by Brynn Kelly
“What’s that?” he said, staring at a box on the table, wrapped in gold foil. Her “present” for the fake wedding—actually the boxed-up leftovers of her home security monitoring system.
She tore off the wrapping. “It’s a motion-sensor camera. I thought I’d drive ten minutes up the road and install it. It’ll send an alert to the app on my phone if anyone approaches. Just in case your instinct doesn’t alert us first.”
“Pure dead brilliant,” he said.
He lowered the basket beside the fireplace and knelt. His palm shot to the dressing on his arm. He held it for a second and tentatively rolled his shoulder back. Why deny that he was in pain? Why refuse medication? He didn’t seem the type to let masculine pride shape his decisions—but then, there were mysteries in him she couldn’t decipher. She swallowed. She was salivating. Hunger—for food. She dived into the shopping bag on the table and found more protein bars, plus bananas, dark chocolate and cashews.
“Sorry,” he said, turning his head. “I didn’t factor in an evening meal. And whatever became of lunch? How about I try my luck with the trout while you fish for dirt on a certain presidential candidate?”
“You’re going fishing? It’s nearly midnight.”
“So the fish won’t be expecting it. My brain is straddling three different time zones right now. It’s fishing time in one of them, I’m sure. Chances of sleep are very low.”
“Me, too. And I had an overnight sleep in the car, so...”
“If I can find only pike then I’m afraid we’re going hungry. My dad used to force-feed them to us.” He gave a melodramatic shudder.
She sat at the table, eating cashews and staring at Jamie’s broad back as he ripped newspaper and laid the fire. He seemed to take up more than his share of the room. Had he always been that muscular or was it a soldier thing?
She forced herself to focus on the laptop. Good honest—dishonest—work would make her forget about the way her belly filled with warmth every time she looked at his crinkly eyes or his accent rolled over her or he brushed past smelling of mint or he kissed her...
Not that they’d be kissing again. Whatever his reasons for pulling away, they were deeply buried and none of her business. She would stop obsessing about him when she started obsessing about finding this information.
Besides, who could fail to be attracted to a sexy, caring doctor? And a doctor who was also a soldier—how many boxes did that tick? Her stomach filled with bees again. In a minute it’d start buzzing.
She sensed a change in the air. He was studying her, his head tilted, lit by the blazing paper and kindling.
“What is it?” she said, her cheeks warming.
“You were staring at a black screen. Penny for the complicated string of thoughts that’s tying your brain in knots.”
She hurriedly touched the mouse pad, lighting the screen. “Believe me, my brain feels less knotted than it has in a year.” In some parallel universe, a girl like her talking to a guy like him might add: because of you. She might even walk right up and kiss him. But not this girl, not in this universe. “It’s just good to have someone to talk to. Anyone at all. I should get started.”
“Glad to provide you with a warm body,” he said, deadpan.
He stood. She pictured him assessing her with a raised eyebrow, but pretended to be absorbed in techie things. The fire popped and crackled, releasing a fresh woodsy scent.
Anyone at all? Really, Samira? It was just as graceless as she’d handled their—what did you call it? A breakup? A separation? After only one night?
In her defense, she was out of practice at human interaction. Heck, she’d never been comfortable with it. She felt him watch her a minute longer, her throat drying. He was probably wondering how he’d got stranded with such an idiot.
“Right, that should take care of itself,” he said, stepping back. “Toss on a log every now and then, would you? I’ll see if I can catch us some dinner. Otherwise it’s going to be porridge—and I hate porridge.”
“That’s not very patriotic.”
“Thought we’d agreed not to do stereotypes.”
She laughed. She’d left out witty. A sexy, caring, witty soldier-doctor. Who was hurting, deep down.
Yikes.
“Pull the curtains across the blinds and it’ll be safe enough to light these.” He grabbed a box of candles from the mantel, laid it on the table and left, scraping the door shut behind him. She took a smoky breath. Had he invented the fishing excuse to get some space? Or was she projecting her own escape mechanisms onto him?
She set the password cracker running. As the shell screen began scrolling with attempts, she browsed through Hyland’s files. The sounds of Jamie rattling around in the shed and dragging the boat abated, leaving a ticking clock, the crackling fire and her tapping. The rest of the world had tiptoed away, leaving the two of them alone on a tiny island. Safe. How weird was that—she felt safe, even as she was doing the riskiest hack of her life? Had to be the Jamie effect. Who could fail to feel safe in his company?
The files outside the vault seemed as banal as their titles suggested. Tess would probably find dozens of stories in them but without context they meant nothing to Samira. She did keyword searches for everything and everyone she could think of related to Denniston and the Los Angeles terror attacks, and came up blank.
After half an hour, a shiver up her spine reminded her to top up the fire—and set up the camera. Away from the glare of the screen her eyes struggled to compensate for the gloom. She wandered to the window and pulled up a blind. After a minute she could make out a small lawn but not the narrow road or the lake—loch—beyond. She pushed her knuckles into the center of her back. No crack, of course. Her back was one big dull ache. All that time sitting in cars and the train seemed to have compacted her vertebrae.
