“It’s okay, Tare…” Milly said. Not because it was, but because her friend sounded violently upset, and Milly didn’t want her to put that much energy into this.
Thing is, Milly didn’t have many friends. Because friends, as it turned out, were surprisingly hard to make and keep when you’d spent large swaths of your lifelong friend-making years in the hospital. As a result, she’d been shy and almost pathologically frightened of speaking up (Magnus’s dubbing her Milly Mouse at their first meeting wasn’t kind, but it also wasn’t entirely inaccurate). And by the time she’d finally made it to Scotland for a summer-long business and technology internship at the Royal Scottish Bank, her social skills were so underdeveloped she didn’t even begin to hope she’d make any friends there.
But her friendless days were over from the moment she met Canadian Tara Hamilton at the RSB orientation. They had nothing in common. Tara was a self-professed anti-Canadian.
Rude, bold, and strong—in body and personality. She was biracial, like Milly, but her black father and white mother were still together. Like really together. They did cutesy things like wait with each other by the phone when their daughter was expected to make her scheduled call home.
Near the end of their internships, Tara and Milly had both landed jobs in Edinburgh—Milly at AlgoFortune, and Tara at the Royal Scottish Bank—and decided to move in together. They’d been best friends ever since.
Now, three years later, Milly, the shy nerd with zero confidence whose whole face turned red when she was called on to speak, still had no idea why Tara befriended her. But she was so glad she did.
However, as much as she treasured her best friend, Tara wasn’t perfect. At the top of her list of flaws was a nasty temper. While Milly might feel the same as Tara deep inside where she’d carefully buried most of her feelings years ago, she’d literally had to pull her best friend out of bar fights on Trivia Pub Quiz nights and make a dash for it.
And right now, she had no doubt her extremely loyal friend was more than capable of hunting Iain down and punching him in the nose if she didn’t get in front of this.
As if to confirm Milly’s fears, Tara grumbled, “That bastard’s lucky I’m visiting Brian, or I’d come up there, find out where he lives, and shove that hiring contract right up his ass.”
And that brought up issue number two. Which was almost, but not quite, as big an issue as her foul temper. Just a few weeks after moving to Edinburgh, Tara had met a sketchy English musician at a pub. And from what Milly could tell, he was the worst. Like, completely-undeserving-of-her-amazing-best-friend the worst.
He always made Tara visit him in Liverpool, never once deigning to make the journey to Edinburgh to hang out with Tara and her friends. Nearly three years into their relationship and Milly had yet to meet the guy, let alone see a photo of him. In fact, she wouldn’t even call what Tara and he had a relationship. More like a long-distance booty call made worse by Tara’s slavish devotion.
As strong and loyal a friend as she could be, Tara was a complete doormat when it came to Brian.
And Milly had learned early on that her otherwise smart friend would not budge on the topic of Brian. Tara visited him whenever he called, and once there, nothing would bring her back until Brian let her go.
Case in point: Milly’s phone call to her best friend to tell her she 1) only had eight months to live, and 2) could not quit her job without getting sued for the last bit of money she had. And Tara, rather predictably, threatened to do physical damage to Iain but didn’t so much as offer to come back to Edinburgh to commiserate with her dying roommate.
But it wasn’t Tara’s job to comfort her, Milly reminded herself, hating the wave of self-pity that passed over her as she pulled her dinner out of the oven. “Tara, it’s okay. Seriously. Two more weeks won’t matter in the scheme of things,” she said, trying to convince both Tara and herself.
“No, it’s not okay! It’s messed up, and I just wish—” Tara suddenly cut off. “Sorry, Milly, Brian’s calling me. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you at work first thing tomorrow, okay?”
Milly opened her mouth to tell Tara she probably wouldn’t be at work first thing tomorrow since she had to drive all the way to the Highlands to pick up the thumb drive with Iain’s rough code on it. But Tara hung up before she could get the words out.
