Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [35]
“Have you done it with him already?”
She jerked toward Gayle, startled.
“Have I done what?”
Gayle rolled her eyes.
“Played tiddlywinks. Honestly, Bree!”
“No. Of course not.” She felt the blood rising in her cheeks.
“Well, are you going to?”
“Gayle!”
“Well, I mean, you have your own apartment and everything, and nobody’s going to—”
At this awkward moment, Roger Wakefield appeared. He wore a white shirt and scruffy jeans, and Brianna must have stiffened at the sight of him. Gayle’s head whipped round to see where Brianna was looking.
“Ooh,” she said in delight. “Is that him? He looks like a pirate!”
He did, and Brianna felt the bottom of her stomach drop another inch or two. Roger was what her mother called a Black Celt, with clear olive skin and black hair, and “eyes put in with a sooty thumb”—thick black lashes round eyes you expected to be blue but that were instead a surprising deep green. With his hair worn long enough to brush his collar, disheveled and beard-stubbled, he looked not only rakish but mildly dangerous.
Alarm tingled up her spine at the sight of him, and she wiped sweating palms on the sides of her embroidered jeans. She shouldn’t have let him come.
Then he saw her, and his face lit like a candle. In spite of herself, she felt a huge, idiotic smile break out on her own face in answer, and without stopping to think of misgivings, she ran across the room, dodging stray children and luggage carts.
He met her halfway and swept her almost off her feet, hugging her hard enough to crack her ribs. He kissed her, stopped, and kissed her again, the stubble of his beard scraping her face. He smelled of soap and sweat and he tasted like Scotch whisky and she didn’t want him to stop.
Then he did and let go, both of them half breathless.
“A-hem,” said a loud voice near Brianna’s elbow. She swung away from Roger, revealing Gayle, who smiled angelically up at him under blond bangs, and waved like a child going bye-bye.
“Hell-ooo,” she said. “You must be Roger, because if you’re not, Roger’s sure in for a shock when he shows up, isn’t he?”
She looked him up and down with obvious approval.
“All that, and you play the guitar, too?”
Brianna hadn’t even noticed the case he had dropped. He stooped and picked it up, swinging it over his shoulder.
“Well, that’s my bread and butter, this trip,” he said, with a smile at Gayle, who clutched a hand to her heart in simulated ecstasy.
“Ooh, say that again!” she begged.
“Say what?” Roger looked puzzled.
“Bread and butter,” Brianna told him, hoisting one of his bags onto her shoulder. “She wants to hear you roll the r’s again. Gayle has a thing about British accents. Oh—that’s Gayle.” She gestured at her friend in resignation.
“Yes, I gathered. Er …” He cleared his throat, fixed Gayle with a piercing stare, and dropped his voice an octave. “Arround the rrruggged rrrock, the rrragged rrrascals rran. That do you for a bit?”
“Would you stop that?” Brianna looked crossly at her friend, who had swooned dramatically into one of the plastic seats. “Ignore her,” she advised Roger, turning toward the door. With a cautious glance at Gayle, he took her advice, and picking up a large box tied with string, followed her into the concourse.
“What did you mean about your bread and butter?” she asked, looking for some way to return the conversation to a sane footing.
He laughed, a little self-consciously.
“Well, the historical conference is paying the airfare, but they couldn’t manage expenses. So I called round, and wangled a bit of a job to take care of that end.”
“A job playing the guitar?”
“By day, mild-mannered historian Roger Wakefield is a harmless Oxford academic. But at night, he dons his secret tartan rrregalia and becomes the dashing—Roger MacKenzie!”
“Who?”
He smiled at her surprise. “Well, I do a bit of Scottish folk-singing, for festivals and ceilidhs—Highland Games and the like. I’m on to do a turn at a Celtic festival up in the mountains