Wild Poppy

by Victoria Johns

  “When he’s in my care, I will feed him as I like.” She climbed out of the car, stormed around to me and elbowed me out of the way before putting it back in the now destroyed plastic bag.

  I’d never seen someone get so aggravated by the strangest of things, but then I remembered what Shadow had told me about where she’d been and what she’d endured, and I figured she could rage about a dog bone all she liked. She was in a safe enough place to do so.

  And besides, I found her kind of crazy more than a little bit attractive.

  Chapter Ten

  Penny

  I didn’t know what was going on, but I felt uneasy.

  Fraser was back after disappearing. I didn’t even know where the hell he’d been. He’d just upped and left, leaving me to look after the dog, and then returned again just as mysteriously.

  Not only that, I’d caught him following me. Who does that?

  People with something to hide, people who were not who they said they were.

  People like me.

  Maybe I was a fool for thinking I could outrun my problems, play dead and then start again. I sat on the porch with my tablet, looking out over the beautiful nothingness of the place where I’d settled, and couldn’t shake that I was right where someone had decided I needed to be.

  Shadow.

  He was the one who had arranged this for me and now I was beginning to doubt the sincerity of it.

  Fraser walked out of his lodge, which was still barely furnished, and headed for one of the outhouses. “Who are you?” I mumbled under my breath, Bullet looking between me and my study subject. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, just like I’d been trained to, and decided against packing up and leaving. If I ran, I’d never know the truth, but at least by staying I could try to dig a little deeper, get to know him. And to do that I’d probably need to go back to a headspace I’d vowed was behind me.

  Bullet barked and sat up from his position of slouch-and-relax by my feet. “Well, there’s no time like the present, hey, boy. Let’s go see what he’s up to.” I put my tablet on the side table, next to my half-finished mug of coffee, and got moving. Bullet was alert almost immediately. He’d become my most loyal friend, my only real friend, and if Fraser left again and were to try to take him, I would fight him to the death to keep that dog in my life.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. Fraser looked at the ladders, the tree lopper he had in one hand, and then at the trees. “Well, I can see you’re about to prune, but why now?”

  Fraser shoved and pushed at the ladder he’d laid against a massive tree trunk and then put a foot on the first rung. “Needs doing.”

  This was how things had been since I’d busted him following me that day—all a bit standoffish. I’d ask a question and get basic two-word obvious replies. It was beyond irritating, and nothing like the guy I’d eaten dinner with on the porch the night before he’d scurried away before sunrise.

  “It doesn’t need doing yet. Season is all wrong. Won’t you be disturbing any nesting birds?”

  Fraser was now at the top of the ladder and when he looked down on me all I could see was his sexy bearded face, and his ass cheeks cupped quite nicely in a pair of cargo pants, sat on the top of some very strong thighs. “You up on the migratory behavior of birds?”

  “Not really, but I hear those noisy little beasts chirping all hours.”

  Bullet was still stood to attention, like a third wheel in all this craziness, only a silent one. Oh, to have a few seconds where I could understand him and hear what he really thought.

  “You gonna stand there and watch, or help?” He raised the lopper up, propped his frame against the ladder and then pulled the rope with his other hand. A magic act of balancing.

  “There isn’t enough room on the ladder for both us.”

  I watched as he positioned the blade near a big leafy branch and pulled the rope with the other, the branch cracked and then fell directly on top of me. “Watch it!”

  “I meant help by piling up what I chop down.”

  Fraser didn’t wait for an answer. He just moved right to the next branch and then chopped away. I picked up a decent size stick and flung it to one side. Bullet’s ears perked up straight away and he belted off after it, jumping bits of logs and trees like a mini horse. “Where do you want them?”

  “If you can drag them over there.” He nodded, and I didn’t look in the direction he indicated. I was too busy looking at his hair and beard covered in leaves. “I’ll sort them later.”

  I grabbed the thick end of one and did as he asked, dragging them and leaving them in a pile.

  Every so often, I grabbed the stick that Bullet was now very much attached to and threw it in a different direction, and followed Fraser around as he moved the ladders along the front row of trees.

  “Any chance of a beer?” he called down after he’d moved the ladders again for the tenth time. He’d been up and down them for a while.

  “Depends. Do you have any beer?” Again, he looked down at me like I was nuts. What guy, especially a guy like Fraser, didn’t have beer in a cooler. “I’ll get you one,” I conceded.

  I threw a stick back and to as I made my way to the house. Bullet was being extra friendly as the wily dog knew there was every chance he’d get treats if he followed me back. I’d made a rod for my own back there. It had only started out as a bit of fun to win his favor; now it felt like a ritual and I couldn’t let the dog down.

  It felt like I was passing some forbidden threshold the minute I entered his lodge. This was his space and, God, could I smell him. Man, soap, and whatever the heck that luscious anti-perspirant was that he used.

  Everything was still so sparse. I stared around as Bullet brushed past me and went straight for the chair, before jumping up on it, turning in a circle a few times and then plopping his butt down.

