Dressed to Kilt by Hannah Reed Page B

strapped ye with yer fellow American, and she took up all yer time.”
    â€œPlease don’t stereotype me. That woman is
not
typical in any way.”
    â€œWe’ll see.” A light in his eyes danced. “The jury’s still out on that one.”

C HAPTER 10

    â€œI gave her yer message, I did,” Jeannie told me when I returned to the inn and firmly insisted on speaking with Patricia Martin in person. “She was on her way out, saying she was goin’ tae visit Bridie Dougal tae see how she was coping. And in spite o’ me insistin’ that she take care o’ yer business first, she went right out the door.”
    â€œYou did what you could,” I reassured her. Inwardly, I groaned. There was more than one reason I was disappointed that Patricia had slipped away. First, she’d disregarded my request, which most likely wouldn’t have happened if it had been the inspector making the same demand. She wasn’t taking me seriously and that was annoying. But it was her destination that bothered me the most. I wasn’t ready for another encounter with Bridie, one in which she was sure to bring up the side of my family I wanted nothing to do with.
    Just don’t let her get me off alone
, I warned myself, mythoughts turning to my father in spite of my efforts to ignore his existence.
    Based on the short conversation with Bridie the morning of the murder, she hadn’t been in contact with my biological father since my grandfather’s funeral over thirty years ago. So he’d gone into hiding someplace far removed from his past acquaintances and their disapproval. He probably obtained some sort of Scottish divorce and remarried and has a new family that he actually cares about. But if he needed my mother’s signature, which I wasn’t sure about, only positive he hadn’t made the request of her, he could be living with someone without the benefit of marriage. And if he’d passed on, my last wish for him was that he had suffered as much as or more than my mother.
    I took a few deep breaths and talked myself down from a volcano of erupting bitterness and disappointment that had been my constant companions as long as I could remember, dating back to my earliest memories of my mother’s diagnosis of MS, to the moment I realized he wasn’t ever coming back.
    Sitting in my car outside the inn, the heater turned up full blast, I wondered (not for the first time) if Ami Pederson had had ulterior motives when she’d suggested a Scottish Highlands setting for the series. As a longtime friend, she’d been perfectly aware of my history and my father’s abandonment. What if she considered this one of her brilliantly executed subplots? Ami had pushed and prodded until she got her way. As always.
    If my suspicions were correct about her motives, she’d been right about one thing, though. The setting was perfectfor a romantic novel. But she’d been wrong if she had thought my trip to Scotland would reunite me with any members of the Elliott clan.
    Why did I have to run into these issues now? I’d managed to avoid hearing a single word about my ancestors for the months I’d been in the Highlands. I’d barely thought about them at all. And now, less than two weeks before I was scheduled to depart, I found myself dealing with a clan chieftain who had known my grandfather and father. And on top of that, I was working a murder that put me in an orbit around Bridie. Like the pull of gravity, I was trapped in some sort of magnetic attraction and I couldn’t break away.
    Which brought me back to the problem of questioning Patricia Martin and steering clear of Bridie Dougal. Bridie was a delightful person, one I would have enjoyed keeping company with, if not for her affiliation with a certain part of my past I’d buried long ago and wished to remain buried while she intended to dig it up.
    Maybe if I remained in the car outside the