All the more reason not to share him with the rest of Ballantrae. Or Ballantrae with him, as the case may be. It was one thing to give in to the romantic folly that was their little escapade here, with silly thoughts of souls lost in another time, reunited once again. Quite another to invite him to expose her ridiculous little folly to the world. Her world, anyway.
She was balling up the linens when she heard the sound of a car engine. Not a truck engine. So it wasn’t Tag rumbling off in his borrowed lorry. Which meant it was someone else come to pay a call. Well. She let her chin clunk down on her chest. Too late to hide him now.
“Bollocks,” she muttered, kicking the linen pile to the side as she marched to the turret door and stepped out onto the battlement to see who’d come to visit. Maybe Tag would stay out on his hike and no one would be the wiser. She could make up some story about the banged-up lorry parked in the courtyard.
No one need ever know a Morgan had once again invaded Castle Ballantrae.
The cold wind snatched her breath away and she wrapped her arms tight around her waist as she stepped outside. She cast a quick glance toward the loch, but there was no immediate sign of a dark figure wandering along the edge. A rapping came at the door below and she leaned out and looked down. And swore. “Just what I don’t need at the moment,” she muttered as she stepped back inside and closed the turret door. Isn’t she content with the destruction she’s already wrought? Maura thought as she descended the stairs to open the outside door.
Sending up a little prayer for Tag to stay out of her line of sight, Maura flung the door open and confronted Priss.
“I come bearing peace offerings.” Priss thrust a white bakery bag between them. “Cinnamon scones. Still warm.” She lifted the thermos she carried in her other hand. “And Beanie’s hot cocoa.” She gave Maura her best sorrowful pout. Which, on Priss, was pretty damn effective. “I can’t stand this any longer. Can we please talk things out?”
Maura’s heart tugged and she realized how desperately she wanted to talk to her best friend about all that had happened to her since they’d last seen each other. Not that she had any intentions of doing so, but it didn’t stop the longing. They’d been each other’s sounding boards for so long, it was hard to imagine not sharing the startling turn her life had taken. But she wasn’t ready to confide in anyone just yet. Not only because of Priss’s betrayal. There were going to be trust issues between them, that was for certain, but that wasn’t entirely the reason.
It was more of the same concerns she was having earlier, thinking about Tag going into the village. The moment she shared him, in any way, with anyone, things would change. She hadn’t come to terms with the changes that had already taken place, much less invite more past her doorstep.
She looked behind Priss, doing a quick scan. She’d like to start down the path to putting things right with Priss, if that were possible. But right now was not the time for an extended visit.
Priss misunderstood the glance and quickly said, “I’m alone. I know you’re mad at me and Jory. And I don’t blame you. I—he doesn’t know I’m here.”
That brought Maura’s attention back around. “You need his permission now? You say that like you’re sneaking about.”
Priss’s cheeks colored slightly.
Maura rolled her eyes. “For Christ’s sake, ye left him in your bed to come here?”
She firmed her shoulders, even as the glow remained bright in her cheeks. “We have to talk this out. Please, I need to explain. I wouldn’t have done… what I did, if I’d been in my right mind. But when I’m around Jory…” She looked helplessly at Maura. “I can’t explain what comes over me. I’ve never been like this before. You know that better than anyone. It’s like there’s some kind of connection between us. I took one look at him and it was like some kind of spiritual thing, like we were—” She broke off, swore to herself. “Christ Jesus, it sounds more ridiculous saying it out loud than it did thinking it in my head. And let me tell you, it sounded pretty far-fetched then.”
Maura’s hand tightened on the frame of the door. Any other time in her life, she’d have thought her friend had gone round the bend. Priss was the least spiritual woman she knew. But then, Maura’s bottom wasn’t exactly warming a pew every Sunday either. Still, they had morals, standards… and they were definitely two of the most pragmatic women she knew when it came to men. But she could hardly tell her old friend that she understood exactly what she was feeling, now could she? Not without explaining how it was she understood. She darted a glance over Priss’s shoulder once more, but there was no sign of Tag anywhere.
