by Brynn Kelly
He broke the kiss, panting, and forced himself to shuffle back to his seat. “It’s not just what I’ve done,” he said, abruptly, “but what I am.”
“Which is?” she whispered, looking resolutely at her lap.
Tell her. “The kind of guy a woman like you should stay well away from.” Coward. Pain pulsed down his wounded arm.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said when their breath had settled, her voice leaden. “You make me want to forget what’s happened—what’s happening—and escape into something beautiful. Like in France. But I can’t forget. I mustn’t. And it’s wrong to escape.”
His chest pinged. “Was that one of the reasons you pushed me away, in France?”
“You didn’t seem unwilling to go.”
He screwed up his face. He still felt the sting of that morning like a slap on the face. But forcing himself to leave had been the right thing to do...hadn’t it? “It’s not wrong to move on, Samira.”
She looked up at him, hope lighting her expression.
“When you find the right guy,” he added, quickly. “You don’t need to forget your fiancé in order to do that. But first we need to finish this and give you the freedom to seek that happiness again.”
She nodded, twisting her ring around her finger. Her engagement ring. He shuffled over and pulled her close—an innocent hug this time. She rested her head on his chest and he buried his face in her crown. He wanted so much more of her—he wanted to dig into that bottomless mind, to explore that supple body, to draw out the passion that hummed inside her—but she wasn’t ready to give it and he wasn’t about to take it. Their lives were both in limbo. Her limbo would be over soon but he’d chosen his path and had no alternative. She deserved security and permanence, a stable place to rebuild her confidence and her faith in the world. The last thing she needed was to get involved with a screwup who’d lost his way, who would break her heart before it healed.
The computer dinged and lit up. Her hair brushed his face as she turned. “He’s sprung the trap.”
As she got busy on the computer, Jamie leaned back on the seat and closed his eyes. He cradled his arm to relieve it from the pull of gravity, which eased the burn a little. Je ne regrette rien. Was there ever a bigger load of bollocks? It’d be entirely fitting if the scar from his wound somehow wiped out the ne and the rien, leaving I regret. Five years ago the tattoo had seemed like a brilliant idea but now it only reminded him how many regrets he had. He should’ve followed Flynn’s lead and had the bloody thing scrawled across his back where he couldn’t see it.
Hell, now he was having regrets about his no-regrets tattoo. And he was clocking up more regrets with every minute he spent with Samira. He rubbed condensation from the windscreen and stared straight ahead at the rain-smudged lights. As he stared, they blurred even more...
Samira shut the laptop with a snap, jerking him from a sleep he didn’t know he was having.
“Well, that’s another crime to add to the list,” she said. “Several crimes. Would you believe he doesn’t keep a single email on his server? They get automatically archived somewhere and then deleted. Who does that?”
“Somebody with a lot to hide.” Jamie grabbed a bottle of water from the back seat and drank until his dry throat eased. “So now what?”
“We crack the password. But that could take days—well, it’ll take until eight o’clock tomorrow night. If it doesn’t work by then we’re screwed. Again. And once I set it to go, we can’t stop it, or we’ll have to start over. We need stable internet.”
“So we find a hotel or B and B?” Brother. Just the thought was giving his body the wrong idea. It’s not going to be a repeat of France.
She twisted, stretching her back. “I’d rather not run the risk of someone recognizing us. And we’d have to show ID, a passport, a credit card...”
“A private rental? Something we can book over the internet without anyone seeing?”
“It’s nine o’clock. They can take days to arrange. We’d be better off sleeping in the car—except no Wi-Fi.”
“We could break into a holiday cottage.”
“God, Jamie, we’ve already taken so many risks.”
“So what’s one more? I know a place. It shouldn’t be too much of a risk at this time of year—it’s not the most pleasant spot in November.” Well, it was no longer a pleasant spot for him year-round but if he wanted to keep her safe... “Does it matter if we’re no longer in Edinburgh?”
