Page 51 of A Scot on the Rocks
“And then what happened?” Jamie asked.
“I found out where he kept it.”
He paused with the cup halfway to his mouth. “Ye stole it.”
“I recovered it. Everything was fine until Grandma found out.”
Jamie could picture it far too easily, a small girl marching through Boston with a bottle of stolen wine and the same determined expression she wore while criticizing his ghost.
“What did she do?”
“Made me return it.”
Jamie nodded approvingly. “Sensible woman.”
Olivia reached for her cup. “Eventually.”
He finished chewing and swallowed. “What does eventually mean?”
“She made him pay what he owed first. And charged him extra for making her chase him down.”
Olivia buttered another slice of bread.
“She called it a stupidity fee.”
He almost inhaled his ale. “A what?”
“A stupidity fee. Extra money charged when someone makes your life unnecessarily difficult because he’s an idiot.”
Jamie rested his elbows on the table, leaning forward. “And what did she say about ye stealing the wine?”
Olivia’s eyes gleamed over the rim of her cup. “That my instincts were sound but my technique needed improvement.”
Jamie slowly shook his head. “Saints preserve me.”
Their laughter settled into the warmth of the room while the rain began again, pattering against the stone.
Jamie looked at Olivia across the table. He’d expected an American merchant’s widow to look at his smuggling and see naught but criminals, but she’d heard the outrageous tax and called the excisemen thieves. More than that, she’d listened to the reason before deciding what she thought of the men involved.
That interested him almost as much as the fact that she’d been a nine-year-old wine thief.
A gust moved through the old hall beyond them, catching the newly altered linen behind the arch, and somewhere in the stone their improved knocking device gave one hollow tap, waited, then answered itself twice.
Olivia turned toward the sound. “Much better.”
“The ghost was good before ye interfered.”
She rose, picking up their empty plates and carrying them toward the basin to wash before Jamie could stop her. She poured a little water from the pitcher over the first before picking up the cloth.
“Leave those.”
“You cooked so I’ll clean up.”
“Yer a guest.”
Olivia looked over her shoulder. “I’m a penniless widow with nowhere else to go. I’m not going to sit around while you wait on me.”
They worked side by side, Olivia rinsing while Jamie dried, their shoulders brushing occasionally. Neither mentioned it, and after a while the conversation fell away entirely while the room filled with ordinary sounds of water against wood, dry dishes being stacked, peat settling in the hearth, Bess shifting beyond the doorway, and rain tapping against the partially intact roof.
