And thinking of her, it was as if he’d managed to conjure her out of the air. Something moved on the loch side of the road opposite the Tea Room, a figure with glossy dark hair, dark trousers, and a black jumper that blended into the descending night. Cait’s achingly familiar face gleaming pale.
He swerved to avoid her, and the Land Rover sent up a sheet of slush that sprayed her from waist to feet.
She whipped around as if she would attack the car, long hair flying in a curtain, blue eyes wild as fire, and a screech loud enough to carry over the engine’s growl. And just like that, the same as the sight of her had done every day since he was ten years old, Brice found it impossible to process a coherent thought.
Aye, God, but he had missed her.
At the same time, he wished she hadn’t come. Not yet.
A muscle twitching in his cheek, he pulled the Land Rover to a stop alongside her Mini and jumped out onto the tarmac. It was only then that he caught his first real look at her. Cait. She was stooped over, wiping at the slush to dry herself off as much as she could manage.
He took off his coat and hurried toward her.
The pull between them hadn’t changed a whit. The closer he approached, the more his body remembered what he’d spent fifteen months trying to forget: the curve of cheeks that fit perfectly against his palms, full lips that offered arguments and kisses with equal passion, a stubborn chin she used to fake a confidence she often didn’t have.
She straightened as he reached the road. Glared at him. “Do you never grow up, Brice MacLaren? I suppose this is your childish way of getting even?”
Well, that was calmer than he’d expected.
“Christ, Cait—I’m sorry. Here, take this.” He draped his coat across her shoulders, careful not to touch her. “I didn’t see you standing there.”
“You might have if you weren’t driving your usual ridiculous speed.” Cait’s hands went up as if to snatch the coat away. She was shivering, though, her teeth chattering, and she seemed to realize that suddenly. Instead of throwing the coat at him as he’d half-expected, she drew it closer around herself and burrowed down into it the way she’d burrowed into his coats a hundred times before.
The loss of her hit him all over again. “I was going the limit,” he said, sounding tired even to himself, “and I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow.”
“How’d you know I was coming at all?” She went still, her attention sharpening.
“The glen’s still small. That hasn’t changed. But it’s good you’re home—your father’s missed you. I’ve missed you.”
“You lost the right to miss me when you threw what we had away. If you ever felt anything for me at all. And if you’re thinking I’ve been neglecting my father, you couldn’t be more wrong.”
He’d forgotten that eyes could burn so bright and still be cold. “I never said you were neglecting him.”
“You implied it.”
“Don’t go putting words in my mouth, woman. If you’re hearing them, that’s your own conscience talking and nothing to do with me.” Brice raised his hands and shook his head. “No, look, let’s not do this. I didn’t even mean to say that.”
“Och, but you’ve always been brilliant at saying things, doing things, you don’t mean and can’t take back.” Cait’s face tipped up to his, snowflakes melting on her cheeks. Then her expression twisted, and she stared down at the tips of her high-heeled boots and the sodden hem of her expensive trousers, clothes more fashionable than the jeans she’d always worn before she went to London. “You’re right, though,” she said, “I promised myself I wouldn’t argue with you, and I can’t seem to help it. We should just keep out of each other’s way while I’m here.”
“No, it’s past time we talked. Preferably somewhere your teeth can stop chattering instead of out here in the street screeching at each other, though.”
“I do not screech. I never screech.” Her eyes flashed again, fire and ice and temper.
He raised an eyebrow at her, grinning. Waiting for her to laugh.
There was a time she would have. A time when they would have laughed together. Now her triangular face pinched even tighter and her chest heaved as though she’d run the circumference of the glen.
He wanted to tuck her against his chest and hold her. Wanted to never let her go.
Instead, he stood like a pillock with the words trapped in his brain and refusing to come out. In the months since she’d gone to London, he’d bottled up too many things he had to tell her. Too many questions.
Was she sorry she had left him? Did she regret jumping to conclusions, the half-coherent accusations she’d slipped into his mailbox? Didn’t she realize her father had taken advantage of her weakness and her doubt?
Donald Fletcher had been only too happy to tell Brice what he’d said to Cait the day after her mother’s funeral when she’d come storming home. It hadn’t been much worse than the things he’d already told them both a hundred times before, but with her mother freshly buried, Cait had been out of her head with grief and vulnerable.
It had taken months for Brice to understand that. All he’d known at first was that Cait’s leaving had ripped open an empty space inside him. And without her there, he’d had nothing to fill that emptiness. Nothing worthwhile. Which had only proven that Cait’s father had been right all along in saying that Brice didn’t have anything real to offer her.
He was working on that, though. Determined to change it. Determined to change himself.
Standing on the snowy tarmac nearly toe to toe with her, he tried to find a way to say so.
She tapped her foot against the pavement, her shoulders thrown back. Her fighting stance. Her invitation to a brawl.
The loch gleamed dark behind her, reflecting the strands of holiday lights Flora Macara and her husband had hung along the roofline of the Inn and the stone walls that skirted the tavern courtyard. A reminder that Christmas would bring Cait no joy this year once she heard her father’s news.