  There was a single set of crockery and cutlery on the drainer, a set of keys on the sideboard and that was pretty much it. In the main living space there was nothing but an old TV set covered in dust and a stack of books lined up by the side of the chair where was Bullet was.

  “Come on, boy, need an alibi.” I clicked my fingers and he came running.

  I looked back to the trees, just to make sure he was still up the ladder, before I tip toed upstairs. It was as disappointing as downstairs. The bed had been made, and there were a couple more books on the floor by the side of the bed. One he was in the middle of that he’d propped open, face down on the floor to keep his page.

  “What are you reading?” I murmured to myself, feeling my hands shake when I recognized the small type face and super thin paper. “The Bible?” I scanned at the open page on 1 John 1:19. ‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to clear us from the unrighteousness.’

  Could this guy be any more of a conundrum?

  This book looked well thumbed. Some of the page corners were spotted with grease where he’d rolled them down instead of turning them like a proper book page. Everyone knew that was virtually impossible with one of these. The scent in this room was heavier, more concentrated, and when I glanced back to the bed, I could visualize him lying on it, Bible in hand, glancing at the sun coming through his window.

  “Oh my... That is some view!” This was no lie, it was both breathtaking and distracting.

  “I know.” The sound of his voice behind me made me squeal and drop the Bible I was holding. We both looked to the floor. I waited for him to start shouting at me, but instead, he just moved through the doorway, picked it up, slammed it shut and threw it at his bed. “Beers are downstairs.”

  I felt ashamed. This was a serious breach of trust, and though I’d done it many, many times before over the span of my career with the agency, I’d never been caught. Clearly, I was getting sloppy. “I’m sorry. Bullet ran upstairs and I don’t let him on my bed. I followed him to make sure he wasn’t doing something he shouldn’t.”

  “Bullet’s fine.”

&nbs
p; He didn’t finish his sentence, or berate me further for prying, just turned to walk down the stairs. “Wait! How come you can see all that way from your window?”

  He spun back around. “Now the trees have been pruned, you’ll be able to as well.”

  This time he did turn and walk down the stairs. It was like a punch to the gut. He’d done all that hard work this morning so I would have that beautiful view. I looked back at it, and it was a picture-perfect landscape with the tops of the trees in the foreground, but you only really saw them when the breeze rattled through them. The hills and farmland were up close, breaking off into steeper mountain like the terrain to the right, but to the left, I could see more water than I had before. Snapping out of my daydream, I headed down the stairs. Fraser was stood sinking a healthy pull of his beer, and there was one for me, open and waiting on the kitchen counter top.

  “Get that down you. We’re not finished yet.”

  I reached for it—thinking fuck it, it was probably five o’clock somewhere—and stood by him. “You read the Bible.”

  “Just a book,” he murmured.

  Then I remembered the cross tattooed on his body.

  “Not for a lot of people.”

  Fraser nodded in agreement. “You have a faith?”

  I didn’t need to think about that for long. “No.” I hoped my voracious response didn’t invite him to dig deeper. What the hell would I say to him? You see, I’ve already spent too long at the hands of violent men who proclaim to be the chosen ones. Doing unspeakable things to women, hell, countries of people, all in the name of Allah and a paradise that I had a hard time imagining.

  People of faith scared the crap out of me. My experience of people with an extreme faith was that of misguided denial. It gave them an excuse for their deluded behavior, and was a catch-all justification for those heinous acts of war.

  Desperate to take him away from this discussion, I put the beer down. “We finished that work?”

  “No. Hedging.”

  “What, now?” I queried, not sure what he meant.

  He finished his beer quickly and walked off, expecting me to follow. “We need gloves.”

  Fraser handed me a spare pair of work gloves and then walked off again. At this moment in time, I was worse than Bullet who’d realized there was potential playtime in the offing as we were outside. The crazy dog had found the stick we’d been throwing earlier and was waiting patiently with it between his teeth. “I don’t got time to play, boy. Your daddy needs help.”

  His daddy, at that point, stepped around me, yanked the stick from his jaws and then flung it hard up into the air. My head followed it like I was following a ball just pitched off the mound, and watched as it cleared the thicket of trees in front of us, cleared the height of the trees and landed somewhere a long way off.

  “Fraser!”

  “Go get it, boy!” he shouted, and Bullet leaped off.

  “He’s never going to find it. You threw it too far!”

  I took off after the dog, not managing to negotiate the ferns and bits of tree trunks as easily as he did, and when I got to the far side of the trees, I saw the view that I was only ever exposed to when I wandered around the hillside after I’d first arrived.

  “Bullet! Bullet! Where are you, boy?” Surely Fraser didn’t throw the stick that damn far.

  Just a moment later, while I was having a panic about the lost dog, I heard him barking as Fraser came into the clearing dragging two big leafy branches behind him.

  “What are you doing with those?”

  Fraser dropped them to the ground and pulled a pair of gloves from his back pants’ pocket, before throwing them at me. “We’re laying a new hedge.”

  I had no idea what that meant. “I’ll put them in at either end. You just poke the branches in and around the existing one.” I watched as he began, and it was a work of art to see him weave the unwanted tree prunings into the hedgerow.

