Then there were the times when she was on the phone with her mother, listening to all her put downs. Jake would give her a back massage, then rain gentle and enticing kisses on her neck. It frustrated the heck out of her, but God it felt good. And that’s why it hurt her so badly when in the end she learned she couldn’t trust him either.
“You hungry?” she asked, hoping food would help her brain focus. “I can make us a salad.”
Ethan walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “You made breakfast, I’ll make lunch.” He took out some ingredients, chopped up some vegetables, and threw them in a pan. Soon a delicious scent filled the room.
She stood next to him as he cooked. “I forgot you were such a great cook. What are you making?” Standing close, she realized he smelled delicious, too, and it had nothing to do with the mushrooms and onions he had sizzling in a pan.
“Omelets,” he replied, “nothing against your cooking, of course, but the oatmeal you made for me this morning didn’t quite do the trick. Now get out of my kitchen and let me cook.”
April obeyed, although she was tempted to argue with him. She wondered if he was looking to start an argument with her, knowing it would lead her to either swear at him—or kiss him. Besides, she was standing too close, and her mind trailed back to when he used to make breakfast for her and served it in bed.
Ethan placed the plates and a pitcher of orange juice on the table and sat down across from her. “How’s your article coming along?”
She swallowed her mouthful of eggs and frowned. “Not so good,” she admitted. “I’m trying to write about our captivity, but my mind keeps going off the subject.”
“You know, you could solve your problems by just saying one little four letter word and this whole thing would be over.”
“Or you could.”
“Yeah, but then I might lose my chance at winning you back.” He smiled at her, but she didn’t know if it was because he was joking or serious. She didn’t know which one she wanted it to be. If only she could trust him.
Since she couldn’t think of a clever or witty reply, she rolled her eyes and kept eating.
Afterwards she cleaned up the dishes and went back to work. Still the right words wouldn’t come to her. She kept thinking about what he said about winning her back, and she wondered if maybe she should let him…that’s when she felt something soft strike the back of her head.
April picked up the balled-up piece of paper off the table and threw it away. “Stop it,” she said. So he threw another one at her. “Stop it, Ethan, I’m trying to work.” He threw another. “Ethan you are such a pain in the…oh I get it now…sorry buster not happening. You’re such a pain in my tushy.”
“And what a fine little tushy it is,” Ethan smiled and threw another one at her. Frustrated because she was enjoying his game, April began to throw them back. She moved into the living room towards the couch he lounged on and fired at close range. Before she knew what had happened, he grabbed her and had her on top of him, and his bright blue eyes were filled with mischief—and something more sincere.
Slowly he leaned his head forward, moving in for a kiss. Her body shivered and she instantly felt his reaction to her position, and she shivered again. She began to melt the moment his lips touched hers. It’d been two years since she’d felt his warm lips…his sweet tongue, his gentle hands framing her face. And it felt like they’d never separated. So perfect, so right.
So many cameras watching them!
“Holy…” Ethan was about to say holy shit because he was at a loss of any eloquent response after such an amazing kiss, but he caught himself in time. Plus, April had quickly shot off of him and was frantically straightening her disheveled clothing, breaking the mood.
“Ethan, the cameras,” she said in a whisper. “We can’t do this.”
“There’s no cameras in the yard, or the bathroom, how about…”
She was going to curse, he could tell, but she stopped herself in time. When she noticed his smile, her eyes lit up in anger. God he loved the way she looked when she was angry. “Is that what this was all about…you were trying to get me to swear at you…you, you …butthead!”
“No! No,” he said, now standing an inch in front of her, “that’s not what that was about… listen April…” Ethan looked directly into a camera and shook his head. “Come on, let’s go outside.” He gently took her arm and when she remained still, he said, “To talk, April, to talk.”
The rain continued to beat down heavily. They stood close together under the small overhang. Because he couldn’t help himself, he bent and kissed her again. She was reluctant at first, but once she gave in she was pure fire in his arms. The rain was loud, but it was the perfect soundtrack for his raging emotions.
“We’re not talking,” April said when she broke their kiss.
“No,” he said before possessively taking her mouth again. When he stopped an eternity later, he asked nearly out of breath, “God, we are so perfect together, why did we ever break up?”
She turned away from him, then wiped the rain, or was it tears, from her face. “Because you cheated on me.”
“I did not cheat on you!” Ethan replied enunciating each word.
“And then you lied about it!” April pulled open the sliding glass door and walked back inside.
Luckily Ethan didn’t follow her. April had a feeling he was taking advantage of the privacy and was cursing a blue streak. She kind of felt that way herself. She felt like an idiot letting him back into her heart like that. Just a few kisses from Mr. Smooth and she was ready to plan her wedding. Idiot.
He could deny that he cheated all he wanted, but April knew what she’d seen. And he still hadn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for why his ex-girlfriend’s car was in his driveway at two o’clock in the morning, and still again at nine a.m.
