When it came down to it, though, very little of her time since law school’d had anything to do with happiness. How had she lost sight of that? She’d been determined to succeed, to climb out of the humiliation of Henry. She’d graduated at the top of her class and gotten good job offers, and she’d taken the best of the best of those—because that was what one did, wasn’t it? What was expected. Somewhere in there, had she forgotten to ask herself what she actually wanted to do? Her work as a lawyer had become about winning and losing and billing hours.
Was that what she wanted?
No.
She clasped her hands together tightly. “Brando said something yesterday about the loch finding a way to make things happen for us no matter how we work against it. In spite of ourselves. I don’t know about the loch, but it seems like something is pushing me to examine my life lately. To make changes.”
Half-turned in his seat, Connal had gone still. “Lately, I feel like that every day,” he said, sounding bemused. Then he unclipped his seat belt, got out of the car, and came around to open her door before he spoke again. “I’m trying to come to terms with the realization that all the plans and choices I have ever made have led me to somewhere I was meant to be, as if I never had any choice at all.”
“What do you mean?” Anna peered up at him in the yellow glow of the carriage lamps.
He took her elbow and shook his head. “Someday, I’ll explain. But it’s an humbling feeling. We get puffed up with self-importance, wrapped up in our place in the world, and forget that there are much bigger things out there, things we can’t begin to fathom. Things that simply require faith. That’s all I’m saying.”
Taking Anna’s hand, he pulled her to her feet and stood looking down at her, his eyes shining in the light. The moon emerging from behind a bank of clouds cast a silver glow behind him. “You asked me a while ago whether I would ever go back to acting, and I didn’t fully answer you. The truth is, I always loved losing myself in becoming someone else. Things were pretty miserable at home when I started acting, and that became a form of escape, I guess. Once I became a celebrity, being an actor was overshadowed. I lost the sense of myself and where I was going. Of what was important to me.” He paused and swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “When I lost Isobel, I thought coming back here would be what was best for Moira. It never occurred to me that this was where I was supposed to be. But it is. I’m supposed to be right here—”
Something in his voice, in the way he watched Anna, said that he wasn’t quite finished speaking. She waited for him to go on. His eyes flickered, and a muscle twitched in his cheek, but then he only lowered his head with exquisite slowness until his lips settled over hers. His hands cupped her cheeks, tilted her head up to meet him, drew her closer.
Kissing Connal MacGregor set Anna’s every nerve ending on fire, burned away doubt and her ability to think, made every pore of her skin crackle with heat and life. She lost herself in his kiss and the wide-openness of the glen at night, where the silence was broken only by their own labored breathing, the call of the night birds, and the lap of the water curling up against the shore.
“Come to lunch again tomorrow,” Connal said as he pulled away.
“I will.” She hugged the indefinable scent of him to herself, musk and spice and promise, as she returned to Elspeth’s house. Still smiling, she made her way back to the warm light trickling from the kitchen.
Sabotage
I am learning that criticism is not
nearly as effective as sabotage.
Anonymous
There was always a fresh disaster to mediate: the never-ending squabbles between Sorcha and Fenella, Rhona’s pouting, pipers almost coming to blows over the choice of songs for the closing ceremony, someone stealing posters. But at noon every day, Anna took a break and spent a couple of hours with Connal—and often Moira.
Connal seemed desperate to show her the entire glen. They spent hours walking the braes, flying an incredibly ugly kite that Moira and Anna made together along the loch, visiting the MacLarens’ gathering place at Creag an Tuirc, the waterfall, the grave of the Reverend Kirk on the hillside, and the burial places of the “Children of the Mist,” the MacGregors in the glen whose clan name had been taken from them.
It was too cold for Moira to come with them the day they went to the cemetery, and too cold for all but the most determined tourists. Connal and Anna wandered alone among the tombstones. The wind blew a lament through the ruins of the old stone church, stinging Anna’s cheeks, while out on the hillsides it made the heather bushes dance.
