Beth’s mouth tightened briefly, and then she relaxed and smiled as she shook her head. “Enough of this evasion. Why would you waste your vacation working over here in Canada?”
“A change o’ pace,” Scotty said with a shrug. “Change is always a good thing. Life can get boring otherwise.”
“Humph,” Beth said dubiously and narrowed her eyes on the man. He was easy to look at, a whole hunk of sexy manhood, but she didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him. He’d popped up in her life repeatedly over the last hundred and twenty-five years since he’d saved her and Dree from a rogue and his mad minions in England. For the first hundred years when he’d popped up, he’d either looked down his nose at her, or treated her distantly, as if she might be infected with something contagious. He’d also been talking to her bosses behind her back, trying to sabotage her position as a hunter. Now he was suddenly acting all charming and friendly? She wasn’t buying it. He was up to something.
Honestly, if he didn’t smell so good, look so pretty, and feature so frequently in her sexual fantasies, she wouldn’t even talk to the man. Unfortunately, he was a sexy beast, and he did feature highly in her sexual fantasies. In fact, he was the only one she had in her wet dreams. The man might not be trustworthy in real life, but in her dreams he was like the Energizer Bunny—he just kept going and going and going. Worse yet, every man she’d slept with over the hundred and twenty-five years since she was turned had worn his face behind her closed eyes. The man just “revved her engine,” as Tybo had put it. At least physically.
“I hear ye’ve left the Spanish hunters and moved here permanently,” Scotty said now.
Beth blinked her thoughts away and looked at him through narrowed eyes. While she was English-born, she’d spent the past more than two thirds of her life in Spain. During that time, Scotty, despite living in England himself, had interfered in her life repeatedly and often. She couldn’t help but suspect this was another opportunity for him to be sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong. However, all she said was, “Dree’s found her life mate. She, naturally, wants to settle here with him.”
Scotty arched one supercilious eyebrow. “And so ye’re jest going to follow her like a puppy and move here too?”
Beth’s chin lifted defensively. “She’s my family. Of course I’ll move here.”
“Are ye sure she wants you to?” he asked. “Things change when an immortal meets their life mate. They tend to—”
“Save it,” Beth interrupted, suddenly amused. Scotty could convince her of a lot of things, but not that Dree didn’t want her around. They had been thick as thieves for more than a century, and friends even before that. “Dree hasn’t changed. She asked me to move here. We’re family, and if she wants me here, then here I’ll be.” Leaning toward him, she smiled sweetly and added, “And since Mortimer is so short-staffed right now, I think you’re going to find it impossible to talk him into not letting me work here, if that was your intention.”
“I had no intention o’—” he began.
“Save it,” Beth repeated with a laugh, and said, “Scotty, I know you tried to talk the Spanish Council out of letting me train to be a hunter way back when, and I know you’ve interfered since then, trying to keep me off certain jobs.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why you trouble yourself like that, but while you seem to think I’m useless and little more than a worm that crawled out from under a rock, Dree doesn’t. She’s a sister to me and—”
“Oh, lass, that’s no’ why I interfered,” Scotty interrupted. “I do no’ think ye’re a worm, and it fair wounds me to think ye believe that when the truth is I—”
When his words ended on a grunt and his eyes widened, Beth frowned slightly, wondering what was up, and then she stepped quickly out of the way as he fell forward. It was like a huge old oak falling. Beth swore the ground shuddered as he hit it, but then she noticed the dart in his behind and her mouth dropped open.
“Ah, hell,” Donny groaned. “He’s gonna be so mad when he wakes up.”
Beth glanced to the younger immortal to see a dart gun dangling from his hand and a grimace on his face.
“It just went off,” he said unhappily. “I swear I didn’t pull the trigger . . . I don’t think,” he added with a frown and then glanced to Beth worriedly. “Just how mad do you think he’s going to be when he finds out I shot him?”
Beth glanced down at Scotty, and then shook her head and walked over to the younger immortal. Taking the gun from him with one hand, she patted him on the back with the other and then began to shoot all the slowly healing immortals on the lawn as she said, “He’ll not be mad at all. We’ll say one of the rogues woke up and grabbed for the dart gun as you were about to shoot, and it went off and hit him.”
“But he’ll read our minds and know it’s not true,” Donny pointed out.
“Oh, we won’t be telling him that,” she assured him.
“We won’t?” Donny asked with confusion.
“No. I’ll call Mortimer and tell him that over the phone so he can’t read my mind. And then he’ll send more backup to collect all the rogues as well as Scotty, Tybo, and Valerian, and they’ll take him back to the house, and Mortimer will tell him our tale, and no one will be the wiser.”
Turning to Scotty now, she shot him again in the butt and enjoyed it so much after all the aggravation he’d caused her over the years that she shot him again for good measure. Swinging back to Donny, she smiled and said, “That’s just to be sure he doesn’t wake up before the backup arrives and we can leave.”
Donny didn’t look completely convinced of the veracity of the claim, but then he relaxed and said solemnly, “Thank you. I appreciate your doing all of this for me.”
“Oh, it’s not for you,” she said with amusement and then pointed out, “I barely know you.”
“Then why are you doing it?” he asked uncertainly.
“For me.”
“But you had nothing to do with it,” he pointed out.
“True. But that’s the first thing to put a smile on my face in decades and I’ll not see you punished for it,” she said with a grin as she walked back to Simpson and shot him, as well. She glanced around the lawn, her gaze landing last on the blonde mortal who had fallen into a faint when Beth had put her sword through Simpson. She would have liked to go check on the woman and see her comfortable, but she and Donny were the only ones there to tend to matters now. They had the rogues to see to as well as Tybo and Valerian and—which reminded her that there was another rogue in the woods who would be waking soon.
Beth headed for the trees. “Grab another dart gun and start getting these guys into the SUV. If any of them start to stir, shoot them again. I have to go check on Tybo, Valerian, and the rogue who attacked them.”
She didn’t wait to see if Donny did as instructed, but headed quickly into the woods.
Two
“What is a bampot?”
Beth glanced at Donny with surprise. They’d been driving in silence since leaving Walter Simpson’s lair. She looked into the back seat before answering, noting that Scotty was sprawled half on and half off the SUV’s bench seat behind them, still sound asleep.
While Mortimer had sent a cleanup crew to take care of the rogues and bring in the injured hunters, Donny had felt so guilty for shooting Scotty, he’d wanted to take him back with them in her SUV. Beth hadn’t argued with the young man. It was no skin off her nose if he got himself caught after she’d got him off the hook with her phone call. So, she’d merely climbed in the passenger seat and left him to load Scotty in back and take the steering wheel. She was just a passenger for this ride.
Beth turned forward in the passenger seat and said, “Bampot means idiot or crazy person.” Glancing at Donny curiously, she asked, “Why? Did Scotty call you that?”
“Yes. Well, he said I was cannie, and then asked a question and said, ‘Don’t be a bampot. Answer me.’”