Page 3 of A Thistle Beyond Time
“No. He seems pretty harmless,” Jenna related. She found her purse and pulled out her wallet. “Here’s some money for him. I thought you could drop him off at a homeless shelter.”
“Okay. I’ll take care of it.” He looked out the front window. “That him?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“He’s a big dude. I wonder if he played football.”
“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t ask him,” she replied sarcastically.
“I’ll bet he did. Probably got hit on the head one time too many. Concussions, you know.”
Jenna rolled her eyes. “Dylan, not everyone plays football.”
“I do.”
“I know, but he’s Scottish.”
“Oh, yeah, he’s wearing a kilt. That should have been my first clue.”
Jenna was pushing him towards the door now. “Go, go, go.”
“Okay, I’m go, go, going.”
Jenna slammed the door shut behind him and went back to the window. She took her phone with her just in case she needed to call the SFPD.
* * *
Cormac leaned against the light post and waited as he had been instructed by Jenna. He hoped Edna hadn’t led him astray. This woman was quite bonnie, to be sure, but she had a sharp tongue, which was in great contrast to her angelic face, golden locks, and liquid brown eyes. She was petite. Her head only reached the top of his chest and though she was slight of build, she was quite shapely.
His eyes were drawn up to the windows above his head. He could see movement there and knew he was being watched. Moments later the door slammed behind a tall, light haired man, who looked down the stairs at him.
“Hi. My name’s Dylan. I’m Jenna’s cousin. She asked me to come down here and help you.”
“Good day to ye, Dylan. I be Cormac MacBayne. Edna sent me to find me wife. She told me Jenna was the one, but Jenna doesnae believe it.”
“I see.” Dylan was baffled, but he wanted to get to the bottom of this for his cousin’s sake. Taking this guy to a shelter wasn’t going to answer the questions he had.
“Cormac, are you hungry, by any chance?”
“Aye. I am.”
“Me, too. Let’s go get some breakfast and you can tell me all about Edna and this wife thing.”
As they headed off down the street, Cormac took one last glance up at the window and caught Jenna spying on them.
* * *
“Where is he going? I told Dylan to drive him to the homeless shelter, and instead, they’ve headed off down the street like two old friends,” Jenna muttered irritably.
It occurred to Jenna in that moment, that Dylan might be pulling a prank on her. It certainly seemed like something he would do. That must be it, because nothing else made sense.
This Cormac was very handsome. He dressed oddly, but it was kind of sexy. Who didn’t love a man in a kilt? The t-shirt, leather jacket and boots were icing on the cake as far as she was concerned. She wondered where Dylan had found him. Did he know him from college? She liked the Scottish accent and wondered why she’d never visited Scotland. If the men there looked anything like Cormac MacBayne, she was going to have to put it on her bucket list.
Her best friend, Ashley, had gone off to Scotland the previous spring and she’d ended up getting married and staying there.God, I miss you, Ashley,Jenna thought.I can’t even call you. Who lives someplace where there’s no phone service, anyway?If Ashley were here, they’d be busy cooking up ways to get back at Dylan. A good practical joke always deserved a response.
Her walk with Chester was supposed to help her relax and instead it had added a whole new list of things for Jenna to mull over in her head. Sometimes it was too hard to turn off all that mindless chatter. The thoughts that made her feel like everything that had happened in her life recently had been her own fault. The thoughts that told her she’d made the biggest mistake of her life when she married Jonathan, and that if she’d been paying attention, she would have known better than to trust him. Jenna looked down at her now-fisted hands and grimaced at her own inability to let things go. She made a conscious effort to relax her hands and took a deep breath, expelling it and all of the obsessive thoughts floating through her brain.
“Come on, Chester. Let’s go get something to eat. I’m not going to solve all my problems right now.”