As she headed for the car with her camera the silence pressed around her, save an occasional lapping from the water and the swish of her boots on damp grass. The fog had an eerie, diffuse glow, perhaps lit by a moon far above. Was it a full moon? She couldn’t remember. A jetty disappeared into the loch but she couldn’t see the end of it, let alone make out Jamie.
He was still gone when she returned. She fell for the allure of a shower, though with the water pressure of a dripping tap, it just left her colder. As she hurriedly dressed in jeans and a shirt, footsteps crunched outside. She flinched, her heart jump-starting. Just Jamie. Through the kitchen window she watched him slap something onto an outdoor bench, his face ghostly, uplit by his phone. Deep lines etched between his eyes as he gutted the catch. After a minute he rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand and stared toward the loch, remaining still for a long time. A faraway look, though he couldn’t possibly see more than a few meters. He looked tired, haunted, older—not the Jamie she knew.
But which Jamie did she know?
He doesn’t want to be read, so stop trying to read him. She grabbed the candles and lit them in the fire, one by one. She planted three on the candelabra and three on a plate on the table.
The door opened and Jamie strode in, ducking under the frame, sweeping cold air ahead of him. “I have fish, mo ghràidh!”
“More what...?”
“Mo ghràidh. Gaelic for ‘my...’” He frowned, as if trying to remember the translation. “‘...friend.’ Another day here and I’ll be speaking fluent Gaelic. And I don’t speak Gaelic.” He locked the door, the bolt clunking home. “I used actual worms for bait, which is another law broken, on top of fishing without a license—seeing as you’re keeping count. In for a penny...” He crossed to the kitchen counter in a single stride and lowered a tray on it, laid with two pale pink fillets.
“Seeing as I can barely understand you now, I don’t know if it’ll make much difference,” she said.
“You have an indecipherable accent yourself sometimes, you know.”
“I do know. It’s all over the place—sometimes even my parents don’t understand me. Wait until I get drunk—you won’t understand a word. I’ll be speaking any combination of English, Amharic, Italian, Arabic, in accents that don’t even exist... Who knows—maybe I’ll pick up Gaelic while I’m here?”
“I’d like to see you drunk one day. We’d communicate in the secret language of drunk people.”
One day. Another reference to a future they wouldn’t have.
“I don’t remember the last time I was drunk,” she said. “Latif didn’t drink alcohol and I’ve been alone awhile. Getting drunk alone just sounds too sad.”
“Well, you’re not alone now,” he said, suddenly contrite, as if her isolation had been his fault. He produced a bottle of red wine from a little pantry, opened it, glugged it into a glass and handed it to her. “You know, I get that you didn’t want me to stay, in France, but I would happily have come and spent time with you, if you’d...”
If she’d kept her promise to keep him in the loop? “I know you would have. I’m just not sure that would have made things any easier. I’ve been a little...confused.”
“I was meaning platonically, but...”
But we both know it wouldn’t have worked out that way?
“You miss him,” he continued. “I can see that.”
“Awo.” She sipped the wine. “For a long time, I couldn’t see past blaming him or blaming myself. Now I mostly just miss having him around. Something funny might happen or I’ll have some random thought and my first instinct is to find him or text him and tell him—and even after all this time it takes a second to remember that I can’t.”
A hand rested on her shoulder, cold, even through her layers of clothing. She flinched.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to give you a fright. How’s the hacking going?”
Jamie. It was Jamie’s hand, not...
So now you’re believing in ghosts?
“The program seems to be doing its thing,” she said, grateful for his change of subject. She’d been staring into nothing. Into a past that no longer existed. “But it could take many hours.”
He slid the plate of candles to the middle of the table, flickering shadows across the ceiling. “This is just like the eighteenth century.”
“Just like it, apart from the laptop in the corner that’s hacking away at the password of the next leader of the free world.”
“Apart from that.” He returned to the kitchen and stuck his head in the pantry. “And electricity and plumbing.”
“And modern medicine, which I still haven’t seen you take.”
He planted salt and pepper shakers on the table, something flashing in his expression and fading again. A sea creature skimming the surface but not breaking through before it dived back into the deep. “And a curious lack of marching Jacobites and marauding Englishmen. Actually, the eighteenth century would have been a shite time to live in Scotland.”
“I like the twenty-first century just fine. Or I will, once I get to join it again. I’ve been stuck in 1999 for the last year.”
“Ah, 1999. I envy 1999. I’d be happy to have a do-over of the twenty-first century.”
“For you or the world?”
“Both.”
“What would you have done differ—?”
“I smell like a dead fish,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Would you mind heating up a frypan while I clean up, super quick?”
As the shower trickled in the next room, she found a pan and a tin of cooking oil. People must have stood in the same spot for centuries, preparing food. If she blocked out the glow from the laptop, she could imagine herself transported back in time, with a white-legged kilt-clad husband and countless wild children with shaggy hair. Cut off from the world. An introvert’s paradise.
And now she was imagining Jamie dirtied up and wearing a kilt. A Jamie who was currently naked, only a few meters away. They were alone, in a small space, not fleeing, not disguised. Her stomach knotted. They could live here for weeks.
