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introduced her as a friend from the States on holiday, which struck Julie as the sort of prevarication hostile witnesses pulled during the fencing phase of cross-examination.
    “I’ll walk you back to the cottage,” Niall said. “MacPherson, my thanks for the drink, and I’ll want a look at that will.”
    MacPherson crossed his arms, muscles bunching along broad shoulders. Julie preferred Niall’s strength—lithe, relaxed, not this auburn-haired bull moose in a kilt.
    “
You’ll
be wanting a look?” MacPherson retorted. “As if you can understand language more than two hundred years old, Niall? As if you’re an expert at reading a hand so faint and elaborate I can’t make it out myself? Since when does larking around with the rich boys on the links give you those sorts of skills?”
    Niall was not a particularly sweet guy, but he’d tucked Julie in more than an hour ago without taking any liberties—she was still bemused at that—
and
he was her golf coach.
    Then too, she was a prosecuting attorney, and advocacy was in her blood.
    “Mid-eighteenth-century language isn’t that complicated if the document is in reasonable condition,” she said. “We have the technology to read ink on paper when the lettering is so faint, you can’t even see it with the naked eye. As for language, it hasn’t changed that much in two hundred years.
    “The Elizabethans did a lot to increase the size of the language,” Julie went on, “as did urbanization throughout the seventeenth century, but two hundred years ago, we had monolingual dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, cant dictionaries, and technical dictionaries. We also have voluminous correspondence—”
    All three men were looking at her as if she’s started spouting Adam Smith verbatim, which she could do, because he’d been a particular favorite of Dad’s.
    “Is your friend an expert, Niall?” MacPherson asked, all suspicion and lowered brows. God help the heifer who thought to thwart him on a bad day.
    “I’ve testified as an expert only a couple of times,” Julie said, “when my father became too ill. He retired from the Smithsonian where he was one of their head document restorers, and I worked for him through both undergrad and law school.”
    And Dad had been gleefully passionate about his work until the end.
    Did any lawyer, ever, die wishing she could try just one more case? Hear one more bench opinion? Lock up one more deadbeat parent? Dad had put those questions to Julie a week before he’d died, but by then, she’d accepted the prosecutor’s job and racked up tens of thousands in student loans.
    “So you
are
an expert,” Niall said.
    “She’s your
friend
,” MacPherson shot back, as if friendship with Niall Cromarty were membership in some gang of rogue document curators.
    “I met Niall less than six hours ago,” Julie said, “and I’m paying a tidy sum to stay in the Cromarty family’s cottage. If that makes people friends in Scotland, then I’ve sorely misread a lot of Scottish history.”
    MacPherson’s expression went through a transformation, from suspicious, to flummoxed, to reluctantly smiling.
    “My mistake,” he said, extending a hand. His nails were clean, so Julie shook. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Leonard, and I hope you have a lovely time in Scotland. Niall, the will is available for inspection by whatever expert you can afford.”
    MacPherson lifted a glass from the bar, saluted with it, and downed the contents. Niall did likewise, and Julie expected them to hurl the glasses at the nearest roaring fire, except the hearth across the room was full of blue and white potted pansies.
    “Glad that’s settled,” she said. “Niall, you offered to walk me back to the cottage?”
    “That I did. MacPherson, I enjoyed the wee dram, I’ll be in touch.”
    Julie heard, “Come out swinging and may the best man win,” lingering in the air as she and Niall left the Hare.
    “What was that all about?” she asked.