Wild Poppy

by Victoria Johns

  I was doing this, existing on my own.

  I watched movies that I’d missed, western TV shows on my iPad that I’d forgotten existed while I was away. I kept my cell charged, even though no one called and I called no one in return. I cooked meals for one and made bottles of red wine last nearly a week.

  I wasn’t lonely. I was alone.

  Today had been a good day. Vinnie’s dog, Bullet, had barked until he’d loosened his leash and let him come over to me for a fuss. He liked it when I rubbed and scratched him behind the ears.

  Maybe I’d get a dog. One that would love to roam around the countryside with me, one that would sleep at the foot of my bed and play in the long grass while I chopped wood or picked at the wildflowers.

  I smiled at the thought as I dumped my dinner plate on the little coffee table I’d bought at a flea market in the town, before reaching for my glass of red wine. I’d found the glass next door. It was one of a pair and I’d left the other one there. I didn’t need a set or a pair of anything. Swiping the screen of my iPad, I scrolled through the notifications flashing up. The weather tomorrow would be pleasant. Dry enough, but it was definitely getting colder. My closet upstairs was stocked ready for winter, as was the outhouse in case there were any problems with the electricity. My calendar had no upcoming events—not surprising really, because I didn’t have any. I headed into the news app, scouring through the BBC, checking out what was going on locally in the Highlands and then heading across the water to home, to CNN and FOX news to see what I was missing in the place I would never visit again.

  There was the all usual stuff, and I was a click away from iPlayer and watching reruns of Take the High Road—a really old show that gave me a good insight into the local communities of Scotland. It also helped me with the lingo that I struggled to grasp when I first got here. But before I opened the app, an article scrolled across the FOX news channel ticker and it caught my attention. I pressed the button, turned up the volume and listened in, my heart lurching at the familiar accent of home. “Government aide and presidential advisor, Stanley Markham, was laid to rest today in Arlington Cemetery.”

  My ears picked up, and like I’d misheard the telecaster, I hit the volume button until the iPad was operating at max volume.

  “Markham had served as a military leader and was an acclaimed genius in warfare and tactics. His developed programs, methods and trainings have been hailed as revolutionary in the war on terror. He leaves behind a wife, children and grandchildren. The Whitehouse have declined to comment on whether he is to be replaced, but…”

  I tuned out.

  Stanley Markham was dead.

  He wasn’t old. He was as healthy as a horse and I held him totally accountable for my training, my imprisonment without extraction like they’d promised, and ultimately, ordering my death.

  I raced upstairs to the loose panel on the front of my chest of drawers and pulled out a fresh SIM card. Back downstairs, I slotted it into the iPad at speed and started to search. Article after article gave me nothing. He was honored and every picture I saw of him made me sick to my stomach. There was nothing honorable about him. He was a taker of lives, in the worst possible way. He operated from the shadows of power in the darkness, and that gave him free rein. He and his team seemed accountable to no one. He turned his immediate and trusted generals into the types of people who watched women being raped while doing arms deals with terrorists.

  Could an act of God have struck him down, a form of fate or karma for all his wrongdoings?

  I was about to put it down to that, until I saw an article that described the circumstances around his death. It said that he’d had an undiagnosed heart condition—that was red flag number one. No one who worked that close to the government and the president didn’t have the very best medical care. No one at his level had an undiagnosed anything. Then it went on to comment that his wife had found him on the toilet after he’d suffered a serious coronary heart failure.

  As I read that the inquest into his death had been closed, my iPad fell from my fingers and landed on my knees.

  Markham didn’t have a heart attack by accident. Someone somewhere had taken him out, and the circumstances in which they’d found him were the calling card of the very secret organization he’d set up, the one I’d once belonged to.

  I climbed into bed, wide eyed and scared.

  I’d promised that my old life wouldn’t dominate my thoughts while I was here starting again. I had to be done with that. I couldn’t keep getting sucked into the past, but this felt like justified worrying.