Something of his thoughts must have registered in his expression. She raised her chin and narrowed her eyes, but instead of making her fierce, with his coat draped over her shoulders, the body language only made her seem smaller and more fragile.
“Well?” she demanded. “You’ve obviously got something to say. Get on with it, and stop gaping at me as if I’ve grown two heads.”
“You need to go see your father. Make him tell you the truth—make him listen—and when you’re through, if you need me, call me. Whatever’s happened between us, I’ll be here for you.” He couldn’t stop himself from moving toward her. Reaching for her. “I’ve changed, Caitie. You won’t believe that, but I’ll prove it to you if you’ll let me.”
She blinked, searched his face. Took a deep, long breath. Then her expression hardened. “You say that while you still reek of whiskey in the middle of the afternoon. Not much has changed, from what I see.”
Brice went stiff. “I had half a glass—”
“Like you had with Rhona Grewer before you let her drag you off to bed? But you know what, it doesn’t matter. You don’t matter. Not to me. Get drunk all day. With anyone you like. Do whatever you like.” She stood quietly, spoke quietly, her lip trembling as she said the words.
The lack of sound and fury was far worse than the months when she hung up on him or refused to take his calls. Where there was anger there was hope, but it seemed she’d burned through even that. Convinced herself that what had been between them wasn’t worth fighting over. Fighting for.
Tired beyond measure, Brice dug in his pocket for the key to the Tea Room. “I don’t know why you’re so determined to believe the worst about what you saw that day, and I can’t change your mind if you won’t hear my side of it. But you’re wrong about a lot of things, not least that we don’t matter to each other. We will always matter. Don’t push me away, mo chridhe. Don’t push away any of the people who want to love you. You’re about to find out how much you need us all.”
He didn’t wait to hear how she would answer. On reaching the Tea Room, he unlocked the door and let himself inside. Cait being back didn’t change the fact that he’d promised to finish the painting and remove the FOR SALE from the window before Cait saw it. Whatever Cait thought, he wasn’t one to break a promise.
Sliding the bolt closed behind himself, he watched her through the glass, waiting to see whether she would try to come in after him. She didn’t move, only stood rooted where he’d left her, her face tilted up to the falling snow.
She looked so lost, so broken, he couldn’t make himself move away.
Dark House
“Man is not what he thinks he is,
he is what he hides.”
André Malraux
More than his words, it was Brice’s sympathy that scared Cait cold. For as long as she had known him, he’d always hidden deep emotion with attitude or laughter. Watching him stride off toward the Tea Room, she didn’t know what to do with the softness she had seen in his expression. The whole conversation made her long to run home to her father and demand to know what was going on.
You didn’t win a battle with Donald Fletcher without sufficient ammunition, though, and as her mother had always said: knowledge was the ultimate weapon.
She wished Brice had simply told her what he knew instead of dropping dire hints. It made no sense for him to know anything at all about her father’s business, much less to have a key to the Tea Room in his pocket.
Something had changed while she was gone. There was something different about Brice, too, come to that. Aye, he still had the usual faint smudge of grease along the ridge of one sharp cheekbone where he caught it with his thumb as he brushed back his hair. He was still quick enough to anger. But he’d both softened and grown more certain of himself. More tempered. Physically he was leaner, even more gorgeous than she remembered. No less devastating to her equilibrium.
No less infuriating.
God, why had she thought she could bear to come home again?
The previous Christmas with her father in London had been fine. Good. Better than their relationship had ever been before, almost like two grown-up friends. Friends who actually spoke to each other about things that mattered. Or so Cait had believed. Maybe the closeness she’d felt between them had been nothing more than self-delusion, her still trying to fill Robbie’s shoes. Now, standing in front of the Tea Room with the wind blowing off the loch and the snow coming down, she felt like a child again, the little sister who would forever run in her brother’s shadow. Even when Robbie wasn’t there to cast one anymore. Her father had always turned to Robbie when he needed something. Maybe it even made an odd sort of sense that he’d asked Brice for help instead of asking her.
Even as she wondered what Brice was doing for him, Brice moved into the unlit front room, pulled something out of the window, and vanished toward the rear of the building. A moment later, a light shone warmly from the kitchen.
Outside, the wind blew colder. Cait discovered she was shaking, and she burrowed deeper into Brice’s coat. It smelled of him, smelled just as she remembered: maleness and grease and the Lava Soap that left his skin clean and pink when he washed his hands. An undertone of automotive leather and a little bit of whiskey. That, too, was familiar.
Too familiar.
Brice had settled his coat around her a hundred times when she was cold. She’d thought she was the only one who wore his clothes. But she’d been wrong.
The weight of the thick black wool threatened to crush her, and she tore the coat off and threw it on the tarmac. She had to fight the temptation to stomp on it, to grind the memories it had brought into the dirty wet asphalt until they lost their power.
Old pain didn’t die that easy.