Priss shivered and shifted her weight back and forth. “Please, Maura. Cocoa’s getting cold. And so am I.”
Maura sighed and stepped back. “Well, maybe you should have reconsidered stockings and a miniskirt in the dead of winter.”
Priss scurried past her, pausing on the foyer rug to stamp the snow from her knee-high, black leather boots. “Aye, well, that’s quite true, that it is, but—”
“Wait a minute.” Maura closed the door then leaned back on it with a brief snort of disgust. “Isn’t that the same outfit you were wearing when I booted you and Jory out of my bed—how many days ago has it been?”
Priss flushed beet red this time. “So, I havena been home as yet. But it’s no’ like I’ve been in them much since then.” She waved a hand. “Yer thinking me a slut, but then ye already thought as much when ye caught me upstairs. And I can hardly make that right, now can I?”
For reasons beyond comprehension, Maura laughed. Something about Priss standing there, all defiant and fiery-eyed… wearing rumpled, five-day-old clothes. She couldn’t help it. “Nay, ye hardly can.” She pushed off the door, snagged the bag and thermos from Priss’s hands and marched across the lounge to the kitchen. “God only knows if Jory put as much effort into a career as he does in bedding women, he’d have made his fortune ten times over by now.”
“Och, ye don't know him at all, do ye?” Priss said, toeing her boots off and setting them on the kitchen hearth to warm.
Maura tossed her a wry look. “Oh, I’d say I know him pretty well.”
Priss made a face. “Ha ha. I don’t mean in that way. I meant… when you were together, didn’t the two of ye ever talk about your dreams? Your plans?”
Maura pulled out her chair, plopped down, then worked hard to conceal the wince that followed. “Yes, we talked. Of course we did.”
Priss tugged out the other chair and curled her foot beneath her before sitting down. She poured the cocoa In the cups Maura had set on the table. “You forget, I’m the one you talked to after you talked to Jory. I don’t seem to recall the two of you getting very deep into conversation.”
Maura bit into the scone, allowed herself a sigh as the decadence of it melted on her tongue. “So you’re telling me you spent the last five days in deep… conversation?”
Priss rolled her eyes at the innuendo. “Not all of it.” Her cheeks pinked again. “But even Jory can only go at it for so long.”
Maura snorted, bit into her scone again, unable to keep from thinking she hadn’t found Tag’s limit as yet. She shoved that out of her mind. It should bother her more, talking like this about a man they’d both bedded in less than a week’s time. She could say the reason it didn’t feel awkward was because she’d already moved on. But that wasn’t it. Not entirely. Priss had hit closer to home than she knew with her comment about her knowledge of Jory.
Thinking back, when they had talked, it had mostly been about Ballantrae, about her worries and problems. Jory didn’t talk about his own aspirations. But then, beyond working in his parents’ pub, she hadn’t thought he really had any. Of course, he’d hardly proven otherwise in action or deed, but still… it was difficult realizing just how shallow their connection had been. And that perhaps she’d been mostly at fault for that. She dipped her chin, poked a piece of scone into her cocoa. Given proof of her abominable ability to relate to men, that was hardly a heart
ening endorsement for what she Was currently feeling for Tag. “It’s not Jory,” she said quietly, desperate to change the track of her thoughts. She glanced up at Priss. “That’s not what needs fixing between us.”
Now it was Priss’s turn to lower her chin, stare into her cocoa. “I know,” she said softly. “I don’t even know where to begin.” She looked up. “I value your friendship above all else. You know that. And I know I betrayed it on the most basic of levels. I—” She stopped, lifted a shoulder, then blew out a deep sigh. “I screwed up. Royally. I can’t even say I didn’t realize what I was doing. I knew it was wrong, what we were doing.”
“And where,” Maura said pointedly.
Priss’s skin couldn’t get any darker. “Yes,” she said in a choked whisper, putting her scone down, pushing her cup away. “Yes.”
“Was there some sort of thrill in it?” Maura asked, more seriously than she’d intended.