  If I’d paid more attention to Shadow, or Bolly, or any of those who had helped me get out, I might have figured some way to keep in touch with them. But I’d promised Shadow, and I couldn’t break that promise. He was the one who had saved me and spared my life. To betray that promise would put us both in danger, and it wasn’t worth it just to ask him if he knew anything more about the death of maniac who shouldn’t be celebrated for things he’d done during his life. Instead, his death alone was cause for celebration.

  No.

  I needed to forget about it. Thank the gods above that they’d seen fit to take some retribution on my behalf. I only hoped that Shadow had seen the news and was living a life somewhere that showed reward for the kindness he’d shown me.

  Sleep evaded me for long enough and the sun had started to rise as I was still yawning. My head was fuzzy and I’d barely dozed through all the tossing and turning, when I heard a noise outside. My suspicious mind kicked in, and I reached for the hunting knife I had slipped between the bed frame and mattress, easily reachable by hand. I tip toed to the window and saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  Keeping my knife ready, I edged out of my bedroom, avoiding all the creaky floorboards that I knew existed and would give me away, when I heard what sounded like the kettle boiling in my kitchen. I’d bought that and a toaster oven at the first opportunity. I was okay with roughing it, but there was no use shunning modern technology for no reason. Downstairs, I heard my cutlery drawer open and the noise of someone disturbing the contents. As I rounded the bottom of the stairs, the tell-tale sound of someone stirring a spoon in a cup stopped me dead in my tracks.

  Someone was in my lodge, in my kitchen, making a fucking drink.

  I’d greased the door hinges when I first moved in, so I was able to push the door open wide enough and make my way into the kitchen.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  The big man stopped dead, the cup nearly at his mouth. “Could ask you the same.” His accent was the same as the rest of the locals here. He had a thick head of dark hair and a beard to match. His arms were covered in tattoos, which were accentuated like living art as he moved the muscles in his arms. The T-shirt he wore was stretched to the max due to the size of his muscles, and in complete contrast he wore a kilt and motorcycle boots.

  It looked all kinds of wrong, and totally right at the same time.

  “I fucking live here, asshole.” I poked the tip of knife in between those bulging pecs. He looked down at his chest slowly, a move I followed, and then looked back at me, his brow raised.

  He placed the mug on the counter. “Funny that. Thought this was ma hoose.” His accent was odd, the Scottish word coming at me with a twang of home.

  Just then a dog barked from outside, distracting me.

  The mug he was holding hit the worktop and he spun quick enough for the tip of the knife to catch in the fabric of his T-shirt. As I fumbled with it, he raised a hand and grabbed and twisted my wrist until I had no choice but to drop the knife.

  “Shit!”

  Bullet darted in from outside, raced a loop around the kitchen, nuzzled his nose against the stranger’s bare legs before coming to me and plonking his ass down on my feet, pinning me to the spot and unbalancing me all at the same time.

  As I stepped out from under Bullet’s heavy load, the stranger turned and went back to his waiting coffee. “So, what are you doing in ma hoose, lassie
? And more importantly why’s my dog protecting you and not me?”

  “This is my hoose,” I ground out, smiling briefly over the fact that his dog preferred me to him and then watched as he seemed more interested in his morning drink than the fact that I could pick up the knife and stab him to death.

  “No, lassie. This is ma hoose. You, Penny Gaumond, live next door.”

  Chapter Six

  Mac

  I didn’t live here.

  This was most definitely her house, but I couldn’t help fucking with her.

  No woman should look as sinful as she did, and it was the only word to describe her. Full of carnal sin, the devil wrapped up in pretty packaging. A bible burning, faith testing sin.