  “This is clever, we both win.” The smile in my voice was evident.

  “How do we both win?”

  “We get to see the view. The trees get to the chance to regrow and become part of nature. Although the view will be in jeopardy someday.”

  “You planning on living for a hundred years?” He laughed.

  His question gave me pause for thought. A year ago, I’d been living day-by-day until eventually I wasn’t planning to live any longer at all. But now, I had hope, could consider a future, and it didn’t matter how mundane that future was. I was living it on my terms.

  We carried on weaving all of the cut down trees for the rest of the afternoon in comfortable silence, and if I were to look back in time and try to pinpoint when the relationship between Fraser and me changed, then I reckon that day would have been on the short list.

  Chapter Eleven

  Mac

  The weather was heating up. Not California style, though. There would be no pool parties or water fights with my brothers’ kids. This wasn’t the start of an endless summer of hog roasts and parties before I moved up and down the state in search of peace and harmony. Summers in Scotland could be scorching hot on one day, where you’d be outside keen to soak up every last ray. Or it would be chilly, with the sun doused in cloud, and it was breezy enough to need long pants and a jacket. Either way, unless it was raining cats and dogs, you made the most of it, because after the rains came, so did the snow. The wintertime here was fucking spectacular, brutal if you weren’t prepared for it, but magical none the less.

  Since I’d started to make all those preparations, it meant spending a huge chunk of time outside, and I loved it. It kept my mind occupied. My hands loved the feel of real graft, especially hard work that you knew you were going to get the benefit from. Normally, I’d have got the house sorted, and then headed to California to avoid the rain of Scotland, but this year, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that, and I knew the only reason was because of my neighbor. I kidded myself that it was because she might not survive out here on her own, but then I was reminded of who she was and the skills she possessed. The one skill that she hid more than anything else was the will to survive, the desire to endure.

  All the early mornings I worked outside, she’d bring me fresh coffee and chat aimlessly to me while playing with my dog. I say my dog, but he’d adopted her as much as she’d fucking dognapped him. There wasn’t much help she could offer while I was up ladders, checking the roofs, fixing flashing or cleaning out drains—jobs I hated, but were even worse when the wind was howling or it was raining sideways. I’d take a break and grab a bite to eat while she drove the car into Pitlochry and ran errands, got supplies or went grocery shopping. In the afternoons, I made it all about the grounds. Making sure the log pile was stocked, the trees were checked and any rotten ones were dealt with before they could tumble in the wind and fall on one of the lodges. Penny seemed happy to work in the rough of the grounds, clearing paths and making it so that when the snow came, clearing it off the ground would take no time at all, rather than one of us being outside for half a day.

  It became only natural for us to clean up, shower off in our respective houses and then join together for dinner. It started out as a one-off thing, where we’d discussed the work we’d done, and then talked about the things still to do. More often than not, we’d share a bottle of wine. But the excuses of ‘there’s enough for two,’ or ‘not much point both sitting alone at tables on the porch, may as well sit together,’ were no longer needed. It just became the thing to eat dinner together.

  The only thing we never did was talk about ourselves personally, and for me that had to change. It was getting close to the time when I would be booking my plane ticket back to California and looking to board the house up for winter, but with her here, I was reluctant to leave.

  Once upon a time I’d never considered myself in a relationship. It was against the role I’d decided to commit my life to, but that was in the past. I was slowly coming to terms with the fact that me and the priesthood were neve
r meant to be. My destiny lay elsewhere, and while I’d never forgive myself for murdering the criminals who had taken my sister’s life so easily, I could accept that I needed to work towards peace, acceptance and closure.

  I had a plan in my mind. A way that I was going to get her to open up to me, because there was no way I was going to explore more and be honest with her if I wasn’t getting the real and raw person inside her, too.

  “Tomorrow is the boat festival,” I mumbled around my wine glass as the sun was setting. Penny sat with a blanket around her shoulders, feeding scraps of steak to Bullet. “And stop feeding him scraps. It’s not good for him.”

  She scrubbed his head, “Who’s a good boy? Who deserves all the treats your daddy never gives you? And what boat festival?”

  “Just an annual thing. It’s all colors and fireworks at night. Loud bangs and oohing and ahhing.”

  “Oh! That could be fun. We should go.”

  “I was thinking we could watch from here. It’s way too busy down there and you can’t see it all.”

  “How do we see it from here?”

  This would be the deal breaker. “From one of the bedrooms. I can move some furniture around.” Her face went blank. Fuck. “Or you could just watch it from your room, and I’ll watch from mine.”

  “Uh no. Seems a bit... Besides, I have no idea what I’m looking at, so you’ll need to explain.”

  I hadn’t realized until my heart lurched back into action that it had stalled when I thought she was going to turn me down.

  “Shall I bring snacks?”

  “Can always make room for beer and popcorn.”

  Penny stood up to leave. “It’s a...” My breath hitched again, wondering if she was going to finish that sentence and say date. When had I started hanging on her every word? Since we’d become more than domesticated neighbors who pretty much did everything apart from share a bed at the end of the day. “I’ll see you in the morning.”