by Julia London
Jenny studied each photo, exclaiming at the beauty, peppering him with questions. But as Edan scrolled down his brother’s page, he noticed a picture someone else had posted and tagged to Bran. The picture was of several people outside the Black Thistle Pub, probably fifteen of them, Edan’s father and brother included. They were lifting their mugs of ale in a cheer of some sort. But what caught Edan’s eye was Audra. She was in the back of the group with Sean McCaul, a friend of his. And while everyone else toasting whoever had taken the picture, Audra was kissing Sean.
Jenny was talking exuberantly, but Edan was too stunned to hear her. Since when? Was it really so surprising? The logical side of him knew that she’d made a clean break from him. But the emotional side of him somehow remained convinced that she didn’t mean it. That she’d wanted to go home, and when he followed her, she’d have a change of heart.
The emotional side of him was a bloody idiot.
“It’s gorgeous,” Jenny said, and closed the lid of his laptop. “All right, Scotland and America. Where else have you been?” she asked.
He looked blankly into her very blue sparkling eyes. “Ah...” He and Audra had gone to the Canary Islands for a week before coming to the States. Good God, had it really been that long since he’d taken time for himself?
“Oh my God, you really are a hermit,” she said gaily when he didn’t answer.
“I’m no’ a hermit—”
“You say tomato, I say recluse. Where would you go if you could pack a bag and leave tomorrow?”
“Scotland, aye? I’m going there at the end of the month.”
“Yes, but where would you go on vacation?”
“Scotland,” he said again, hardly thinking.
“Ai yi yi,” she said with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. “Okay, so what are you going to do there?”
“Fish,” he said absently.
“Fish!” she repeated. “Don’t say more, because the excitement could stop my heart. You’re going all the way to Scotland to fish?”
“What else would you have me do?” he asked a little curtly. He had a sudden image of Audra sitting precisely where Jenny was now. “You’re so tiresome, Edan. You’re stuck on this bloody loch, living the life of an old man.”
“I don’t know. You could do one of those Highland games. Be a Highlander like Outlander!” she said with delight.
“I’m no’ a Highlander,” he said a little curtly.
“We’re all something,” she said. She had twisted about in her chair to face him, clearly enjoying the conversation.
“Aye, you’re a gadabout.”
She tipped her head back with a shout of laughter. “Gadabout! That’s so old-fashioned!”
“And you’re bloody well aimless,” he added.
Jenny’s smile faded a little, and he instantly felt awful for having said it. She wasn’t aimless. He was astute enough to know he was really lashing out at Audra.
“So I’ve been told,” she said with a weary sigh. “Today, as a matter of fact.” She lifted her wineglass, holding it up in a mock toast. “Touché, Mr. Mackenzie. Although I’d like to suggest I’m more undecided than I am aimless. I aim for lots of things—I just never hit what I’m looking for.” She clinked her glass against his.
“I’m sorry, Jenny,” he said. “That was uncalled for. I didna mean it.”
“Don’t be sorry. I know who I am and I’m okay with it, and not everyone can say that, can they?” she asked, her brows dipping slightly over her glittering blue eyes.
“No,” he admitted.
“Seriously, why aren’t you with someone, Edan? You seem like the kind of guy who should be with someone.”
The question startled him. He looked around the kitchen, half expecting some camera crew to leap out and declare this some sort of prank. When none did, he said, “Where did that come from?”
“From curiosity. It’s a reasonable question,” she said. “You’re a catch.”
He thought he could feel himself blushing, amazingly enough. “I’m no’ a catch—”
“You are.”
Edan stared at her, debating how much to say. “I should have been married three months ago, but it was called off.”
“Three months?” Jenny put down her wineglass. “I am so, so sorry, Edan. I didn’t realize she’d died so recently.”
“Died,” he repeated, his brows knitting in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“Your fiancée. I heard in East Beach that you’d lost your fiancée.”
Edan didn’t know what to say. “You were in East Beach for a half hour at most, and somehow, my fiancée came up?”
