Chapter 14
Bentley
Douglas Taylor III, Esquire, stood in front of a pitifully inadequate pub in the middle of a painfully primitive village in the wilds of rural Scotland and wondered how in the hell he’d managed to let himself be talked into dealing with these kinds of conditions.
It was, as with a great number of things, all Madelyn’s fault.
He walked in the door, strode up to the bar, and banged on the counter.
The native took an inordinate amount of time to see to him and was reluctant to take his order, but Bentley was hungry and surely the kitchen could be opened an hour early.
He retreated to a comfortable—marginally, of course—seat to wait.
Things were just not proceeding as he had planned.
His life just wasn’t going as he had intended.
Damn that Richard Phillips! He hadn’t behaved at all as Bentley had expected him to.
Stupid academics. They were perpetually lost in their ivory towers, places so out of touch with reality, Bentley often wondered how they managed to feed and clothe themselves.
Of course, when he took his seat in yon ivory tower, he would do things far differently.
He drummed his fingers on the table. It was getting into that tower—and getting himself seated on the lofty throne of Dean of the Law School—that was proving to be more difficult than he had anticipated.
His plan had first included befriending Dean Anderson, everyone’s favorite shoo-in for all sorts of high honors, and doing so by befriending his friend, the brilliant linguist Richard Phillips. As rumor had it, Phillips and the Dean had been roommates during their undergrad years at Harvard.
Concentrating on how to get to Phillips had been uppermost on his mind one winter afternoon last year as he’d been idly scanning the up-and-comer staff list for potential threats to his own status.
Whose name should he have noticed but Madelyn Phillips, DD&P’s rising young star.
She was pretty, she was brilliant, and he had quickly found out that she was related to her father.
Handy, he’d thought at the time.
His pursual of Madelyn had been pitifully easy, but his attempts to get in good with her father had not. Damn the man for his obsession with words.
Words were, as fate would have it, not Bentley’s strong suit.
He didn’t like to admit that weakness. He also never showed anyone the word-a-day calendar hidden in the locked drawer of his desk, or the tapes that promised he could use Large Words with Confidence in no time at all that lurked under the front seat of his car.
He wasn’t stupid, he just didn’t have time for trivialities. Or words longer than three syllables. And all that foreign gibberish? It belonged on the foreign soil it had come from.
Unfortunately, Richard Phillips hadn’t been impressed by any of his words—which left Bentley wondering if he hadn’t used the really long ones correctly—or by his $2,000 Italian silk suits.
Bentley had done everything short of actually falling in love with Madelyn to try to get her father to like him.
It had been a complete waste of time.
And once he found out that Richard and the Dean weren’t all that close—some sort of falling out over some obscure bit of Latin grammar—what had been the point of having anything further to do with that obnoxiously organized daughter of his?
No point that he’d been able to see.
And once he’d dumped her, irritation over her father’s dismissal of him had really begun to get to him, and he’d made a few phone calls to get back at her dad by destroying his daughter financially.
And then he’d seen the Dean and Phillips having lunch together, laughing like the old friends they were, damn them both.
That had left him back at the beginning.
And with Madelyn destitute and vulnerable, taking her back had seemed like the easiest way to get what he wanted. He hadn’t counted on any resistance.
Yet another reason they were certainly not suitable for each other.
Not to worry, he assured himself quickly. He didn’t have to marry her. He could simply drag out an engagement with her for as long as it took for her father to recognize his innate intelligence, befriend him, and hastily introduce him to Dean Anderson.
And then his quick rise up the steps of that ivory tower would begin in earnest and he would be able to shove that in his own academic father’s face.
Of course, none of that would happen until he found the woman in question. He’d already discovered she wasn’t where he’d left her—in that primitive jail cell. That useless Hamish Fergusson hadn’t had any idea where she was, only that she’d left with Patrick MacLeod.
He’d looked at MacLeod’s house, but found nothing.
He’d gone to James MacLeod’s castle, but peeking over the garden wall had shown him nothing but a large man waving a sword around.
Bentley had determined immediately that such a man was not one he wanted to converse with, so he’d retreated and wondered if hiring someone to find Madelyn might be a good next step.
It beat the hell out of doing it himself.
Yes, that’s what he would do. And when he found Madelyn, he would inform her of his decision to take her back. Convincing her of her course of action wouldn’t be a problem. He’d already shown her what he could to do her financially. Other threats could be used as easily.
“Service!” he bellowed.
His food arrived. Not as quickly as he would have liked, but it came.
Good grief, didn’t these people know how to deep fry?
He shook his head and decided that the sooner he was back on his home turf, the happier he—and his stomach—would be. So, therefore, the sooner Madelyn was found the better.
And this time she would know better than to refuse him.