“No. I’ve disabled the location alert. Is this somewhere we won’t be seen by anyone?”
“Aye.” He picked up his phone and loaded a holiday rentals website. “It shouldn’t be hard to find. It’s a cottage beside a little loch—the only dwelling in miles.”
He found it on the third site he searched. Character charmer beside a loch. A hidden secret, owned by the same family for fifty years. The main photo, taken from the loch in spring, showed a stone cottage beside the water, shaded by a crab-apple tree fat with pink flowers. The next photo was of the loch under a domed blue sky, the forest and hills so perfectly reflected you could turn the photo upside down and not know it. “According to the calendar, it’s not booked until Christmas.”
“And the family won’t know?”
“They’re Londoners—well, they were, when I was a kid. My parents booked it almost every summer. They said they liked the isolation but I think it was mostly because it was the cheapest holiday accommodation in the Trossachs. It’s an hour and a half drive from here, maybe two hours if we have to skirt cameras, though there won’t be many along this route, not once we’re away from Edinburgh.”
“It says the mobile coverage is patchy. There’s internet?”
He swiped down. “Wi-Fi—there, see?”
“Let’s do it. I’ll drive. You need to rest.”
He pulled his seat belt on. “I’m fine.”
“Your eyes are sunken and your skin is the color of concrete. I may not be a doctor but I’m not a fool. I hope you’re not one of these stubborn men who refuses to take painkillers. My father does that, too.”
“Ah, a real man doesn’t feel pain.” Really, he should throw the fucking drugs in the trash.
“Are they not what you need? We can risk buying more.”
“The kind of painkillers you get at a Boots wouldn’t do shite for this.”
“Is that an admission you are in pain?”
“It’s a commentary on how we’ve collectively set up a social system that is built to protect ourselves from our own stupidity. Speed limits, drug restrictions, warnings on cigarette packets... All to stop the lemmings falling off the cliff, yet still they find a way to fall.”
She shook her head. “Every time,” she said, under her breath.
“Every time what?”
“Every time I ask you a serious question, you turn it around or compensate with abstract notions or humor.”
“I compensate for everything with humor. Otherwise I’d be the dourest guy around.”
“The whattest guy?”
“Dourest.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“D-O-U-R-E-S-T.”
“Ah, dourest.”
“That’s what I sai—”
She’d already got out of the car. She walked around the bonnet and opened his door. “Out! I’m driving. And how is it your accent is getting stronger and we haven’t spoken to a single Scottish person?”
Was it? God help them if he regressed in any other way.
* * *
TWO HOURS LATER the drizzle had given way to fog so thick Samira could be driving a submarine. She cleared her throat, louder than necessary, but in the back seat Jamie just shuffled, mumbling. She’d been holding off waking him, though she might have been braking a little too hard and singing along to Blondie a little too loud, in the hope he’d wake without it loo
king like she was spooked. But now she was spooked enough not to care.
“Jamie. Jamie!”
He moaned and rubbed his face. “Where are we?”
“No idea. I swear this road is narrower than the car. Your phone reception ran out half an hour ago, so I lost GPS. I’m using a...a real map that was in the glove compartment. On a piece of paper. I have to keep refolding it. We don’t seem to be getting anywhere but I’m reasonably confident we’re moving.” She tapped the speedometer, which hadn’t passed twenty miles per hour in thirty minutes. “And I’m eighty percent sure we’re headed to this loch and not Denmark, though at one intersection I had to get out of the car and walk right up to the sign before I could read it through the fog. At least any CCTV cameras will have a hard time making out our plates—and there are very few cars silly enough to be out on the roads. I’ve only almost crashed into three.”
“Wow, have you been saving up all those words for...” He checked his watch. “Two hours?”
