Chapter 27 #3
Harriet realized she’d missed a few things, but it was too late to catch up now.
Sam was wearing a surprisingly patient expression considering the fit the man in front of him was throwing.
Then again, she’d already seen Elwood lose his temper with Oliver in London, so his current spewfest was nothing new.
“But you’re the chief—” Sam ventured.
“I don’t want to be the impresario!”
Harriet heard a sigh from behind Jackson, then watched Rufus excuse himself before he hopped down off the stage and walked over to join the madness. She looked at Oliver with alarm.
“Is he going to help?”
“We’ll see,” Oliver said with a shrug.
Harriet watched Rufus stop a few feet behind Sam and simply clasp his hands behind his back. He looked, oddly enough, remarkably like Sam’s father at his most relaxed.
“I never asked you to take on that role,” Sam said carefully.
“You are in league with Sir Mortimer,” Elwood snarled. “You and … well, you and your other you. As if I could possibly be fooled by your masks and clothing. I know you’re pretending to be a writer at the same time!”
Harriet looked at Oliver. “Who’s Sir Mortimer?”
“The previous impresario,” Oliver replied. “A very dedicated patron of the arts, or so I hear, but one doesn’t wonder why Cornwall suddenly looked so appealing, does one?”
“One doesn’t,” she agreed.
“But I have caught you up,” Elwood said, pointing at Sam with a shaking hand. “Your time is up! I will reveal to all your dual identity!”
Sam frowned. “If you don’t want to be—”
“I want to be you!” Elwood wailed. “I don’t want to direct; I want to act! I want men to admire me and women to desire me.” His voice caught and he bowed his head. “I want to act.”
Harriet looked at Jackson. He was rubbing his hand over his mouth, no doubt to stifle a bit of manly sympathy. Oliver only lifted his eyebrows briefly and shrugged. She looked back to the scene in front of her and suspected things were just beginning to heat up.
“And I don’t want to direct,” said another man stepping forward and pushing Elwood out of the way.
“Damned fussy lot of you punters with your endless complaints about poetic feet and proper embellishments. I want to run everything, like a theatrical dictator.” He smiled.
“A benevolent one, of course. You can all call me Emperor Claude—er, Claudius, rather.”
“And I want to direct.”
Harriet looked at the absolutely stunning blonde woman who had pushed the two men aside and taken center stage. Why she wanted to be off stage when she could have been bringing grown men to their knees from her looks alone, Harriet couldn’t have said.
“What can you do for me, Samuel McKinnon?” she asked.
“My wife would say I can do nothing, Aelia,” Sam said quickly. “So terribly sorry.”
Aelia shrugged. “I don’t want you, McKinnon, I want the troupe. You’re just in my way.”
“I’m not,” Sam said promptly. “Let’s have our deep pockets here give Sir Mortimer a ring and see what can be done. I’m just a regular lad, right?”
Elwood moved closer to him. Harriet found that she had taken a step closer to the edge of the stage right along with her flanking guardsmen, something that Master Elwood apparently noticed because he held up his hands quickly. He looked at Sam.
“Go make a speech and smooth it all over,” he said in a low voice. “And hurry before that blond demon over there comes and shouts at me again.” He shivered. “He’s terrifying.”
“You see what needs to be done,” Claudius announced. “Say something.”
“Sort it,” Aelia agreed shortly.
Harriet was beginning to understand why Sam found other time periods so soothing. She thought she might prefer a morning in the lists with swords to what she was witnessing at the moment.
She watched Sam work his way toward the stage, leaving Rufus to making the appropriate phone call.
She didn’t argue when Oliver stepped down to no doubt act as security.
She took Sam’s hand and pulled him up on the stage with her, then let go of the breath she realized she’d been holding once he pulled her into his arms.
“We’re going to need a new set of rules,” he said grimly.
She looked up at him seriously. “I’ll make a list.”
“I’m so sorry about that.” He shook his head. “I don’t usually miss things like it.”
“I don’t think he was your usual sort of thug.”
Sam shook his head. “We’ll have to do a little digging to find the details, but perhaps not today.”
“Not today,” she agreed. “I don’t think you’re quite finished here yet.”
He looked over his shoulder at the madness on the lawn, then back at her. “I might hedge.”
“I could take notes, if that would help you keep things straight later.”
He held her tightly for a moment or two, pulled back only far enough to kiss her, then he smiled. “Take good mental notes and we’ll compare them over a meal.”
“Not over the entire afternoon?” she asked innocently. “Will we have other things to do?”
His mouth had fallen open, but he shut it and shot her a look. “You don’t get to tease me.”
“Of course I do,” she said, reaching up to brush his hair out of his eyes. “Go get ‘em, Tiger. I’ll help you keep your prevarications straight over supper. I have other plans for you all the other moments of today.”
“Well, you do get to choose—”
“Good hell,” Jackson said, leaning in and making a noise of someone who was on the verge of losing his breakfast, “I beg you two to please cease. Please.”
Harriet released Sam who subsequently sent his cousin a look of promise, then watched him walk away to take up a place where he could do a little damage control.
She soon found herself surrounded by Oliver, Jackson, and Rufus, which was surprisingly comforting, though she would have been just as happy to have had just Sam.
She took a deep breath, put her hands in her pockets and hoped he would survive the rest of the day.
“Friends, Britons, countrymen,” he began with a self-deprecating smile.
Harriet decided abruptly to forgive him for at least half a dozen things he hadn’t yet done.
“And Scots!” someone yelled from the back of the crowd.
“A special designation for those dwelling north of Hadrian’s wall,” Sam said with another smile. “I have a tale to lay before you that with imagined wings will swiftly fly.”
Harriet exchanged a look with Oliver who only lifted his eyebrows briefly, then with Jackson who shook his head, then with Rufus who smiled in a particularly paternal manner.
She turned back to the man of the hour, watched him flash his killer smile a time or two, and didn’t even complain when all of the women—no matter their age—and most of the men swooned.
She was swooning right along with them.