  Penny—I had to remember to call her Penny, not Poppy—had poker-straight, jet-black hair. When it moved it looked like oil on water, colorful and mesmerizing. She had a severe bang cut in the front that covered her eyebrows and fell into her eyes. The color matched her eyes, black. So black, that you couldn’t tell where her pupils ended and the color should have started. I tried my best not to glance down. She was only wearing a simple nightdress, nothing fancy, definitely nothing sexy, but it showed enough skin to be alluring. Her skin said she’d just walked off a California beach, and I wondered if she’d smell of coconut and sunscreen, but I knew she wouldn’t. She looked tropical, a hybrid mixed with another race. I wondered if she’d been sunbathing where she’d been, but then kicked myself. Of course she hadn’t. You didn’t show that much skin where she’d been. Pretending I didn’t know what she’d been doing, that she was a complete stranger, was going to be tough.

  I averted my eyes quickly, though. Once they focused on the scars, the little burns that marred her thighs made me mad, and me being mad over the treatment of women didn’t end well for me, or other people.

  “I don’t understand,” she mumbled.

  “What’s not to understand? I just got home, now I’m having a cuppa.”

  Penny stalked forward, nearly tripping over my Staffordshire Bull Terrier, Bullet, and snatched the mug from my hands, causing a good third of it to slop over the side and splash down my T-shirt. “Well, if this is your place, that mug is mine. I got it from next door.”

  Bullet barked, and we both looked to him. “He’s not a fan of fighting.”

  “And that spoon,” she continued, grabbing that, too.

  “Are we stock taking? If so, do you have a tea towel?”

  Penny threw up her arms in frustration. “What the fuck is a tea towel?”

  Forgetting for a moment that she wasn’t from here, I pointed at the cloth draped over the sink.

  “Then yes, and that would be my tea towel, because I went out and bought the damn thing.” The tea towel then cuffed against my face as she threw it at me in a huff and Bullet barked again. “Sorry, handsome.” She bent to him and scrubbed his ears up and down. I looked at my dog, insanely jealous for a moment, and swore I saw the furry little fucker grin. Then she spoke in this cute voice, which made it crystal clear why Bullet ran to her when he came through the door.

  “I didnae get that warm welcome when I walked through the door.”

  “He’s lucky he didnae get stabbed, isn’t he, handsome?” she said again, cute voice now mocking my home-grown accent.

  “Stop ruining my dog,” I growled. “He’s supposed to hate strangers.”

  “We’re not strangers, are we?” She stood up. “He’s welcome in my house every day and comes for treats.”

  “Treats. That explains why he’s gone soft in the middle.”

  I saw her glance at my midriff. I liked that, but I had to remember that I wasn’t here for that.

  When Shadow had come back from his final mission, he was broken, and not just a little bit. It was only after he started counseling and came back to the man Flick knew as Beckett Hope, that he opened up.

  He’d been part of a black ops team that had gone so rogue that they thought it was okay to abandon a women in some prehistoric place, who thought she was serving her country, when instead she was servicing the criminals they’d secretly armed. While his fear for her was real—about how she would cope alone without support after such mental and physical torture—Beckett was also terrified that she’d return home and expose him. He didn’t carry out the mission as he was supposed to. Instead he saved her, killed the man behind the secret organization and got on with his life.

  The only way to keep her from hunting down the familiar was to give her a life far away from the one she’d missed, and that was where I came in.

  There were only two conditions. She was never to know that I knew who she really was or that I was tied to Shadow. We were brothers of the Black Sentinels MC, although I was a nomad.

  Being nomadic suited me and when things got too much for me, when my own troubles hunted me down and sunk into the crevices of my mind, I hit the road. It was always better for everyone if I was on my own when that happened.

  In order to set Poppy up, I’d agreed to gift her the vacant lodge on my lot. I only came home once in a blue moon, mainly to check the place out, visit family graves and see Bullet, my dog. Shadow set up the rest, the available credit on her card, which he’d close down when I told him she was set up, the fake papers and passport.

  I thought my bit was done. I mean, I’d given someone a place to fucking live in, but then the news of some guy dying freaked Shadow the fuck out. It nearly sent my brother off the rails again, and it turned out my bit wasn’t quite done yet. The news reports of the guy dying held vital clues that might send Poppy into a tailspin if she was tracking the news back home.