“No,” Priss said immediately, then stopped. “I don’t know.” She swore. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn't thinking. Other than there he was, the man I’d been privately lusting after ever since, well, forever.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did! Every time you talked about him, didn’t I agree how hot he was? And how I completely understood your infatuation with him?”
“That’s not exactly the same thing.”
Priss lifted her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “What was I supposed to say? I wanted him first, please let him go?”
Maura opened her mouth, then shut it again when she realized Priss was right.
“It didn't give me the right to do what I did. Especially where I did it. But you were actually talking about him like you were serious, when I knew he was all wrong for you. Then opportunity stepped right up and I had to take what was probably going to be my only chance. You know?”
“So now you’re telling me you slept with my boyfriend, in my own bed, as a favor to me? To prove we weren’t meant for each other?”
“Of course not, but the fact that he took advantage of the opportunity does prove my point. Kind of.” She slumped back in her chair. “There’s no defense for what I did, what we did, okay? And I don’t know if this will make things better or worse between us, but I meant what I said. About it not being just sex. There is something special between Jory and me. And now that we’ve been together, it’s only gotten stronger. Shockingly stronger.”
Maura snorted. “Yeah, until the next ‘opportunity’ knocks.”
“I suppose I deserved that, but I mean it, Maura, he’s… I know you don’t want to hear this, but he could be the one.”
“Okay,” she said. “But I wasn’t talking about you. I meant Jory. If he screwed around on me, ‘the one’ or not, what makes you so sure he won’t screw around on you?”
“He wouldn’t,” she said, and not defiantly. She said it as if, well, as if she simply knew. “I don’t want to hurt you. But it’s different between us, between Jory and me, than it was between the two of you.” Priss fell silent, then picked up her cup and slowly stirred her cocoa, seemingly contemplating what she wanted to say. “Did you two ever talk about your future? Together, I mean? Not about Ballantrae, or your problems with keeping it from crumbling to dust, but about things like family and wanting to travel and dreaming of running your own shop. You know, life things?”
Now it was Maura’s turn to fall silent. She’d thought of all those things, she’d even thought about the possibility of having them with Jory. But she’d never gotten around to actually discussing it with him. “He’s just so easygoing. You kind of assume he’ll just go with the flow.” She hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud until Priss responded.
“I know. I think everyone assumes easygoing equals lazy. He’s not lazy, Mo. It’s just that his hopes don’t match those of his family. And he hasn’t found the heart to tell them otherwise. So he plods along working for his father, and no one thinks he has ambition, because his ambitions are elsewhere.” Priss leaned forward, propping her elbows on the table, her eyes lighting up as she talked about him. “He wants to open his own film shop. Develop pictures, have a small gallery of framed prints for sale of local points of interest. Fantastic, isn’t it?”
There was no way to hide her surprise except to duck her chin. Jory did like taking pictures, that much she knew. He’d even turned the guest room of his flat into a darkroom. But she’d thought it nothing more than a hobby. “I—I didn’t know.”
Priss didn’t have to press that point, and mercifully, she didn’t. It was painfully obvious to them both that what Maura thought she had with Jory wasn’t remotely the kind of relationship that he and Priss had. Nor was it remotely the kind of relationship it needed to be, the platform to build something solid on. For that to happen, both parties had to actually communicate. Rather than one party doing all the plotting and planning, assuming the other party would just be swept along in her wake. She sighed, disgusted with herself.
Had she done the same thing with Tag? Not that they had a relationship, really, but there she was, all starry-eyed and dreamy about this amazing connection they shared, and yet since the talks they’d had that first night here, any time they’d come close to a topic of importance since then, she’d backed away, shifted gears. To be fair, so had he.
But it wasn’t like they’d spent their entire time together naked and going at it. They did talk, a lot, in fact. And they did share with each other, more than she had with anyone else. They talked about her writing, her desire to write a novel someday. He told her about digs he’d worked on, some of the historic finds he’d been part of. But they danced around the rest. Partly because once they’d confronted it, there would be nothing left to say afterward. Once things were resolved, he’d have no reason to stay. So, what point was there in forging a strong foundation if there was never going to be anything lasting built on it?