“The clerk at the market asked where I was staying and... Well, we had a chat.”
Edan could just bet they did. He rubbed his face and sighed. “She didna die, lass. She left.”
“Oh. She said you lost her—”
“Aye, I lost her to Scotland. She’s gone, but no’ dead. Quite alive, it would seem.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said again.
He shrugged. What was there to say?
“But why?” she asked. “Why would she leave this beautiful place and her handsome fiance?”
He smiled self-consciously. “She said it bored her. I suppose I did, too.”
Jenny stared at him, as if trying to work out which part of him was boring.
“Why aren’t you with someone, then?” he asked her, unwilling to say more about himself. Or face the possibility that Audra might be right about him.
“Easy,” she said with a breezy flick of her wrist, “men don’t like me like that. I mean, I do okay—but let’s just say I spend a lot of time in the friend zone. Not that I haven’t had boyfriends,” she hastened to assure him. “They just never last long.”
That seemed mad to him. What healthy man wouldn’t want a very pretty, if slighty mad lass?
She laughed at his expression. “Don’t look so shocked. It happens all the time, doesn’t it? You meet some guy or girl and you think they’re great, and then after the glow wears off, and a few months pass and you’re like, anh,” she said with a dismissive shrug of one shoulder. “Or, I’ll meet a nice guy, and we’ll hang out as friends, and then I’ll start to believe that maybe there could be more between us, and then he’ll blow it by saying, ‘Hey, is your friend Vanessa seeing anyone?’”
She laughed again, but the laugh wasn’t as bright as before. It sounded almost bitter.
“Did you no’ just break up with someone?” Edan asked, confused. “Did you no’ say you were suddenly single?”
“I did. I am. That guy was bad news and I’m mad at myself because I knew it going in.” She leaned forward and looked into her wineglass, and for a moment, he thought perhaps she’d spotted a bit of cork floating about. “We were on this journey together,” she said quietly, making air quotes. “But the more I was with him, the more I was like, ugh. And then, to top it off, I caught him cheating. Like totally in the act.” She shuddered.
Her boyfriend sounded like the worst sort of bloke. Edan thought of Audra with Sean and felt a bit of a churn in his belly. Audra wasn’t cheating, but he supposed it was never easy to see someone you’d been with locking lips with someone else. “That sucks,” he said.
“Yep,” she said. “But I’m not too sad about it. It was for the best. Devin was more of a stop gap, really.”
“What does that mean, a stop gap?”
“I don’t know,” she said with a bit of a shrug. “I guess after I got laid off, and my dad announced he didn’t need me anymore, I didn’t really have any place to go, you know? Devin was the only one with a tangible offer.”
He glanced down, absorbing that. She was starting to make more sense to him. “I’ll be totally honest, Edan—I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she admitted. “I don’t know where I want to go or what I want to do. I need a plan, and I don’t have one yet. All I know is that I love it here. It’s so peaceful and calm and away from all that,” she said,
gesturing to his door, as if that was waiting for her outside. She swiped up her wineglass and drained it, put it down and said, “That’s my story. What’s yours?”
“My story is that I have a plan,” he said. The last thing Edan wanted to do right now with the day’s last bit of light shining in through the window was to talk or think about Audra. He shrugged. “I’m closing the inn and putting it on the market, then heading home.” He suddenly stood up, unwilling to discuss the reasons of his decision. “Might I offer you anything else? Crisps?”
“Curly fries?”
He frowned.
“Kidding! Sort of.” She stood up, too, and carried their glasses into the kitchen. The dogs, understanding there would be no scraps to fall off the table now, trotted out of the room.
“So this place is lonely for you,” she said.
He wouldn’t call it lonely, precisely. What he felt was distance—from the world. From life. “It’s fine,” he said, and turned on the water at the sink.
“Stand aside, captain. I’ll do cleanup. That was the deal.”
“I meant it as a joke. I’ll do it.”