Milly hated driving in Scotland. Despite having lived there for nearly three years, she just couldn’t shake the feeling she was driving on the wrong side of the road every time she got behind the wheel—a wheel that was, from her perspective, located on the wrong side of the car. It was probably because she didn’t have many opportunities to drive all that often. In fact, the only reason she’d even bothered to get her international license and learn to drive a stick was that an assistant who couldn’t drive wasn’t up to Iain’s standards.
Her job occasionally called for her to use one of the company cars to pick up and drop off items at different tech outfits located all around the city. And now it called for her to drive into the Highlands to pick up a thumb drive so the software development team could get as much work done as possible on it before the bank holiday weekend.
Funny, she hadn’t thought she could feel any worse than she had walking out of the doctor’s office. But driving to Iain’s childhood village in the dead of night to pick up a thumb drive? Wow. Her life, what was left of it, was hitting new lows all over the place.
However, Milly’s depression began to lift after she negotiated the Vauxhall Astra up a narrow mountain road. As it turned out, Faoltiarn, the Highland village where Iain grew up, was a charming postcard of a town with a large mountain on one side and a shimmering loch on the other.
It was still very dark out, but the full moon hung heavy as a spotlight overhead, working in conjunction with the smattering of streetlights to illuminate the collection of darling stone shops on either side of the main street. Even though it was almost June, the small village reminded her of something out of a Christmas card, with their dark green detailing and multiple windows sporting the same red plaid found on Iain’s kilts.
The main street soon gave way to a wider graveled road which wound lazily around the eastern side of a glittering loch. The side closest to her was dotted by little white stone cottages with thatched roofs. And on the other side of the loch…no, that couldn’t be right.
But yes…there, nestled among the tall pines, stood a castle. A small castle to be sure, but nothing like the ruins she occasionally saw on the side of the road when driving around Scotland with Tara in her car (the car being the one and only positive to come out of Tara’s relationship with Brian). This castle stood three stories tall and even had a low perimeter wall.
Whoa! she thought, just as the car’s GPS informed her that her destination was ahead on the right.
Milly pulled the car to a stop in front of yet another cottage. It was slightly larger than the ones she had passed, but other than that, it looked just like all the rest—whitewashed stone walls, thatched roof, and super old.
As she got out of the car, a funny feeling came over her. Like maybe she’d somehow stepped out of her own time into a highland village from the distant past.
To add to the eerie ambiance, something that sounded an awful lot like the far-off howling of wolves punctuated the otherwise silent night. It had to be dogs since she’d read wolves had been hunted to extinction in Scotland back in the 1700s. And while there were a lot of discussions happening across Scotland about possibly reintroducing the European wolf, Milly felt confident no decisions had yet been made.
Nevertheless, the cries sounded a lot like wolves—at least to someone who’d grown up in upstate New York as she had—and they served as the perfect soundtrack to the “ancient Scotland” BBC documentary she’d apparently stumbled into. It was all Milly could do not to shudder as she walked toward the cottage’s dimly lit front door.
The door was unlocked, just as Iain said it would be. And walking through it gave her the feeling of
having exited a time machine with the dial set firmly to “the future.”
So much for the old-timey vibe she’d had during her drive through the village. While Iain’s cottage appeared to be a few hundred years old on the outside, it was modern as all get out on the inside.
Milly tapped the light switch closest to the door, illuminating stylish, upscale furniture in every direction she looked, along with a large flat-screen TV above the fireplace, and three different video game consoles in the open plan living room.
From that point, locating Iain’s home office was easy. There was only one open door down the narrow hall off the main living area. The room it led to was lit by a small desk lamp. Inside, Milly found a wood standing desk with a white sticky note on it visible in the lamp’s warm circle of light. THUMB DRIVE was written across it in bold, black Sharpie.
Milly’s brow furrowed. The note—written in Iain’s distinctive all-caps handwriting—was very clear. But the thumb drive wasn’t there.
She scanned the desktop and then began searching the floor beneath the desk. It was while doing this that she solved one mystery. And stumbled into another.