The morning after Brice had asked her to marry him, she’d gone to pull her T-shirt on, but he’d slowly dressed her in his flannel shirt instead, from the bottom up, planting a gentle kiss on the skin beneath each button. She’d worn the shirt and nothing else while they made breakfast together, and the brush of the fabric against her skin had felt like an intimate gesture, something just for her. Only for her. Then the day after Mum’s funeral, she’d found Rhona Grewer letting herself out the door of Brice’s cottage, her blond hair unaccustomedly tousled and the beautiful blue button-down shirt that Cait had bought Brice for his birthday tied up loosely over a skirt that fit like a second skin.
Being Rhona, she had smiled without a hint of shame. “He’s a good man, that one,” she’d said clicking past Cait in her four-inch heels. “Don’t take your eyes off him too long, or you might find he’s moved on to someone else.”
Cait gave herself a shake. Turning her back, she walked past the posh new Land Rover that Brice was driving and slipped into the driver’s seat of her own Mini. She couldn’t help wondering who the Land Rover belonged to. Had Brice already taken up with someone new?
The thought made Cait feel faintly sick as she slipped back behind the wheel. It reminded her, too, that she really needed to get rid of the car that he’d restored for her. Make a clean break of it. She’d started to advertise the Mini a half-dozen times since she’d moved to London, but she’d never managed to carry through. Selling it would be like selling a piece of herself.
Bone tired, she put her fingers through the grating of the cat carrier where Mrs. Bogan had started to meow what sounded like the first note of a funeral dirge, over and over again. “Hush, now,” Cait told her. “I know just how you feel, love. I do. I hear you, and I am sorry I left you so long.”
Not in the least soothed by the apology, Mrs. Bogan hissed and dropped into a sulky crouch at the bottom of the carrier. Cait switched the ignition with her hand shaking and reversed back out onto the road.
The car park at the Inn had already started filling up for the evening. A young couple hurried up the path toward the sprawling building as Cait drove past, and the door swung open with a glow of yellow light. Music spilled outside: a bagpipe playing the first notes of “Wild Rover,” then drums and an accordion joining in. Voices, too, still sufficiently in tune and tempo to suggest the night was young and the beer had only recently started flowing.
Not so very long ago, Cait would have been in there with everyone else, her back braced against Brice’s broad chest, his arms held fast and warm around her, his lips coming down now and again at the end of a song to kiss her hair. He had a fine voice, did Brice. Better than Cait’s own, though she’d been the one to sing in the choir.
She put her foot down on the accelerator, suddenly desperate to get home. To hell with the posted limit. She drove straight through the intersection and continued up the hill past the newly rebuilt Village Hall, past the double row of white harled stone houses with warm lights filtering through lace-curtained windows. Eventually, she turned into a long track that led to the house where she’d grown up. But at the top of the drive, she stopped, her hands tight on the wheel.
As with the Tea Room, her mum’s absence was unmistakable. No glittering holiday lights dripped like icicles beneath the eaves of the house. No handmade ornaments of gold and silver bells and moons and stars hung on the holly tree beside the door. The porch light was off and, through the picture window at the front, only the pale blue flickering light of the television lit the sitting room.
Cait eased her foot off the brake and let the car glide down the remainder of the drive. Once she’d parked and turned the ignition off, she left her cases in the boot and took nothing with her except the cat carrier and the small holdall with the box of chocolates she’d brought her father.
The front door was locked, and that was different, too. She stooped to retrieve the key from beneath the flowerpot by the holly tree, but found it wasn’t there and had to resort to finding her own among the dozen on her keyring. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had to use it.
Stepping inside, she paused and listened on the threshold. Apart from the low murmur of the television, the house was silent. If her father was home,
he didn’t seem to have noticed the flash of her headlights as she approached. She tiptoed through the hall and turned into the sitting room, the faint sense of dread she’d been feeling no longer faint at all.
Half-covered in a blanket, her father lay snoring quietly on the sofa. Crumpled wrappers, dirty plates, empty glasses, and a half empty bottle of Scotch littered the low table beside him, but amid the mess, there was something emptier about the remainder of the room.
It took Cait a moment to process that it was physically emptier.
She switched on the lights for a closer look. A bare spot on the wall showed an unfaded square of wallpaper where a painting of the blue-roofed village on Santorini had hung the last time Cait had seen the room—her mother had always dreamed of going there. That wasn’t the only bare spot. The blown-up photo of Cait with her mum at university graduation had also gone, along with the portrait of Robbie in his army uniform with the pressed poppy Mum had slipped into the corner, and the framed family photographs that once covered the entire mantle were missing, too. Absent also was the carved marble chessboard that had held pride of place on the little Queen Anne table. Her mum’s knitting box. The little porcelain figurines from the table beside the sofa. Most of the books from off the shelves.
Every trace of Cait’s mother had been stripped away.
The cold tightness in Cait’s chest slid deeper, settling in the pit of her stomach and leaving her feeling as empty as the room. She crossed over to the sofa and stood looking down at her father, wondering what to say. The realization that he seemed old, suddenly—and frail and thin—struck her like another body blow. Where was the giant of a man who had loomed over her family all her life?
Had it truly been a year since she’d seen him?
It was an easy day’s drive up from London, but she hadn’t made the effort. She hadn’t allowed herself to make it.
Magic of Winter Page 2