She hadn’t been stalking him. Knowing he was working the late shift and would be home early in the morning, she’d stayed up all night and drove over wearing nothing but a rain coat, with a bottle of wine in the front seat. When she saw his ex’s car in the driveway, she pulled over and went to the door, but at the last minute chickened out. She couldn’t bring herself to go to the house and confront them. Instead she went back to her house and cried herself to sleep.
Shaking off the bad memories, April made herself a cup of tea and sat back at the table staring mindlessly at her computer. A minute later she heard Ethan walk inside, then a few minutes after that heard the sound of the shower running.
Good, this was her house, he should be leaving her alone. While left alone at the computer, April did some on-line shopping, buying those boots she’d seen, figuring she deserved them. Nothing like a new pair of boots to help repair a broken heart. If only that really were true, she thought as she wiped away a tear stuck in the corner of her eye.
~~~
Ethan dried himself off from his frigid shower and swore into the mirror. What a fuckin’ idiot he was, thinking they could pick things up where they’d left them two years ago. No matter what, she still couldn’t trust him. And that hurt more than he was willing to admit.
Cheat on her? What a joke! He was in love with her, the very idea of cheating on her was ludicrous. Yet she wouldn’t believe the truth anyway. He knew she’d been hurt terribly by her ex-boyfriend. His sister, Cheryl, had told him all about the moron who broke her heart, and she’d warned him before she introduced them.
“Don’t hurt her,” his sister demanded the night of the blind date. Well it wasn’t actually a blind date. Ethan had seen April a few times before he begged his sister to set them up. He knew he was crazy to believe in such things, but it really had been love at first sight for him.
He was a police officer, made it his job to notice everyone in town. Then one day while driving around, he noticed his sister walking down Main Street with the prettiest redhead he’d ever seen. He nearly hit the car in front of him when his heart lurched in his chest from just looking at her. E
than spent the next few weeks looking everywhere for her, he’d found her going in the grocery store, the movie theater, and the pet shop.
After getting dressed, Ethan went to the couch he claimed for himself the past two days…and two painful nights and sat down. “Why don’t you have any pets?” he asked her out of the blue.
“What?” she asked, turning and looking at him curiously.
He surprised her. Good. “I saw you one day, before we started dating, and you went inside a pet store, but you don’t have any pets. I’ve always wondered about that.”
“I thought you’d never seen me before the night of our first date.”
“Yeah, I did a few times around town. I saw you with Cheryl once and asked her to fix us up. Why don’t you have a pet? You seem to be a cat person to me.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by cat person,” she said before joining him in the living room, sitting in the chair across from him. “You asked Cheryl to set us up? I didn’t know that.”
“Of course I did. I fell in love with you the minute I saw you.” He didn’t add that he never fell out of love—let her figure that out herself. “You don’t even have a fish or a hamster.”
She sat silently for a moment, and he expected her to reply to his declaration of love, but instead she finally answered his original question. “I interviewed the pet store owner about why people insist on dressing their dogs up like people…not one of my most interesting articles.”
Ethan watched April fidget in her seat. She was nervous, she could never sit still when she was nervous.
They both spoke at the same time. “I never cheated on you,” and “Are you hungry?”
“No,” he replied answering her question. “My ex-girlfriend, I won’t say her name with all these cameras and microphones, was at my house because she was afraid. Her boyfriend at the time had hit her, gave her a black eye and some nasty bruises. I’m a police officer, she came to my house asking for advice and for help. I talked her into going to the station and filing a report. She was in no shape to drive, so I asked one of my friends, another cop, to pick her up and drive her down there. That’s why her car was there.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?” He loved her? From the minute he saw her? April’s heart pounded wildly in her chest. All this time wasted.
“I couldn’t. I promised her to keep it a secret, and well…I kinda hoped you’d trust me enough to know I’d never cheat on you. I was so madly in love with you, April…I still am. You gotta believe me—I’m saying it in front of all these cameras.” He sat on the couch, just watching her with such love and emotion in his eyes. “Say something, Honey, I’m dying here.”
April stood up, looked directly at one of the cameras and said loudly, “Fuck, damn, shit!”
The look on his face was priceless. She reached for him and pulled him up and led him outside. The rain had finally stopped and the sun began to peak through the clouds.
“What…what was that all about?”
“I want those cameras out of my house, I want you all to myself. I love you, too, Ethan. I never stopped. I’m sorry I didn’t trust you. Can you forgive me?”
He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. She was dizzy by the time he stopped. “I’ll forgive you on one condition.”
“What?”
“Marry me, soon, and forever.”
“I will if you promise to never stop riling me up.”
“Oh baby, I don’t only promise to, I’ll swear to it.”
Be sure to visit Michelle’s website
www.MichelleScaplen.com
Double, Double, Toil & Trouble
Deborah MacGillivray
• Scotland- Trespassing on someone else’s land is legal.
“Now she’s done it!” Cian Mackinnon glared at the chain across the road, furious it prevented him from driving to the castle the back way. He considered putting the vehicle in low, rev the engine until it reached high torque, then smash through the chain. His luck―it’d only mess up the front of his Range Rover. “The witch has no bloody right to stop me from using the driveway.”
