Addie laughed. “No one says that, Elyse.”
Ignoring her, Elyse set the mugs down and turned Addie’s computer toward him. “Logan, take a look at this.”
A video of a redheaded yak snorting and waving its horns around played on Addie’s computer with the caption Fancy mooooves #hairycoo #highlandcow #visitscotland #tourism.
Addie’s vexing eyes sparkled. “In case you needed inspiration.”
He cracked the knuckles on his index and middle fingers to release the frustration he hadn’t been able to grind out between his teeth.
“This is for you,” Elyse said, handing the tea to Addie who discreetly slid her coffee cup to the other side of the desk.
She took a sip and grimaced before giving Elyse a weak thumbs-up. “Delicious.”
“Throw it in the harbor and we’re done,” Elyse teased, launching into the morning report on the office gossip as if Addie was their long-lost friend from uni.
Traitors, the lot of them.
“Hey, can you hear me?” a tinny voice whispered—the miniature recording device Logan had stuck on the metal trash bin at Addie’s feet. It’d been murmuring the same phrase at random intervals all morning.
It was proving to be less distracting than he’d hoped, but the way Addie’s eye twitched every time the bug went off lightened his mood dramatically.
The prank was juvenile, to be sure, but he hadn’t even bought it specifically for Addie. His initial target had been Big Mac—to retaliate for the dead fish, filed under F in Logan’s filing cabinet, which went undetected until the entire office reeked to high heaven—but desperate times, and all.
“Did you hear that?” Elyse asked, looking around the desk and lifting the branches of the potted fern.
Addie leveled Logan with a cold stare. “Nope.” She’d caught on to the owner of the bug, then.
Logan braced his hands behind his head and crossed an ankle over his knee, not bothering to disguise his smirk.
“I heard it,” Big Mac called. “And it’s driving me up the bloody wall.”
“Huh,” Elyse said and launched back into her storytelling until the ringing phone pulled her away.
Without missing a beat, Addie turned to him. “I need the itineraries for each of your multiday tours as well as the Edinburgh city tours,” she said.
“They’re on the website.”
“Yes, but those don’t list specific restaurants or accommodations. And I need the timetables for each destination and the routes between them.”
“I don’t adhere to a strict schedule. It really takes the authenticity out of the experience, don’t you think?”
“Hey, can you hear me?”
Big Mac whirled around in his chair. “Where the fuck is that coming from?” he shouted and started ripping open drawers in his desk, rattling the picture frames on top.
Addie’s eyelids fluttered closed, and she pulled in a long breath through her nose. Logan bit the inside of his cheek to keep back a smile.
“You heard it, didn’t you, Margaret?” Big Mac asked, lifting up stacks of papers and his computer keyboard.
Margaret looked over the heavily padded shoulder of her red blazer. “Maybe it’s bees.”
Laughter bubbled up inside Logan at the outrageous hypothesis, his ribs creaking with the restraint to hold it in. None of his guides would’ve agreed to this prank if he’d asked them, but they were playing the part beautifully.
Addie placed an open palm in the middle of the desk, clearly not letting this go. “You do follow a specific itinerary, though. You’re only going to locations communicated to the customers prior to leaving, right?”
Logan tipped back in his chair, balancing himself with one foot on the desk. “Och, Scotland is a wild country meant to get lost in.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Would you say the other guides follow a similar philosophy?”