She took the sponge from his hand. “Come on, you have to let me do the dishes,” she insisted. “You’ve fed me twice now. The least I can do is scrub your plates.”
“There no’ enough plates to make up for giving you a room,” he pointed out, and took the sponge back from her. She was standing so close that he could see flecks of gray in her crystal-blue irises. “You’ll be wanting to get back to something pressing, I suspect. A bath and a book. A real book. No e-reader for you.”
Her lips curved up in a smile of pure pleasure. “You get me.” She continued to hold his gaze, her smile soft. She had such bonny, mesmerizing eyes—
She suddenly rose up on her toes and before Edan understood what she intended, she kissed him. She kissed him with lips as soft as butter, her fingers silk on the stubble of his face. It was a sweet kiss, hardly a kiss at all, really, and yet Edan’s body responded like a bomb had detonated in him. He felt himself tumbling hard and fast down a path of desire, and alarmed, he lifted his head, his eyes locked with hers.
She looked so fucking alluring now, with the blush in her cheeks and her wet lips. She also looked stunned. She was stunned? He was floating somewhere between earth and God knew what.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” she said breathlessly, as if she’d read his mind. “I have no idea what got into me. I promise, I don’t go around kissing men willy-nilly—” She didn’t finish her thought because she grabbed the collar of his shirt and yanked him closer. Wine sloshed out of a glass he was holding and onto his pants leg as she kissed him again. Only this time, she kissed him so violently that he stumbled back against the kitchen counter, and Jenny came with him, her body pressed against his, her arms around his neck. He somehow managed to put one glass down and caught her around the waist. His mind shouted at him to push her away, but his body held onto her, anchoring her there, pressing against the length of her. Jenny nipped at his lips, swept her tongue into his mouth, shoved her fingers into his hair.
She bloody well kissed him.
Edan was quickly and dangerously aroused. It was as if a sleeping giant had been awakened, and his body was hardening with want. He swept his hand up to her breast, filled his palm with it, and Jenny moaned.
That small moan jolted Edan back to his senses. What the hell was he doing? He suddenly shifted back from her—which meant quite a backbend, as they were crammed up against the kitchen counter.
Jenny blinked with surprise at the abrupt end of the kiss. She stepped back and stared at him, wide-eyed, as she slowly ran the pad of her thumb across her lower lip. “That was crazy,” she said in a whisper. “I can’t believe I did that. Edan, I don’t know what to say. I honestly have no excuse. I mean, you looked like you could use a kiss, but that gives me no right to just do it without your consent. I’m a huge advocate of consent. I had this friend that—”
“Jenny,” he said, before she could launch into a story that would make no sense to him.
“Right. I apologize.”
The thing was, she didn’t look apologetic. She looked like she was only moments away from ripping his clothes off, and Edan was only moments away from allowing it. He cleared his throat. “I think you best go back to your room, aye?”
She put her hands on her hips. Her gaze fell to his mouth. “You’re probably right,” she said. But she didn’t move. Her eyes were glistening with what he read as desire. “I do want to get an early start tomorrow,” she muttered, as if trying to convince herself.
“Leaving Lake Haven?” he asked evenly.
“Don’t know,” she said to his mouth. “You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out.” She tossed her braid over her shoulder like she was on a runway and suddenly started for the door.
Edan followed her out onto the terrace.
She paused and looked up at the sunset. “Yep, it’s stunningly beautiful here. Not Scotland beautiful, maybe. But beautiful all the same.”
“Aye,” he said. But he was looking at her.
She glanced up at him. “Listen—”
He quickly held up a hand to stop her before she could say anything.
Of course that didn’t stop her from saying more. “I can be really impulsive, obviously. I guess that’s not exactly news, but sometimes, I get a little carried away. I’m just saying—”
“We’re good,” he said.
Jenny smiled. She teasingly shoved his shoulder. “Okay, if you say so.” She walked down the steps to the grass. “Oh, by the way, is the restaurant opening tomorrow?”