Aye, he could use the front entrance to Castle Dunnascaul. It’d mean backtracking several kilometers. Add to the fact, the road leading to the front door wasn’t really drivable―needed grading and filling in with gravel―his mood was not cheerful. A gale loomed on the horizon. A sensible lad, he wanted no part of getting caught on the old cliff road when high winds howled like The Bansidhe.
Gillian Grant played the bitch simply because she bought into the centuries old feud between her family and his. Didn’t matter she spent half her life in the States. Nor did the fact neither of them had been raised in the castle have bearing on The Troubles. He was a Mackinnon and she was…hmm…a bitch.
A damn sexy bitch, he admitted, but a pain in the arse when it came to the castle. What did he expect? She was a Grant. Their motto surely was Stubborn to the End. Living up to her name, she’d upped the ante by placing a chain over the back drive to prevent him from taking it.
The Mackinnon-Grant War was about to heat up.
Disgusted, he climbed out of the Rover and stomped down the winding driveway to her quaint, thatch cottage. As he neared the whitewashed, two-story structure, he saw the picture window curtain flutter. She’d been watching, expecting the confrontation when he discovered the chain.
The front door squeaked open and she stepped onto the stoop, arms crossed, a glower upon her face. If she ever stopped frowning, she’d be a damn fine woman. Neatly braided, her dark blonde hair snaked over her shoulder, around her full breast and past her hip. Always in the prim braid, he’d never seen that mass of hair loose. If just once she’d let down her hair–literally and figuratively―he feared she held the power to bewitch him until he didn’t ken down from up.
From the day they’d sat in the solicitor’s office and heard the will, relations between them had been anything but cordial.
The bone of contention―a five-hundred-year-old castle.
Castle Dunnascaul once belonged to Gillian’s family. Once being the key here. When Bonnie Prince Charlie pulled his stunt in 1745, trying to claim the throne of Scotland for his father, Clan Grant remained Royalists. Supporting the lost cause, Gillian’s branch blithely marched to their doom. Oddly, though most Mackinnons were out for Charlie―showing no better sense than the Grants―his particular sept of the Mackinnnons refused to rally to the Stuart’s standard. After Culloden, Dunnascaul had been confiscated and given as a reward to Malcolm Mackinnon, his great-grandfather, thirteen odd generations back. Despite the Grants being attainted, they held tight to the burning hope one day they’d regain the castle.
Tempers cooled over the past century. Controversy again flared when Gillian’s grandmother, Anne Grant, began an affair with his grandfather, David Mackinnon. Cian didn’t know the story, why if they were so in love they didn’t each divorce and marry, ending the feud. But no. They’d scandalized both clans, indulging in a lifelong affair. Tongues wagged for decades.
The castle’s ownership became a rub once more when Anne died of pneumonia. Supposedly, David promised Anne on her deathbed Dunnascaul would return to her family on his demise. Several witnesses swore he’d vowed this. For years, the Grants waited for David to stick a spoon in the wall so the ancient castle could revert to its rightful owners.
Last month, when they met at the solicitor’s for the will’s reading, Gillian anticipated Dunnascaul would be hers. Shock came when they learnt it passed to Cian. Only the thatched cottage on the southern boundary was left to Anne’s granddaughter. Not uttering a word of protest, and with a defiant tilt of the chin, she accepted the keys and took possession of the thatch. Since then, she’d plagued him at every turn.
“You trespass, Mackinnon.” She tugged the shawl around her shoulders.
“Aye, I am. I wouldn’t be troubling you, Gillian Grant, but someone foolishly put a chain across the driveway.”
“It stops trespassers. You have a drive
to Dunnascaul.”
Cian ran his eyes over her. She was an eyeful, not some skinny model-type, but a woman with flesh shaped to please a man. Shame she looked like she’d sucked lemons. “You know what you need, Gillian Grant?”
That stubborn chin jutted higher. “Save your chauvinistic patter, Mackinnon.”
“Chauvinistic, she says.” He huffed. “You thought I’d say you needed a good shagging—and I won’t deny that might be the source of your sourpuss moods. What I was going to say, Gillian Grant, is you need turning over my knee and given a good paddling.”
She snapped, “You and what man’s army?”
“I don’t need assistance, lass.” He stepped up on the concrete porch, invading her space. “A pleasure it’d be to demonstrate it. If you’d rather, I could help in the shagging department…just to improve your disposition.”
Gillian took a step backward, caught herself, clearly not about to let his taller frame intimidate her. Composing her face, she glared at him with regal bearing. “Shouldn’t you hie yourself off. You’ve a wee bit of a drive back to Dunnascaul and a storm’s coming.”
Since it neared Winter Solstice, night came in the middle of the afternoon. It would be pitch-black before he reached the castle if he took the front drive. With the storm coming, he had no intention of navigating that kidney-busting driveway.
“You cannot close access to the road. You may have been raised as a Yank, but surely you know simple trespassing isn’t a crime in Scotland.”
“Only if the trespass doesn’t―”
“Destroy crops, inhibit the property’s regular use or invade privacy. Since I do none of those things, you cannot prevent me from using the drive.”
No Law Against Love Page 19