The shower shut off, and the curtain rattled. If she were more courageous, she’d push open the bathroom door, sidle up behind him and slip her hands under his towel. He would turn and catch her cheeks, angle her head up for a kiss...
She closed her eyes, welcoming the desire skating up from her toes to her belly. She could enjoy that feeling, even if she didn’t act on it.
“Samira—are you okay?”
Her eyes snapped open. He was standing right beside her. “Dehnanay.” She swallowed. “Fine.”
“You were miles away.” He was sensationally bare-chested, a towel wrapped around his waist, just as she’d pictured. Yep, he’d look good in a kilt.
“Just...thinking,” she said.
“Don’t be scared to share your thoughts with me.”
Oh, not these thoughts.
“You don’t need to carry all this weight alone, you know. Talking can help.”
She nodded, abruptly. Lucky she didn’t have the courage to say How about a quickie on the dining table, just to get it out of my system?
But maybe she could strike up the courage to speak her mind. “Indeed it can, Jamie.”
He tipped his head, with a trace of a curious grin.
“We’re a terrible couple of people to be stuck together, you and I,” she said. “A woman who struggles to express her thoughts and a man who makes a determined effort to bury his.”
“I don’t bur—” His wet, clumped eyelashes flickered as he looked away. “I’d better get dressed.”
He shut himself into the bedroom. She sat on the couch, swiveled her legs onto it and leaned backward over the arm. No crack. Goddamn.
The door opened. “Oh hel-lo,” Jamie said, walking in, dressed as before. She lurched back up and stretched her neck side to side.
“You do that a lot,” he said. “Stiff back?”
“Awo. I just can’t seem to find the right stretch. The least of my problems.”
“But easily solved. You want me to crack it for you? I’m pretty good at that.”
Oh yes. And oh, no.
“Come here,” he said, holding out his hand.
She stared at the hand. Saying no would be more awkward than saying yes, right? And the idea of getting that crack... She let him pull her up, and he wrapped his arms around her. Unsure what to do with her hands, she rested them on his arms. He pulled tight across her back. No crack.
“Samira, you’ve got to relax. You’re as stiff as a corpse. Breathe in with me.”
He filled his chest. She copied, her own breath shaky, her breasts pushing against him, creating the polar opposite of a relaxing effect.
“Now, exhale,” he whispered.
Halfway through her exhalation, he pulled tight. A series of cracks ran up her back like corn popping.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“Wow,” he said, releasing her but not moving back. “That’s been building awhile.”
She slid her hands off his arms. “Thank you.”
“Med school has to be good for something, right?”
She felt taller, lighter, at risk of floating away on the euphoria of relief...and something else. His Adam’s apple moved, drawing her eye to his throat. His eyes darkened, he touched her elbow and his warm breath brushed her forehead.
No. Enough of this torture. She turned, abruptly. “I’d better...check on the computer.”
“Aye,” he said, with a start. “I’d better... The fire needs wood. And the trout...”
As he took over in the kitchen, she idly looked through Hyland’s files, her chest slumping. She’d been so sure when she’d got onto the site at Edinburgh that she’d find the dirt Tess needed, and the world would magically return to its normal axis. What if the vault contained nothing either? But Charlotte’s message... Perhaps Charlotte had
tried to hack in but couldn’t. But with the security alert she couldn’t have got into Hyland’s account at all from London—or Paris. So how did she even know the vault was there? From this Erebus person?
“Dinner’s ready,” Jamie said quietly, as if hesitant to interrupt her thoughts. “It’s pretty simple.”
She moved the electronic equipment to the sofa, put Jamie’s cell phone on charge and returned to the dining chair, sipping wine as he set the table and sat across from her. His lanky frame made the chair look like a child’s. She needed something else to focus on, something that wasn’t the files or her attraction to Jamie.
She took a breath. “Tell me about your family, Jamie. What happened?”
His lips parted. Panic flashed through his eyes and vanished.
“And don’t brush it off with a joke,” she added.
He took a forkful of fish and chewed.
“I happened,” he said, eventually, the words directed at the trout.
Silence.
“Tell me the story.”
“You don’t want to hear it.”
“You’d be surprised how much I want to hear it. I’m guessing they weren’t happy when you enlisted.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Come on—their doctor son going off to fight another country’s wars?”
He smoothed an index finger across an eyebrow, like he had a headache. A bird cried as it passed over the cottage.
“I can see how heavy those secrets are, Jamie. And believe me, I’m good at keeping secrets.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“You’re not making jokes anymore, so that’s already a start.”
“You don’t like my jokes?”
“Spoke too soon.”
“Aye,” he said, eventually, chasing food around with his fork. “My folks weren’t impressed.” She could almost hear the emphatic period at the end of his words.
“Yes, and...?”
He smiled slightly, and a ticking noise escaped his throat. Recognizing defeat when he saw it? “I was their great hope. The idea that a child of theirs could grow up to be a doctor... They weren’t wealthy, they weren’t able to make much of their own lives, but they loved the idea that future generations of Armstrongs would have all the opportunities they didn’t have, without the struggles to pay the bills.”