She was the most unusual woman. Edan was a little dazzled by the kiss and really didn’t know what to say. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Do you think you might have a tapeworm?”
Jenny laughed gaily. She had a beautiful spirit to match her beautiful smile. “I probably should get that checked out.” She picked up the sides of her skirt, held them out, and curtsied. “Thank you for a lovely evening, Mr. Mackenzie,” she said in an awful British accent. “See you,” she said, and fluttered her fingers at him before tottering off. She trailed her fingers lazily across the backs of his lawn chairs, and as she walked along, the caramel-colored braid of hair swung above her hips.
Edan stood there watching her walk away, his hands still deep in his pockets, that kiss still thrumming through his body. When she’d disappeared into the shadows of dusk, he walked to the edge of the terrace and looked out over the golf course and the lake beyond. He saw horses grazing in a fenced field, the blurry shapes of vacation homes in the distance. A cool air, crisp and feeling of coming rain, was settling in around the lake.
And yet, Edan was burning up inside.
Seven
What is the matter with me?
Yes, she was impetuous, but this was ridiculous.
Jenny fell onto her bed, covered her face and a groan with a pillow. Why why why had she kissed him like that? No warning, no build up—she’d gone right for the jugular. Sometimes, she amazed even herself with the things she did. Her face felt hot, and she wondered if he’d seen how embarrassed she was for having accosted him.
And yet, she wasn’t exactly sorry, because that had been one super hot kiss. And lest there be any doubt, that aloof and distant man had participated fully.
Jenny fell asleep thinking of that kiss and woke up with the sensation of it still buzzing through her. She was debating whether or not she should apologize again when her phone rang. Jenny dug it out from beneath the bedspread and answered it.
“Hey!” Brooke shouted into the phone.
Jenny winced at her loud voice, then yawned. “Hi, Brooke.”
“So I heard your boyfriend flaked on you,” Brooke announced.
“Wait, what? How do you know that?” Jenny asked, then remembered. “Oh. Right. Bethany.”
“She’s worried about you. She said you won’t answer your phone now.”
“I won’t?”
Jenny yawned. “I was out last night and didn’t have it on me.”
“Keep it on you at all times. Is it true you’re staying at some inn that’s closed? Is that even safe?”
“Okay, I did not say that to Bethany,” Jenny said, sitting up.
“She looked up quaint inns at Lake Haven online. How long are they going to let you stay there?”
“I have no idea,” Jenny said. She thought of Edan. “Brooke—you won’t believe what I did.”
“Yes I will. Tell me.”
“I kissed a man.”
Brooke said nothing.
“I mean I kissed him. When he was holding a dirty sponge and couldn’t fight me off.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Brooke howled with laughter. “What do you mean, he couldn’t fight you off because he was holding a sponge!”
“He was being polite. And then he told me to go home.”
“Really!” Brooke said, sounding surprised.
Jenny told Brooke the whole story. Of arriving to find the inn closed, of seeing Edan in a kilt. She told Brooke of the drive into East Beach and then the fish dinner, and how when she was leaving, she really meant to leave— “And then boom, I just kissed him.”
“He didn’t like it?”
“Yes. Not really. Maybe,” Jenny said uncertainly. “Let’s just say he didn’t see it coming. But I like him, Brooke. I like him a lot.”
There was a long pause, and then, “Jenny?” said in the careful tone one might use when addressing someone about to jump off a bridge. “You just broke up with Devin. Don’t you think you ought to take a minute? Maybe do some introspection?”
“Yes, Brooke, of course I think I should take a minute. But sometimes you just get a sense about someone, and I have a sense about him. There’s something that tells me he is kind of hurting and kind of alone, and he’s so fucking handsome, and I don’t know, I just like him. If you think about it, it’s entirely possible that fate brought me here.” She didn’t add that she liked his quiet patience with her, which she knew was not easy. Or that he actually seemed to listen to her. Sometimes, anyway.