Just a few steps away from the desk, tucked into a shadowy part of the room, sat a large cage. It resembled an oversized dog kennel, like the ones they’d set up in the hospital for the therapy dogs when they weren’t “on duty” and visiting patients.
There on the cage’s metal floor, she could see the thumb drive, its USB port gleaming in the low light. Great! Thumb drive found. Unfortunately, the thumb drive wasn’t the only thing in the cage.
A wolf stared back at her. A huge, silent wolf with silver eyes that seemed to glow in the room’s low light. The thumb drive lay next to its front paw.
Milly quite literally jumped back. Then had to reach out a hand to stabilize herself against Iain’s desk as she recovered from the shock of finding a caged wolf in her boss’s home office.
“Okay, what the hell,” she said out loud. Because who does that? Who keeps a wolf in a cage next to a desk with an important thumb drive on top of it?!
She started to call out to Iain, but of course, he wasn’t there. He was camping. Which meant she was on her own. In his cottage. With…his wolf.
Crap!
Milly didn’t believe in reincarnation, but she really had to wonder if she hadn’t seriously effed up in a past life. Because she was positive no other executive assistant on Earth had ever found herself in a situation like this.
Why the hell hadn’t Iain at least told her he just happened to have a pet wolf? Like, “oh hey, Millicent…don’t freak out but I keep it crated in my office when I’m not home.”
She stared hard at the creature, completely out of her depth. Milly had no idea what to do next. Knowing Iain, he’d expect her to retrieve the thumb drive and deliver it as promised, wolf or no wolf.
But she also had no desire to stick her hand in a cage with a freaking wild animal.
Milly crouched down, a wave of fatigue crashing over her for reasons that almost certainly had nothing to do with the overproduction of white blood cells that were currently killing her.
As if to offer some reassurance, the wolf in the cage whimpered, bowing its head in a way Milly immediately recognized as universal canine language for “pet me.” Maybe it wasn’t a wolf at all, she thought hopefully.
Maybe she’d been so startled that she overreacted, and the “wolf” was just one of those dogs that only looked like a wolf. Like a malamute or a husky.
A huge husky, she thought, as she gingerly patted it on the head, inserting the tips of two fingers through the cage bars.
The maybe wolf-like dog responded to her tentative two-fingered pet affectionately. Pushing its head into her hand as if to say, “See? I don’t bite. You should pet me some more.”
Milly laughed. Honestly, the wolf-dog didn’t seem scary at all. And with a little maneuvering, she carefully edged her other hand just past her wrist between the thick wires of the cage. With a reassuring smile at her new furry friend, Milly slowly stretched her hand and forearm a little farther in toward the thumb drive. “Okay, just grabbing this—”
With almost lightning speed, the formerly gentle wolf-dog dropped all pretense of tameness and launched itself at her stretched out arm, sharp teeth clamping down on the fleshy part below her elbow. It happened so fast, Milly didn’t feel a thing for the first few seconds other than irrational disappointment in the wolf-dog for turning on her.
This was followed immediately by crushing pain, and Milly screamed as she desperately tried to shake the creature’s mouth from her arm. But the wolf-dog held on for several more seconds, its silver eyes bright and resolute. And despite the huge adrenaline spike, Milly simply wasn’t strong enough to pull her arm from the wolf-dog’s firm bite.
But just as she was beginning to wonder if she would be forced to watch the creature tear off her arm and eat it in front of her like something out of a bad horror movie, it let her go. So suddenly, she fell back on her butt.
Milly cut off screaming to stare at the unblinking animal. She was done pretending it wasn’t a wolf. And she really didn’t understand why it had bit her and then let her go.
But she wasn’t about to spend too much time second guessing what had just happened. Instead, she ran. Scrambled clumsily to her feet while clutching her injured arm to her chest and ran like a bat out of hell back to the relative safety of her car.
Chapter 4
“Oh, my God, Milly! Are you okay?!”
Tara jumped out of the hard plastic seat and ran across the ER’s linoleum floor as soon as Milly entered the front lobby.
