets of Out…the Book That Must Not Be Named. Only with the luxury amped up by ten.

  Harrison walked around, poking at things and frowning, mostly. He had grown up in this place, so the splendor of it seemed to be something that he took for granted. Nikki on the other hand had never been within ten thousand miles of a castle in her life. To be standing in a bedchamber that might’ve housed some ancient lord or lady—and from the looks of the furniture in the room it had—absolutely floored her.

  A four poster, which was actually quite a bit smaller than she would have expected, stood in the middle of the far wall, draped in old-looking velvet. The room was exactly what she’d expected an old castle room to look like. Rock walls, candle sconces on the walls, rugs and tapestries in deep jewel tones adorning everything. In short, the place was incredible.

  “Do you have your notepad and pen with you?” Harrison asked.

  “No, but I’ve got the phone you gave me.”

  “Can you type with your thumbs as fast as I can talk?”

  “Probably not, but it’s got this handy little dictation feature on it,” she said. “Instead of having to take down notes all you need to do is talk, and it will record it for me. Then I can email it to myself and I’ll have every word that you say.”

  “Alright, as long as you get down everything that we need.”

  They spent the next several hours going from room to room with Harrison making extensive comments on everything from cracks in the ceiling to tile work in the bathrooms that needed to be re-grouted to carpets and bed coverings that needed to be laundered. At first glance, the castle was absolutely incredible. But once she really began looking at it, it was easy to see the crumbling fixtures and the dilapidated state the place was really in.

  “Aren’t you like a billionaire or something?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

/>   “This castle is pretty amazing,” Nikki said. “Just thinking if you’ve got all that money, why is it about ready to fall down around our ears?”

  “I’ve sunk more money into this place than you can imagine. It just takes a ridiculous sum to keep it maintained. My money has paid for all the restorations. Trying to get it up to where it needs to be so it can start bringing in money without my help, which my father isn’t all that thrilled to accept.”

  He shrugged. “Until a few years ago I didn’t realize how bad it was. I didn’t really notice when I was a child, and I haven’t been here much since I was old enough to make a go of it on my own. I lived in New York, my family lived here.”

  “You didn’t come back to visit?”

  “Not very often, no.”

  “Well, you’re crazy. If I had a place like this in my family, I’d never leave it.”

  “Yes, well, you’ve met my family now. Do you blame me for staying away?”

  “Not really,” she said, laughing. “But I guess all families have some quirks.”

  Harrison snorted. “I can handle quirks,” he said. “But when it comes to my family, it’s nothing but wall-to-wall quirks. It’s a little much to take sometimes.”

  Nicole laughed again. “Yeah, I can see that.”

  Harrison looked down the list he had on his clipboard, checking off a few more items.

  “How soon do you think you can get that list to me?” he asked.

  Nicole shrugged. “Probably a few minutes. I just need to hook it up to my laptop so I can print it out for you.”

  Harrison nodded. “Okay. That sounds good.”

  He led the way out of the small lounge they were in and into a library that was straight out of Beauty and the Beast. He’d made it to the center of the room before he noticed that she’d stopped at the entryway and was staring around, her mouth hanging open, and her heart trying desperately to do that cartoon beating-out-of-her-chest thing.

  He glanced back, eyebrows lifted.

  “Holy. Crap,” she said. “This is…this is incredible.”

  A faint smile graced his lips as he looked around the room. “It is. I’ll admit this is one of my favorite rooms in the house.”