That was just the beginning of her wild thoughts. The novelty of having someone to share them with hadn’t worn off—and Jamie wasn’t just anybody. She hurriedly adjusted the rear-vision mirror. Since she couldn’t see anything through the back window, she’d angled it to him, though in the dark her imagination had been forced to fill the gaps—his lanky body flopped over the seat, his broad chest filling and emptying. She’d imagined feeling it rise and fall against her cheek—the musky warmth of his sweater, the thud-thud of his heartbeat, his arm slung around her, his hand resting on her lower back...
Those hands. Strong and rough but dexterous. A surgeon’s hands but a soldier’s, too. He would nuzzle her hair like earlier, urge her face up toward his, take her lips...
Concentrate on the road.
“Just don’t drive us off a bridge,” he said. “Tess will think it a Hyland conspiracy.”
“Trying my hardest.”
“Shall I drive? Not being stubborn and chauvinistic here but I know the roads.”
She happily stopped the car and scooted across to the passenger seat as he dragged himself out the rear door and in the front.
“We’re close,” he said, after a few minutes of driving. “The loch’s just down there.” He pointed along one side of the road.
“How can you tell?”
“You can’t see the lights of the big old country house on the shoreline?”
“Is this a Scottish thing—some superhero power to see through fog?”
“No, I can’t see shit. There was an old mile marker back there—I used to look for them along here when I was a kid.”
The shadow on his jaw had darkened along with the night. It’d be deliciously rough against her skin.
She cleared her throat. “When were you last here?”
“Long time ago. Once I went to university I was far too cool to holiday with my family.”
Hiding behind humor again. But hiding what? Grief? Regret? He hadn’t seen his family for three years, so nostalgia was unlikely. Oh, to hack into his brain and crack the password to that vault. Plenty of people showed a fraction of their true selves to the world—she knew that better than anyone—but the fraction Jamie showed was very different from the part he hid.
Latif wasn’t like that. Nothing inside was different from the outside. Even his final act—slipping away in the night—was in keeping with his nature. She’d been horrified to wake up and find him gone, of course, but that’d been her fear all along.
And there she was, comparing Latif and Jamie again. Why was it when she thought of one, the other immediately came to mind, like a word association? The ghost of Latif reminding her she’d never find anyone who understood her like he had? The specter of Jamie teasing her with a future that couldn’t be? It wasn’t as if Jamie were offering to fill the hole Latif had left. She could picture the kind of woman Jamie would date—fun-loving, confident, uncomplicated...
Great, now she was envious of a woman she’d just this minute conjured from her imagination.
She sighed. “Is it always this foggy here?”
“I don’t remember ever seeing fog here but I’ve only been in summer. Think of it as a security blanket.”
“Was it a nice place to come, as a kid?”
“Aye.”
“Do you miss those days?”
He glanced at her with narrowed eyes, like it was a trick question. “In some ways.”
She waited for him to expand but he didn’t. He was all chat-chat-chat when they were talking about her. Was this how people felt when they tried to extract information from her? Charlotte had once complained that speaking to Samira was like getting dirt from a stone.
Charlotte. Guilt stabbed Samira between the ribs. Here she was, kissing Jamie—and fantasizing about much, much more—when Charlotte was missing, Tess was in jail, her own life and freedom were at risk, and Latif was, well, still dead. Jamie was just her...bodyguard.
And what a body.
Shut up.
CHAPTER TWELVE
JAMIE MANEUVERED THE car along a twisting lane so narrow Samira could reach out her window and pick ferns from the bank. She guessed the expanse of mist on the other side of the road marked the lake. The loch. Only a vowel’s difference, the way she pronounced it, but it turned a body of fresh water into an ancient and mystic organism, somehow. Of course, in Jamie’s accent, the ch came out as a sexy, throaty growl, calling to mind his French R.
Ugh, did she have to get turned on by everything the guy said or did?