And yet, in her heart of hearts, didn’t she know the foundation was already there? Just waiting for her to do something to make it permanent so they could keep building on it? And didn’t the fact that he was stalling, too, mean he felt the very same thing?
She picked at her scone. But on the other hand, what the hell did she really know about it? Hadn’t Priss just pointed out, complete with clearly defined examples, just how tragically inept she was at deciphering men and relationships?
“It’s not that he doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to them, you know,” Priss was saying. “It’s just that he doesn’t want to hurt them. He’s got a huge heart, Maura. Most people don’t see that about him.”
“Maybe because most women are sidetracked by his Other huge… attribute,” Maura muttered, her mind still on Tag.
To her surprise, Priss snickered. “You have to admit, the man is blessed.”
Maura knew she shouldn’t smile. There was something inherently wrong with two women sitting around a kitchen table discussing their carnal knowledge of the same man over cocoa and scones. But then she wasn’t one to tout propriety, was she? “He is that,” she agreed.
She broke the remainder of her scone into little pieces as she thought about everything Priss had said. “So, you’ve talked about these things, your dreams and the like, you and Jory?”
Priss nodded as she took a sip.
“And you’ve only been together a few days,” she murmured, more to herself than to Priss.
“It’s been longer than that,” she said, then lifted a palm when Maura shot her a shocked look. “Not the sex part. What I meant is, well, you’ve been dating him for a while. I see him in the village, and out with you. We’ve… chatted.” She frowned. “Stop looking at me like that. I wasn’t flirting with the man or anything. I was just being nice to him because you were going out with him. Only—” She broke off, then didn’t finish.
“Only you developed your own crush on him in the meantime.”
Priss lifted a shoulder, her gaze darting away. “I couldn’t help it. It’s just this
inexplicable thing with us.” She sighed, perhaps unknowingly. “I had no idea he was feeling the same thing. It’s amazing really.” Her tone was that of wonder and awe.
And Maura knew exactly how she felt.
Priss looked up, her expression earnest. “I’m not sorry we’re together,” she told Maura. “I can’t give you that. But I will forever regret how it started. I didn’t ever want you hurt.” She reached across the table, putting her hand over Maura’s wrist. “I know this probably doesn’t make any sense to you, but you have to believe me. It was the wrong thing to do to you, but it’s the rightest thing I’ve ever done for me. It was like I had no choice, it was my one and only chance. Maybe it’s greedy of me, and I probably don’t deserve it, but I honestly don’t want to lose our friendship over this.”
“I don’t want to, either,” Maura said, quite truthfully. She covered Priss’s hand with her own. “And I do understand.” She paused briefly, taking a courage-building breath. She was still torn over what she was about to share, but it had taken a great deal of courage for Priss to come here today and both apologize and try to explain the choices she’d made. It seemed only right that Maura come clean as well. Keeping more secrets was not the way to start things over.
Priss seemed sincerely remorseful for her actions, and beyond that, Maura could hardly hold the rest against her. Especially in light of what she’d been doing almost since the moment the door had hit them on the way out of her bedroom.
Besides, she was confused and troubled by her feelings for Tag, which had only been complicated further by the things Priss had made her think about. She needed outside perspective. And, surprisingly, it seemed that Priss might actually be the person to give it to her.
“I… uh, I have something of my own to tell you.”
Priss’s face split into a wide grin and she squeezed Maura’s arm. Hard. “Then you’re forgiving me?” She pushed out of her chair and leaned over the table, dragging Maura up as well as she pulled her into an awkward hug. The table wobbled dangerously as she clung to Maura’s shoulders. “You won’t regret giving me another chance,” she whispered fiercely. “I swear it.” Still beaming, she released her and plopped back down in her seat. “Now, what’s this you have to tell me about?” She picked up her mug and cradled it in her hands, her eyes dancing with avid curiosity, mouth pursed in a ready smile.
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