“You should have a thicker jacket.” Connal took off his green scarf to wrap around her neck when she shivered despite the many layers she’d worn. “I’m going to make you catch your death dragging you around like this, aren’t I? I’m sorry. I’m being selfish.”
“I love every minute,” Anna said, though mostly she loved seeing him as happy as he was when they were out walking in the glen.
“Do you really not mind? I always feel the clock running out this time of year. Rambling like this, before the hikers and campers are out in force, is the only time I feel free. I want to spend as much of the day outdoors as I can.”
Anna slanted a look at him as she burrowed deeper into the softness of the scarf. He had so much energy out here in the glen or when he was directing the play, always moving, circling the actors, repositioning them, demonstrating how to read a line. It was hard to picture him cooped up indoors with only Moira for company, both of them isolated from the world, from life, by a stone wall and a decade of distrust.
“Would you really never go back to acting? I can’t picture you rattling around in the house all day. Cutting yourself off from being creative.”
His expression went blank. “There’s always plenty to keep me occupied. Raising a smart child requires creativity in itself. Not to mention that a house this age and size takes time and effort to keep up, and there are investments. Reading. Music. There’s always something. But there’s too much baggage with a career like mine. You either give in to the public nature of that, or you stay completely private. Either way, the public and the media think they know you, and what they don’t know, the tabloids make up. I was too young and excited by it all at first to realize how much it cost me. Then gradually, I found myself playing a role off-screen as much as on, wearing a mask to protect myself. By the time I lost Isobel, I’d lost track of what was beneath the mask.” Tangling his fingers through Anna’s, Connal gently pulled her toward him and stood looking down at her. He released his breath, not quite a sigh but close. “When I’m with you, I feel more like myself than I can remember feeling in years.” Admitting that appeared to surprise him.
Anna found herself smiling against his lips. She was usually the one who blurted things out to him or Elspeth, as if their conversations lanced open wounds she’d been carrying inside so long they’d festered into abscesses.
Talking to Connal was easy. He listened without judging, but he didn’t shy away from the sore spots either. The first night they hadn’t had a play rehearsal or a committee meeting to juggle, they sat reading together on the floor of the tower library, their legs stretched out on the soft, worn carpet. A fire crackled in the hearth, and between that and a deep glass of wine, Anna felt warm and comfortable.
She turned a page in the old copy of Wuthering Heights she had pulled off the shelf and wondered why she had once loved the book so much. Heathcliff wasn’t romantic, merely depressing. Looking up, she found Connal watching her.
“What?” she asked.
He set aside the nonfiction book he’d been reading. “Have you spoken to your mother yet?”
“Did Elspeth ask you to talk to me?” Anna closed her eyes. “I know I should, but I can’t. I need to sort things through on my own, find my feet again. She makes me feel like I’m ten years old again whenever I talk to her.”
“Parents always do that,” Connal said. “It’s in the rulebook.”
&
nbsp; Anna’s smile was barely there. “I’ve felt like the odd one out in the family since I was ten, as if nothing I do is right, and I don’t know how to fix that. I wish we could be friends, at least with Margaret and my mother.”
“Not your other sister?”
“Katharine? Trust me, that ship sailed a long time ago. I’d sink it in the deepest ocean I could find, given half a choice.”
Connal sat up and pulled her to rest against his chest. “Why?”
Leaning back against him, she found herself telling him about Katharine and Henry. “I don’t know if I would have seen what he really was if I’d been looking for it; he had me fooled all along. But Katharine—she’d always been a selfish liar, taking anything I had that she wanted and managing to make it seem like my fault I had lost it. Even now, in my mother’s mind, I’m the one who’s being unreasonable for not making up with Katharine. It doesn’t matter how old I get, I can’t break the patterns set when we were children.”