Eventually he pulled into a rutted driveway, the headlights sweeping over a tiny stone cottage, blinds lowered in its two small front windows like it was sleeping—windows designed to keep out the cold rather than let in the sun. A skeletal tree leaned onto one side of it, branches clawing the stone. Jamie parked out back, next to a wooden shed and an overturned tin rowboat with a faded blue stripe circling its hull. If not for that sliver of color they could have driven into a black-and-white movie.
She shivered. “This doesn’t look like the picture.”
“No, it’s not quite how I remembered it.”
Jamie stepped out and mist seeped into the car, its cold fingers prickling her cheeks. She let herself out and shut her door, the thud deadened by the thick air. Using his phone as a flashlight, Jamie dug around a loose chunk of stone at one corner of the cottage. After a minute he held something up. “They’ve been hiding the key in the same spot for decades. Technically it’s not breaking in now, right?”
The fog was so thick she could scoop a cupful and drink it, if it didn’t remain a wary meter out of reach. Hard to imagine a happy family on summer vacation. Hard to imagine summer at all, though the thought of a night here alone with Jamie heated her up from the inside.
He unlocked a wooden door and shoved it open with a scrape. She clunked up the two stone steps and he stood aside to usher her into a living room. As he followed, the gray-white glow of his phone created more shadows than light, black shapes rearing and diving behind the furniture—a wooden table, four chairs, a sofa, a candelabra above a blackened fireplace, a kitchenette. It smelled of earth and damp and soot and firewood. Someone had brightened it up with turquoise curtains tied back beside the blinds, a pale blue-and-pink tartan throw draped over the sofa, a thick red rug on a rippled flagstone floor that might have been molded by centuries of foot traffic. Jamie shoved the door shut and laid the keys on a windowsill above the kitchen sink. As he slipped past, he touched each side of her waist. She tensed.
Two internal doors gaped, one revealing a tiny bathroom, the other a bedroom not much larger, with a bed that could generously be called a double. The only bedroom.
Not that they’d be doing much sleeping...and definitely nothing else.
“I take it you don’t have a big family,” she said.
“My parents took the bed, my sister curled up on the c
ouch, I had a camp bed—we had to push the table aside to fit it in.” He lowered the backpack to the floor. “My mum would light the fire even in summer because she liked the pine smell and the ambience, so we’d sleep with the doors and windows open.”
“I’m struggling to imagine warmth.” But she could see the charm—feel it like a tug on her heart. It wasn’t a place her parents would choose. They liked five-star hotels, vibrant cities, art, museums, restaurants. “Where are they now, your family?”
“Here. Scotland.” He scooted past again, briefly touching her upper arms, opened a little box attached to a wall and flicked a switch. The fridge rattled and hummed.
“Scotland” was evidently all she’d get. “Will you visit them, once this is over?”
“Maybe,” he said, in an unnaturally casual tone. She reached for a light switch but he caught her wrist.
“No lights,” he said. “With few leaves on the trees, it’ll be visible at the country house. I’d rather not risk a neighborly knock on the door. No one at all knows we’re here and we need to keep it that way. Wow, you really are cold.” He took both her hands in his and held all four to his chest, frowning at the fireplace. Just him being protective, being the carer, but her breath rushed in. “I’ll find some firewood. The fog and darkness will hide the smoke.” He squeezed her hands and slowly let them go, as if giving her time to regain control of them.
They brought in their few remaining belongings and Samira set up the computer on the table while Jamie headed out with the wood basket. From habit, she repacked everything else, using the laptop screen as a light. She was over occupying other people’s vacation spaces, though at least this time she wasn’t alone with the four Js. If only it were a real vacation—the kind where you left your toothbrush out, drank red wine, played cards, laughed, rested your cheek on your man’s chest and listened to his heartbeat and felt his steady breath in your hair...
The door swung open and thumped against the wall. She jumped. Jamie swept in, heaving the basket, filling the room with the tang of freshly chopped pine. He kicked the door closed. Attraction smacked into her chest like a physical force. Primal instinct? Protector and provider. Shouldn’t she be immune to that, as a woman of the twenty-first century?