  If... that had been my argument, until Shadow laughed in my face, and shouted, “Of course she’s tracking the fucking news. She’s trained, like me. Part of her survival will be to know what’s going on back home.”

  That was when Shadow begged me.

  Begged me to come home and check she was here and not doing anything stupid.

  I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect to find her decked out, living the good life and bonding with my dog.

  “Do you need to be here right now?” Her voice still held a hint of the accent from her past, but only when she was pissed off.

  “Do you need to be in ma hoose at all?” I bit back, bending down and opening the fridge. Resurfacing with a packet of sausages didn’t impress her at all.

  “I’m not making you breakfast,” she huffed and pitched a hip out before putting her hands on them.

  “Correct.” Penny seemed satisfied. “I’m making you breakfast.”

  “Urgh!”

  I watched as that curtain of hair fanned out around her as she stormed off. When I heard her slam the bedroom door above me, I bent down to address my dog. “Hey, boy, you’ve got your loyalties a bit skewed. You missed me?” I had his face wrapped up in my hands, as he looked at me with those big eyes. His face was perfectly split down the middle into two colors of fur, brown and white. I didn’t want to go all cliché and call him Bullseye after Bill Sykes’ dog, so I compromised at Bullet.

  Vinnie appeared at the back door all flustered, dressed in tweed and winter gear like we were expecting snow imminently. He hadn’t seen me yet. “Bullet!” He huffed and puffed like he’d been hunting high and low for man’s mischievous best friend. When he rounded the corner of the kitchen and found me waiting for him, the poor old farmer jumped a mile. “Oh! Shite, Fraser. Nearly gave an old man a heart attack.” He held his hand to his chest.

  “You normally lose my dog?”

  “No. He’s been coming up here for breakfast treats for a while now.”

  More fucking mention of treats. These people were ruining my dog.

  It sounded like it was a good job I’d come. Shadow wasn’t expecting me to stay, but I could... just to look after my dog, of course.

  Chapter Seven

  Penny

  Why the hell was he still here?

  Apart from the fact it turned out that we were neighbors, of course.


  I snuck a look out of my bedroom window and watched in rapt fascination as he chopped wood in the trees in front of our houses, wearing his red and black kilt and his motorcycle boots. He’d discarded the T-shirt a while ago and the only thing on his upper body was an enormous tattoo of Jesus on a cross. It covered his back from side to side, and top to bottom.

  I mean... I’d had enough of men who were comfortable wearing skirts, or Abayas as they wore in Afghan, but I’d give my neighbor his due; he made this kind of skirt look good.

  Fraser.

  Not only did he rock the traditional clothing, he looked like he stepped out of a historical film too. His accent was smooth, not edgy, and he sounded like Gerard Butler. That more than sexy hint of his homeland, shrouded with Americanisms making it clear he’d spent some time there. As if that wasn’t enough, he was called Fraser McPhee. How deliciously Scottish did that sound?

  “You want some of these?” he shouted up, hurling the axe into the trunk of a nearby tree before looking up at my window.

  Dammit, he’d seen me watching.

  I edged up the sash window. “No. I can chop my own damn wood!”

  Three days ago, when he’d appeared, he’d cooked me breakfast and then I’d kicked him out. That’s right, I’d kicked him out of his own lodge. He found it amusing, but also said he probably wouldn’t be staying long and that he didn’t care if I stayed there, as long as I looked after it.

  Who was this guy?

  Who didn’t care if someone, a stranger no less, lived in their home, while the one she should have been in stood empty?

  After the sausage breakfast, he helped himself to a set of spare bed sheets and went next door. Since then we’d been like neighbors at war. Or should I say, I’d been acting like a petulant child, and he’d been a perfect gentleman. Did nothing rile this guy? Why was my inner bitch not pushing his buttons?