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He nodded sagely, thankfully not acknowledging her veiled question about his sexual kinks. She wasn’t sure it would be good for her to hear exactly what he was into in the bedroom. Her mind was having plenty of fun making up the details by itself.
‘Some big promotion in the offing?’ Fraser asked, and it took Elspeth a moment to remember what he was talking about.
She took a sip of her drink and nodded. ‘Something like that.’
‘You’re a doctor?’ he said, after clearly searching through his memory banks for the bride’s profession.
‘A GP, yes. Well, a trainee, and hoping for a job when I finish.’
‘Why did you want to be a doctor?’
Elspeth couldn’t remember the last time someone had asked her that. And she didn’t have a good answer. To her, it had never seemed like a choice. All she knew was that it had been a decision made long before she had chosen her exam subjects as a teenager. Probably around the time she had been sitting by her baby sister’s bedside, incapable of doing anything that could help her other than sit there.
She’d trained as a doctor because she wanted to help people like Sarah. Be their advocate in the healthcare system and ensure that every single one of them got the best outcome that they could. Because she had seen the miracles the medical profession could perform. Keeping her sister alive, getting her home, giving her independence with an electric wheelchair and communication aids, among the million other ways it had helped her over the years.
And now Elspeth had the skills and the knowledge she hadn’t had when Sarah was a baby, which meant she could be cared for by her family rather than by strangers. But her care responsibilities meant careful planning for the future, especially given that her mum had been in her forties when Sarah had been born, had arthritis herself, and wasn’t going to be mobile, or even around, for ever.
But that was way more detail than anyone needed to know—especially dangerous-looking men in kilts brandishing bottles of champagne.
‘I liked science and I wanted to help people,’ Elspeth said, giving the standard medical school application answer.
It wasn’t really much of an explanation, but it was all he would be getting. She had watched her relationship with Alex dissolve around her because he hadn’t been able to reconcile family and romance, but she had no desire to go into the details. Perhaps talking about this wasn’t the good idea she’d thought it might be.
‘Anyway,’ she said, keen to change the topic of conversation and shift the attention away from her sorry tale. ‘That’s my story. What’s yours? Why are you here if it’s so tortuous?’
Fraser shrugged as he leant his forearms against the railing, surveying the gardens in front of them. ‘Nothing so exciting—just family duty. The groom is my mum’s cousin. My mother insisted I be dragged into groomsman duty to make up the numbers even though I hardly know the guy.’
‘Ah, a mummy’s boy,’ Elspeth said with a smile, echoing Fraser’s knowing tone from earlier. ‘Interesting...’
Fraser bumped her shoulder with his and Elspeth held her hands up.
‘Hey, if it sounds like a duck, looks like a duck, and does what Mama Duck says...’
‘Enough—drink your wine,’ he said with a laugh, topping up her glass again. ‘I did not lure you out here to talk about my mother.’
‘Now, that sounds interesting.’
Elspeth looked up at him, pulling the blanket a little tighter around her shoulders, hyper-aware of the scratch of the fabric on her shoulders, the earthy smell of the wool, the barrier it put between her and Fraser.
‘I’m not sure I remember being lured, as such. But what were your motivations if you weren’t thinking about introducing me to your mother?’
Oh, she was sure that asking that question was going to get her into trouble. But that twinkle in his eye, the way he challenged her with his stare, egging her on, had tweaked at something inside her. She wanted to play.
He smiled back at that slight suggestion of innuendo, and she knew that she was right. She’d just got herself into trouble and she couldn’t bring herself to be sorry about it.
‘So you’re saying you’re not the kind of girl I want to take home to meet the parents, huh? Well, that’s good to know. I thought we were going to explore out here. Wasn’t that the plan?’
Elspeth drained her glass and gestured towards the steps down from the decking. ‘Lead on. Where do you want to look first?’
They wandered through the gardens, their shadows long over the lawns, until they came across a gathering of redwood trees: Californian giants, hundreds of feet tall. Beneath their shade, the light was lost completely, and Elspeth realised what a secluded spot they had found.
She leant back against the trunk of one of the trees, feeling small, humbled by the scale of them. As Fraser approached, still swinging the bottle by his side, Elspeth held up her glass like a shield, suddenly aware of the intimacy of their surroundings, how her attraction to Fraser had been bubbling under the surface of their banter since he had first approached her, and how he was looking at her now, like the wolf in a fairy tale.
But she was no innocent Red Riding Hood, and she had no plans to run or hide.
‘Do you think we’ve missed them cutting the cake?’ Elspeth asked, breaking the tension, wondering whether they’d come too far to take their conversation back to something inane and safe.
‘I’m not sure.’ Fraser came closer, topping up her glass, then closer still, so she wouldn’t have been able to lift it to her lips if she’d wanted to. The glass was trapped against her chest, along with her hands and her resolve. ‘Do you care?’
