“So can ten-year-old boys,” Geoffrey assured her.
As they watched him move away, gingerly leading the Chattan mascot, Marge remarked, “You know, sometimes I think that cousin of yours is almost human.”
“Almost,” Elizabeth agreed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ELIZABETH caught her breath. Here goes, she thought. Cameron Dawson and Sheriff MacDonald were walking back together on the path that led to the parking area. She wanted to see him so badly. She wished he were in China. She wanted to run and hold him, right in front of everybody. She was scared to death of him. And mostly, she kept forgetting to breathe.
Before she could make up her mind to lose herself in the crowd at the counter, he had caught sight of her and waved, smiling. Elizabeth waved back, feeling the hot flush in her cheeks. Damn you, anyway, Cameron, she thought. You’re like a bloody baby giraffe: you’re trampling me and you don’t even know it.
Bloody! Even the words were his.
He had said something to the sheriff-who had gone into the hospitality tent-and now he was coming toward her as innocently as a falling cable car. I love you so much, she thought; please get the hell away from me. I don’t want to live through the next five minutes, and you’re damn sure not going to enjoy it either, kid.
He still had about twenty yards to traverse, during which time she tried psyching herself into indifference. Sometimes he hardly even knows I’m there, she told herself; he talks to me-at me-as if he were cleaning out his mind. And when I try to tell him things, he replies with something so off-the-wall that he can’t have been listening. I wonder if he even takes women seriously. I might as well be a seal, sometimes.
This line of reasoning might have worked if it had not been overlaid with a ton of subjectivity, all in the offendder’s favor. The part of Elizabeth’s mind reserved for the defense replied with a soft-focus video memory of the night before, accompanied by a sound track of a country song: “Loving you feels just like coming home.”
Oh, well, she thought, when my level of reasoning is reduced to quoting country music, I might as well throw myself in front of a Mack truck. A MacTruck, she thought ruefully. And here it comes.
Cameron Dawson, still a bit edgy from having to suffer fools gladly for the last hour or so, was blissfully unaware that he personified disaster. “Hello,” he said, still smiling. “I nearly got myself thrown in jail just now. I tried to do a good deed, mind you, and keep a bloody drunk off the road by giving him a lift, and that sheriff wanted to put me away.”
“I expect you were on the brew yourself,” Elizabeth replied, remembering Heather’s phrase.
Cameron blinked. “What? No, I don’t think so. Dr. Campbell is dead, so I expect I’ll be allowed to go ahead with my seal research.”
“What does that have to do with drinking?”
“We weren’t talking about drinking,” Cameron pointed out. “ ‘On the brew’ means unemployed.”
Elizabeth shrugged. Heather couldn’t have meant it that way. British nobles did not have unemployed fathers. (Did they?) Apparently the nobles had their own version of slang. She was too polite to mention this to Cameron, though.
“I’ve just been up with the sheriff, looking at poor Mr. Forsyth. He was a very nice fellow; it’s a great pity.” He looked at her. “Is that sort of thing usual in this country?”
“Two murders a day?” murmured Elizabeth. “Not usually in one’s immediate vicinity.” She did not offer any further topics of conversation, which was most unusual for Elizabeth, who often talked to avoid having to communicate.
“Is anything wrong?” asked Cameron finally.
“We need to talk,” Elizabeth said quietly.
Oh shit, thought Cameron. He may have only been in the States for a matter of hours, but cultural gap or no, when a woman says, “We have to talk,” there’s a storm brewing. “Okay,” he said pleasantly. “Want to walk a bit while we’re doing it?”
Elizabeth nodded. In the direction of a cliff, she thought. “It isn’t really very important,” she murmured when they were out of the festival crowd. “Just something I thought I probably ought to ask you.”
Cameron was silent for a moment, and his ears had turned noticeably redder. “Fire away, ma’am,” he said, still as calm as ever. It isn’t very important was another danger sign.
Elizabeth looked at the soft green mountains couching the sky like so many overstuffed sofas. Appalachian mountains, she thought: you can’t see them for the trees. And we are just like them: everything is soft and covered up by layers of politeness and caution. I couldn’t say anything straight out if my life depended on it. She wondered what the mountains were like in Scotland.
“I realize that last night probably didn’t mean anything,” she began slowly.
Cameron didn’t look at her. “I don’t know,” he said carefully. “It did to me.”
“Well, I just wanted you to know that you don’t have to keep spending time with me if you don’t want to. If you’d rather be with somebody else, I’ll understand.”
“Someone else? I’ve spent the last two hours with a drunk and a sheriff who thinks I’m a spy. Is that your idea of competition?”
“No. I thought there was someone else here that you might want to be with. And I guess she needs you more than I do, now that her husband-”
Cameron thought it all through very carefully. She and husband and Elizabeth’s look of moist-eyed nobility. He took a wild guess. “Are you talking about Heather?”
“I know it’s none of my business,” Elizabeth murmured. “It was pretty obvious that you knew her back in Scotland, and I thought you might still be in love with her.”
The rest of her carefully planned speech might have rivaled Sydney Carton’s address from the guillotine, but she didn’t get to deliver it. It would have spoiled the emotional content of the scene, what with Cameron sitting on the ground laughing. Elizabeth was confused. There is something here that I’m missing, she told herself. It wasn’t the kind of laughing that one associates with guilt or embarrassment. He was laughing just as if she had said something incredibly stupid.
“I suppose it’s all over now as far as you’re concerned, but I’m not sure about her. She probably should have someone she likes with her right now. Oh, maybe you should call the British embassy. After all, she is the niece of the Duke of Rothesay, and perhaps they’d send someone to advise her.”
Cameron, still grinning, looked up at her. “What did you say?”
“That the British embassy might send someone-”
“No. Before that. She’s what?”
“I don’t know what her title is. Walter just says that she’s the niece of the Duke of Rothesay. He’s been bragging about it all weekend. Of course, you’d know, wouldn’t you? What is the correct thing to call her?”
His eyes narrowed. “I think impostor would just about cover it,” he said evenly.
“What?”
“Everyone kept telling me she had a title, and I thought she was claiming to be a cousin of a life-peer. That was just barely possible. She wouldn’t have a title, of course, but I put it down to American generalization. I wouldn’t have thought she could get anyone to fall for this rubbish, though.”
“What rubbish?”
“Do you know who the Duke of Rothesay is?”
Elizabeth shook her head.
“It’s the Scottish title for the Prince of Wales. In other words, the present Bonnie Prince Charlie.”
“Walter must have got it wrong, then. Maybe it’s an earl with a similar title.”
Cameron patted the grass beside him. “Sit down. We’re going to talk about this long-lost love of mine.” When Elizabeth had settled beside him, being careful not to get too close-she still wasn’t sure about all of it-Cameron said, “All right. Granted that Heather and I are both Scottish. But do you notice any differences between us?”