In her cold bed every night, all the moments of their time together had played like a song stuck in her head—every touch, every word, every last glance between her and Henry, between Henry and Katharine. She had spent months searching her mind for clues she could have missed, and she’d never found any answers.
Getting out of bed in the mornings had been even harder. Every new day meant eating in the kitchen with her mother watching, eagle-eyed, to make sure Anna didn’t let herself get fat on greasy food and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. It meant more long hours mired in the scandal of it all while her mother paraded her around the country club. Smile, Anna, smile.
Law school had been a merciful escape, but Anna hadn’t gone out on a single date in those three years. Even after law school, apparently, she’d played it safe and let herself get engaged to a man who made her feel little more than friendship for him.
Connal MacGregor was not the sort of man to inspire lukewarm emotions. Not in her. Perhaps not in anyone. Which made him a complication Anna didn’t need in her life.
So why couldn’t she make herself stop staring?
“Did you lose something, doll? I’d be ’appy to help you find it.” From beside the bar on Anna’s left, a voice addressed her. Seated there with two mates, all three of them clearly the worse for drink, a tall man in an Aran sweater and leather jacket got up and headed toward her.
Smiling at him vaguely, Anna shook her head and whipped around to her left. She marched toward the inn’s main entrance and let herself out amid the jingling bells.
The night was cold. The wind smelled of mountain thyme, greening heather, and something like fear, acrid and bitter and suffocating. Anna had left her coat inside, and the chill raised goosebumps on her skin. Around the side of the courtyard, the loch was visible, the dark water rippling with moonlight and the ranks of shadowed steep-sided Highland braes standing guard over both sides down the long length of the glen.
Hugging herself for warmth, Anna stopped on the moss-edged flagstones by the fence, trying to still the confusion that made her itchy and unsettled, like pins and needles, like a limb that was waking up after having lost circulation for too long.
It was ironic: At home, focused on work and day-to-day activities, she had rarely stopped to think about relationships or love or emotional needs. She’d met Mike soon after moving to D.C., and he’d been charming and fun. Distracting. That was the truth of it. He’d been distracting. They had started with a few casual dates, and then, so gradually Anna had barely even noticed, they’d slipped into a relationship that didn’t require a lot of effort.
She’d barely stopped to think when he’d proposed. Her work had been going well. Marriage had been a logical step—sometime in the future. Mike had claimed he understood that her hours were crazy, and if she wasn’t ready to set a date just yet, that had been fine. But as time passed, it had become less fine.
Time was the one thing Anna had known she needed. And the time had never been right. On some inner level, she must have known her reluctance to set a date had nothing to do with being too busy. She hadn’t loved Mike the way that she’d loved Henry. Maybe she hadn’t let herself love him like that.
It hurt too much to love with her entire heart. When Henry had left, everything she’d believed about him, about herself, about the two of them together, had splintered into shards. She’d spent her life since seeing the world in fragments, the past, the present, the future she’d believed in all distorted. Loving someone that much had left her wide open to the kind of pain it was almost impossible to survive.
“Waiting for me, doll?” An arm landed heavily around Anna’s shoulders, and hot beer breath fanned across her cheek.
Anna froze. Froze in a way she hadn’t frozen since she was a child, but then, she’d spent so much of the past few days dredging up things she’d been ignoring too long. Unburying things she’d hidden deep away.
She told herself to move, to wrench away from the man. The signal took too long to reach her brain.
It was the man in the bar with the Aran sweater. A drunk. Nothing more. She stepped forward. The fence blocked her and, when she turned, the man put his arm out to box her in.
“Don’t go running off so soon,” he said with a happy, drunken smile, as though what he was doing was perfectly all right. “I came out to get acquainted.”
Anna turned the other way. He stepped around her.
“Let me go,” she said, her voice high and tight.
“Nae, now, don’t be getting mad. I liked the way you smiled at me far better, and you wanted me to follow, didn’t you? Well, here I am.” He pushed in closer, grinning wider.
Anna spun, and he blocked her again. She was tall, but he was taller and broader, and even drunk he moved with surprising speed. The courtyard was empty in the cold night air, everyone inside where the light shone warmly through the windows.
It was stupid to be afraid. She wasn’t a ten-year-old girl this time, pulled into a closet backstage at a beauty pageant by a judge—an old man—who pulled her against his crotch and kissed her so hard that her own teeth cut through her lip. She wasn’t alone this time. All she had to do was yell, and someone would hear her.
Only then it would be another scene, wouldn’t it? Two car accidents and one more stupid mess she’d gotten herself into in front of half the village.
She’d spent her whole life trying so hard to avoid making messes. To avoid unpleasantness. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to do the right thing.
To heck with it, then. She was done being nice. Done being polite.
Done holding back.
“Let me go,” she repeated coldly, “or I swear I’ll make you and the children you will never have regret you ever saw me.”
He studied her and something in her voice must have finally penetrated his drunken cheerfulness. The grin faltered, and he stepped away from her, his hands raised in surrender.
“No use getting in a flap, doll. I was only being friendly-like.”
He turned with exaggerated care and swaggered away. Anna hugged herself, shivering, and watched him go, trying to catch her breath.