“I’m fine. It was just a few stitches and a rabies shot.” Milly held out her gauze-wrapped arm. “See, all fixed. You didn’t have to come all the way out here. I only left that message because I didn’t want you to worry about me when you got home and saw I wasn’t there.”
“Oh honey, don’t say that! Of course I came! First that awful cancer diagnosis and now this. Oh, God, this is all so messed up…” Tara looked stricken for a second, but then she grabbed Milly by the shoulders and demanded, “Why the hell were you in Faoltiarn?! That’s the middle of nowhere! What if you hadn’t been able to make it to the closest hospital? Anything could have happened to you!”
“Well, it’s not exactly in the middle of nowhere. And I thought it was kind of charming…” Milly stopped when she saw the way her bestie was glaring at her. “Anyway, I only went because that’s where Iain’s cottage is located—he goes for these, like, weird monthly camping trips. And he needed me to drive over and pick up a thumb drive for the development team.”
Tara’s brow bunched. “Wait, your boss has a home in Faoltiarn?”
“I know, right? I don’t get remote mountain retreat vibe off him either. But I guess he grew up there…and, you know, keeps a wolf in his home office. Crazy, right? But the nurse who bandaged my arm said their clinic gets what appear to be wolf bites at least once or twice a year.”
“Wolf bites!? Okay, so you went to your boss’s house and got bitten by a wolf…” Tara frowned ugly, like she was having a hard time processing what Milly had just told her.
Milly didn’t blame her. She was still having a hard time processing it herself, and she’d had three hours to sit and go over what had happened multiple times while waiting to be seen. “Sorry for the wait, dearie,” the nurse practitioner who’d stitched her up had said. “Full moon nights can be absolute madness ‘round here.”
“But how do you feel now?” Tara asked, eyeing Milly’s bandaged arm.
“Fine,” Milly assured her. “It barely hurts anymore. And the nurse said I was lucky. It was a pretty clean bite, so it might not even leave a scar.”
“Okay, okay, good…” But Tara continued to eye her with sharp worry. “But you could have been hurt. Really, really hurt. Have there been any…side effects?”
“Side effects?” Milly repeated not understanding the question. “Like what? They only gave me Ibup
rofen. And the shot should have taken care of everything else—”
She cut off when Tara suddenly engulfed her in a bear hug. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter. I’m just so relieved you’re all right. So relieved…”
The hug kind of hurt her bandaged arm, but Milly didn’t try to disengage. And she found herself working hard not to cry. She didn’t realize how much she’d needed a hug until she was wrapped in her much taller friend’s comforting embrace. And no, Tara hadn’t come up from Liverpool to make her a cup of tea last night. But showing up here this morning…all was forgiven. And despite her diagnosis, Milly counted herself blessed to have such a wonderful friend.
They stood like that for a long time before finally agreeing it was time to leave. There was some debate about whether Milly was ok to drive herself all the way back to Edinburgh, or if she should go with Tara in her car. But Tara was already running nearly an hour late for work, and Milly didn’t want to make her any later.
Plus, she couldn’t just leave the company car parked at this rural hospital. Iain aside, most of the people who worked at AlgoFortune were friendly and easy to get along with. Milly didn’t want to inconvenience at least two unlucky co-workers who needed the car by leaving it an hour outside Edinburgh. Especially because there was a distinct possibility it would get clamped—which was kind of like a triangular form of booting—before anyone could pick it up.
The good news was that Tara needn’t have worried. Milly made good time back to Edinburgh, and her arm only twinged a little during the drive. The bad news…it was raining by the time she got back to the city.
Not that this was unusual weather for Scotland. But since she’d only taken her wallet and phone for what was supposed to be a quick pick-up at Iain’s cottage, she didn’t have an umbrella.
Milly was seated in the parked car, contemplating the fastest route into her flat, when a loud rapping sounded on the driver side window. She jumped and very nearly screamed.
Her Scottish Wolf (Howls Romance): Loving World Page 3