Page 15 of Threadbound

“Jamie, obviously,” Trixie replied.

“Well, sure. Who’s asking?” Rob wanted to know.

“No one,” Jamie answered, lifting his head, then standing and gathering up his empty lunch containers.

“A charmingly elegant gentleman with dark hair and lovely pale skin,” Trixie answered.

“Asking about Jamie?” Rob was clearly as interested in this conversation as Jamie was not.

“No,” Jamie answered emphatically. “He was not.”

“But he did take Jamie’s tour,” Trixie pointed out.

“Because you practically made him,” Jamie retorted.

“As though you didn’t want me to!”

Since he kind of had, Jamie didn’t have a good response to that, so he rolled his eyes and headed back inside, leaving Trixie to embellish whatever details about the man and his non-relationship with Jamie that she wanted.

After stuffing his things back into his cubby, Jamie headed back onto the museum floor, this time, over in the Anatomy andPathology wing. The Halls were still fairly crowded, so he moved through the visitors, making sure they noticed his official shirt and name tag, just in case they had questions.

After several hours of explaining medical oddities and discussing the finer points of how formaldehyde preservation produced discoloration of tissues over time, Jamie’s feet were aching. He decided to give this side of the hall one more loop—once upstairs through the balconies, once on the main floor—before heading back to see what needed cleaning or packing up for the day.

As he rounded the far end of the hall, he stopped abruptly when he noticed a familiar figure bending down to examine some preserved amputated limbs from Waterloo.

Jamie’s first thought was… Well, it wasn’t so much a thought as an instinctive panic reaction. His second thought—which was an actual thought—was that he was really glad Trixie wasn’t on this side of the Halls this afternoon because whatever she would have done would have probably embarrassed the hell out of him.

And then the man turned, as though he could sense Jamie’s scrutiny from across the Hall with its thousands upon thousands of jars of pathological samples.

There were at least a couple dozen tourists still milling around, but as far as Jamie was concerned, they might as well have ceased to exist. All he could see were those dark emerald green eyes with long lashes set into porcelain-fine skin.

“Excuse me?” A woman’s voice jerked Jamie’s attention away from the man and back to his immediate surroundings.

“I’m sorry. How can I help you?” he asked the woman, who looked to be in her mid-twenties.

She smiled, a little nervously—which was normal, Jamie knew. A lot of people were unsettled by being surrounded by human remains. At least the ones who were smart enough to realize that the pathology museum had actual human remains init and not plastic replicas, which he’d had to explain three whole times that day. Always to Americans, it seemed.

This woman sounded English, though, so hopefully he wasn’t about to have to explain it for the fourth time.

“Can you tell us more about the Edinburgh Seven?” she asked, and Jamie saw that she had two other friends with her, also both women.

Jamie smiled. “Of course,” he answered cheerfully, launching into his prepped lecture on the seven women who had passed their entrance exams and begun studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1869, and whose legal battle with the courts ensured that women were able to pursue medical careers thanks to the UK Medical Act of 1876.

The small group was as enthusiastic as Jamie about the subject, and when they finally thanked him and moved on, it was nearly closing time.

The mysterious man had once again disappeared.

In the pub,Rob frowned, dark skin drawing together over his nose. “Should we be worried?” he asked. “D’you have a stalker, you think?”

“Oh, posh,” Trixie put in, taking a sip from her fruity drink. “Even if he were a stalker, Jamie’s like twice his size.”

Rob looked startled. “Is he really?”

“Not quite twice,” Jamie muttered, not looking up from his beer.

“Practically,” Trixie replied. “He’s a little thing.”

“He comes up to my shoulder,” Jamie argued. “He’s taller than you.”

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