Beyond him, Connal was just emerging from the inn. Spotting Anna, his stride lengthened, and he hurried toward her with a muffled greeting to the drunk as he walked past. Anna locked her knees to keep herself from running toward him.
“Are you all right?” he asked as he drew closer. “I was coming out to find you, because Rhona said you’d gone looking for me.”
“I’m fine,” Anna said, her teeth chattering, her breath still coming fast.
“You’re freezing. What are you doing out here?” He studied her more closely. “What happened? That man, he didn’t—” Connal glanced back at the door that had just swung shut behind the drunk, and his expression shifted. Puzzled to furious.
He half-turned, shoulders bunching, fingers curled into his palms. But Anna grabbed his sleeve, needing his warmth. Needing not to be alone.
He studied her, shivering himself in the thin sweater he was wearing, and she saw the moment of hesitation before he reached for her and started to rub her arms, trying to warm her up.
Big fires started with a little bit of friction.
He touched her. Looked down at her. They looked at each other. Her heartbeat skittered, and his eyes dropped to her mouth.
This was probably stupid, a stupid thing to do, but Anna clearly couldn’t avoid messes, and where had being careful gotten her in life? Henry and Mike and nowhere. . . .
No, not nowhere.
Here.
And Connal had been honest with her from the beginning. He’d shown her his vulnerabilities.
She didn’t step away. He had that shimmer around him again, and the electricity in the air concentrated around her into one hard shove, pushing her forward into his arms. He watched her as she fell against him, watched a long moment without moving, and then his hand slid almost reluctantly along the column of her neck and the curve of her chee
k, lingering there, a question written on his features.
Do you want this?
Yes. Heavens, yes, Anna thought, though she couldn’t have said a word even if she’d tried.
Connal’s eyes had gone dark and solemn. Slowly, carefully, he lowered his head, gave her plenty of time to step away, to run. His lips brushed hers with such gentleness, a butterfly’s touch. For the first time in her life, Anna came close to understanding chaos theory: how the wings of a butterfly beating could cause a hurricane. Every drop of her blood surged to meet him, every muscle quivered, begging to be closer.
He murmured something against her mouth and tore off his hat. Drawing her closer, he deepened the kiss, made it grow even more electric until Anna thought she would drown with the joyful pain of waking up, of being alive. Her heart beat so fast she couldn’t breathe.
She hadn’t felt like this since high school. Since Henry.
No, not even Henry.
It was as if every sensation she had ever experienced was all collecting inside her now, a million nerve endings zinging from her lips to her core, every fiber and excited molecule. The feeling was all heat that blurred away thought and plans and calculations, all the hopes she’d tucked away in the dark recesses of herself along with her dreams for the future.
And she let herself fall, because she was surprised and a little drunk and suddenly—inexplicably—oh, so tired of holding herself back, of listening to the voice of reason in her head, of telling herself she wasn’t free or alive or enough for this to happen to her yet.
Yet.
Yet was the most tyrannical of words, wasn’t it? It almost always came after “not” or was used in place of “but,” and it was never said with “yes, please.”
Yes, please was exactly what Anna wanted now. What she needed.
She pressed against Connal, met his lips with her own, claimed his tongue, his breath, his pulse that was as erratic as hers. She wanted to feel everything, to be the kind of girl who lived without a three-step program and a plan for the future. A girl who lived for the moment and in the moment.
This moment.
These lips.
This magic that was singing so unexpectedly in her blood.
She kissed him back until she was dizzy, until they were dizzy together, leaning against each other, breathing hard. He rested his forehead against hers, then started to pull back only to be drawn back to her mouth again as though he couldn’t help himself, as if his lips were drawn there magnetically. And that was the word for what she felt between them. Magnetism that aligned her neurons to his, her polar north toward him, until every cell of her was aware and melting beneath his touch.
Glad Innocence
Where glad innocence reign
’Mang the braes o’ Balquhidder
Robert Tannahill
“The Braes of Balquhidder”
In her painfully sun-filled room the next morning, Anna sat fully dressed with her head in her hands. It wasn’t only the mild hangover that kept her there; it was the awkwardness of it all.
How was she supposed to face Connal again when she’d practically swallowed his tonsils in the middle of the darn courtyard, probably in full view of half the village? He’d been gracious about it, lovely even. Not that he hadn’t seemed to enjoy it—he’d given every sign of enjoyment—but then he’d carefully disentangled her, gone inside and fetched her coat and purse, gently loaded her into his car, and dropped her at Elspeth’s with a careful goodnight kiss on the forehead as if he was afraid that he would break her.
She’d lain awake half the night, hot memories of that kiss keeping her company until the effects of Flora’s coffees had worn off and cold mortification had kept her from sleep.
Oh, well. What was a little more humiliation? It was becoming a familiar feeling.
No more—absolutely, positively no more—whiskey.
Ever.
But she couldn’t hide in her room all day. She had too much work to do before the next meeting about the play that night, not to mention the first meetings of all the other assorted event committees.
