Highlander - Donna Lettow [22]
MacLeod touched her hand across the table. “I suspect you are neither old nor a fool.”
“Ah, but don’t forget stubborn.” She turned her hand over so that his palm rested in hers, then held his hand. “So, now I have bared my soul to you, it’s your turn.” Her purring voice, her chocolate eyes flecked with gold, the way she stroked the back of his hand, she was certainly persuasive, and even the sudden arrival of the first course would not deter her from her request. As the owner left the table, she pinned MacLeod’s hand beneath hers when he tried to reach for his fork. “Tell me about Duncan MacLeod.” Stubborn she was, indeed.
“Not much to tell, really. I own a small barge on the Quai de la Tournelle. Cold in the winter, but you can’t beat the view. I run a dojo back in the States. I like to read. I like to run.” He gave her a little self-deprecating grin. “I’m really rather boring, when you get right down to it.”
“Yes, I know these things. You have a martial-arts studio that barely breaks even, you have no other visible means of support apart from dabbling a bit in antiques. And despite that, you always pay your taxes on time, and you give extremely generously to charities, especially those involving orphaned children. Your last traffic ticket was two years ago. You have no criminal record, yet your name seems to come up quite frequently as a witness in police records, which tells me you are a ‘do-gooder’ with an overgrown curiosity.”
MacLeod rolled his eyes. “Your Farid does good work.”
“I asked him to. And while all that interests me, it still tells me nothing about Duncan MacLeod. Tell me how he feels, tell me how he thinks.”
“He thinks your food is getting cold and you should eat it before the main course arrives,” MacLeod said, picking up his fork. He tore into his choucroute with great relish. “Otherwise, we may offend our host,” he continued between bites.
Maral seemed to give in, taking a few dainty bites. Then she said, with studied casualness, “ ‘MacLeod’—your family is English, then?”
“Scottish,” he corrected her through a mouthful.
She took another careful bite. “Scottish, English, there’s not really a difference anymore, is there? I mean, after all, it all belongs to England now.”
“There is too a difference,” he explained. “The Scots didn’t give up their identity just because the English took the land. There’s a lot of dead Scots who wouldn’t take kindly to being called English. A lot of live ones, too.” Then he realized he’d walked right into her web.
Placing her elbows firmly on the table, Maral leaned across toward him and gave him a blistering smile. The light in her eyes was positively wicked. “Gotcha.”
Humph. “If I’d known there would be a test, I would have studied,” he groused good-naturedly.
“Call it a pop quiz,” she said. “You seem to know your genealogy, so tell me: How long had there been MacLeods tending their sheep in Scotland before the English came? Before some English lord suddenly owned all the sheep pastures just because some foreign king said so and made your ancestors tenants on their own land? How long, Duncan?” She could tell by the shadow that had come over his face that her words had somehow struck a chord deep within him. “And how long was it before your people sickened of being treated like animals and rose up against the English and demanded their rights?” She pressed her point. “And how many Scottish lives were lost over the centuries in their fight to keep their identity?”
Her words had cut him to the bone. He who had buried generation