With a soft groan, she picked herself up and forced herself downstairs to the kitchen—where she found Connal MacGregor seated at the table wearing another shoulder-hugging sweater. Chatting with Elspeth while eating bacon, sausage, and tattie scones, he seemed to take up all the oxygen in the room. Anna nearly turned around and headed straight back up the stairs.
Except that Elspeth saw her. “Morning, love. You don’t look like you slept much at all.”
“Blame it on Flora’s coffee.”
Elspeth laughed. “In that case, have some more coffee. No alcohol. Shall I make up a pot for you?”
“Yes, please,” Connal said, “but give us a second, would you?” He got up from the table and came around to push Anna backwards out the kitchen door.
In the hallway, as soon as they were out of sight, he put his hands on either side of her face and looked deep into her eyes. “I’m going to kiss you now,” he said. “Are you going to object?”
Anna stared. Couldn’t utter a single word. Shook her head.
Connal lowered his head and claimed a kiss. A short, deep, warming kiss.
She hadn’t realized she was cold until he’d heated her up again.
“There,” he said, pulling away and taking all that warmth back with him.
She blinked, confused and bereft. “What was that for? And what are you doing here? It’s barely eight o’clock.”
“I got to worrying that you were going to mistake my self-control when I dropped you off last night for reluctance or regret, and I didn’t want to give you a chance to talk yourself into making things awkward between us. Maybe, also, I needed to know it hadn’t been all fear or Drambuie on your part.”
“It wasn’t fear or liquor,” Anna blurted before she’d taken the time to think that he’d given her the perfect excuse. If she wanted an excuse. Did she want one?
No.
“Regrets?” he asked, his brows drawing together.
She could have lied; maybe she should have. But regardless of how little sleep she’d had, she felt understood and wide-awake in her body for the first time in years. She felt alive and exhilarated and a little bit afraid, not of Connal, but of pain. Of joy. Of allowing herself to feel.
“No,” she said firmly. “I don’t regret a thing. Except that the news is probably all over the village by now, and that’s the third collision I’ve had here in as many days.”
“Oh, a collision, am I?” Connal laughed, his eyes teasing and warm. He pulled her closer. “In that case, let’s try colliding again, shall we? I don’t think I mind at all.”
He bent his lips to hers again.
The magic of those kisses the night before hadn’t had anything to do with alcohol or adrenaline or fear. They’d been him and her. Them.
Fire ignited between them now, fire from the very first touch as if the blaze had been banked all night just waiting for a breath of oxygen. But eventually Anna’s stomach growled, and they both laughed and stopped to breathe. Anna rested her head against Connal’s chest, listening to his heart beating fast.
The scent of coffee and bacon drifted out toward them from where Elspeth was working at the stove, and Connal wound his fingers through Anna’s. “Come on. Time for more of this later.” He paused and looked down at her. “If you want more?”
She nodded, not sure she could speak.
After escorting her back into the kitchen, he held out the chair for her and dropped a kiss on the top of her head. Smiling mildly at Elspeth, he said, “I’m taking your niece out for lunch later. Just so you know.”
Elspeth came and sat, nursing her cup of tea between her hands. “Make it somewhere public, would you? You’ve won me a hundred quid from Davy Grigg, the pair of you.”
“What was the bet this time?” Connal asked, raising a wicked eyebrow.
“The village money was all on Brando when Anna first arrived, but I managed to get good
odds after dinner the other night. Thank goodness, too, because once everyone saw the two of you at the pub before the village meeting, I couldn’t have gotten in a decent bet. Poor Brando. He never does get a break.”
Anna felt a stab of guilt thinking back to her conversation with Brando the night before, though not about herself. He had never been meant for her, and she was sure he knew it. “There’s a lot more to Brando than anyone here gives him credit for,” she said. “We shouldn’t make a joke out of his love life.”
Elspeth’s lovely smile wavered, and the crease between her brows grew deeper. “Och, we aren’t poking fun at him to be mean. We love him”—she tossed a quick frown at Connal—“some of us do, at least. We worry about him without his sister here. It’s just our way. And we’re proud of what he’s made of himself.”
“Maybe let him know that,” Anna said, glancing over at Connal, too. “He thinks the glen still sees him as a teenage delinquent. Maybe that’s why he fought so hard to make certain his voice was heard about the festival.”
Connal gave a noncommittal grunt and cut a piece of bacon. Elspeth sat a moment holding her tea, lost in thought. Then she rose with a soft scrape of chair legs on wood and came to kiss Anna on the cheek. “Sometimes it takes someone coming in from outside and shaking things up, showing us what we’re too used to seeing to find the truth in it. You’re good for all of us. Now, what will you have to eat?”
Bacon and sausage held no appeal, but there was gingerbread left. Anna crossed to the counter and liberated the last two pieces from the domed keeper, set them on a Wedgwood plate, and brought them back to the table. Connal slid a manila file in front of her.
“What’s this?” Remembering the last folder she’d gotten while sitting at this table, Anna opened it as if something inside might jump out and bite her.
“Graham went over the play for us last night,” Connal said, sitting back in his seat. “Just a few initial scenes to give us an idea of how it might work.”
Something tenuous and edgy in Connal’s voice brought Anna’s head up. “Last night? It was after ten by the time you dropped me off.”
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