Connal gathered Anna closer. “Family relationships are hard because you can’t get rid of them. Your relatives see you through the lens of the events they’ve shared with you. Then you grow up and live through new experiences without them. You change, but they don’t know that because they weren’t there to see it.”
“Is that what it’s like with your family?” Anna shifted in his arms so she could see his face.
“There’s only my mother, and she’s remarried to an Italian count, living in Perugia. She sweeps in a couple of times a year, despairs of me ever giving Moira the mother she desperately needs, then flies out again without seeing the irony of that statement.”
“And your father?”
Connal rested his chin on the top of Anna’s head. “He died when I was twelve. Cancer. But he was a great father. I was heartbroken, losing him. That was the reason my mother let me audition for my first film. It gave us both something to think about other than the fact that he was dying. A way to cope. The odd thing is, she was on the brink of divorcing him when he first got sick, and then she was inconsolable after he was gone.”
Anna thought about her own parents, the way they argued constantly, never happy with each other’s company. Would they have been better off divorcing? Her father spent most of his time retreating to the office or the golf course, and even when the two of them attended a party together, they would end up on opposite sides of the room. She had always blamed her mother for that, but why had her father never left? Would it have made either of them any happier?
She wished she was stronger when it came to her mother. Typing an email was easy. Picking up the phone was almost impossible.
That didn’t keep her mother from calling a dozen times a week.
The phone rang in the study. It could have been someone calling about the festival, or a friend calling Elspeth, but three-twenty in Scotland meant ten-twenty in Cincinnati when Ailsa Cameron was just leaving her morning yoga class and getting into her car. Pointing to herself, Anna shook her head and mouthed, “I’m not here.”
Lips thinning, Elspeth picked up the phone. “Hallo?”
Her mother’s side of the conversation wasn’t audible, but Anna didn’t need to hear it.
Elspeth released a pent-up breath. “I have given her your messages, Ailsa. I can’t help it that she’s not here—the festival keeps her busy. No, she won’t turn on her phone. She’s doing her best to save money. And yes, I’ve told her you’d pay for it.”
Holding the phone away from her ear an inch, Elspeth waited while Anna’s mother, presumably, cycled through the same things she repeated every day. But then Elspeth’s expression stiffened.
“Oh, for the love of heaven, Ailsa, don’t be silly. I’m not trying to take her away from you. Anna’s a grown woman. She makes her own decisions. Maybe if you’d listen to what she has to say once in a while instead of lecturing, she’d be more ready to hear your side in return. Can’t you just give her some space? Not everything in the universe revolves around you.” Elspeth slammed the phone down and shoved the charging cradle farther away into the corner of her desk, as if increasing the space between herself and the instrument could keep her sister at a safer distance, too.
“I’m sorry,” Anna said.
“I’m just going to stop picking it up from now on.”
“No, don’t do that. It’s not fair of me to make you keep putting her off—you’ve worked so hard to stay friends with her.”
Elspeth directed a sharp look at Anna. “How do you know that?”
Anna hadn’t thought about it, but it was obvious looking back. “Because you’ve always been patient with her. You’re the one who did the listening, and you’re the one who went to Cincinnati every year. Although maybe that’s good. I’d hate to think of her getting on a plane and coming to lecture me in person.”
“She’d have to face her own demons before she did that, love.” Elspeth pulled her laptop closer and clicked the trackpad to turn the screensaver off. “Half the reason your mother spends her time meddling in other people’s problems is so she doesn’t have to think about her own mistakes. But you are going to have to talk to her sooner or later. You know that.”
“Which mistakes?” Anna asked.
Elspeth shook her head, her lips pressed together so tightly it was apparent nothing was getting past them. She went back to hunting and pecking at the keyboard, assigning booth numbers for the festival’s arts, crafts, and food concessions.
Anna let it go. There were plenty of other things to worry about. With only a week and a half to go before the festival, the small bits of mischief that had been plaguing them all along had suddenly grown more serious, and she had urgent phone calls to make.
At seven o’clock the next morning, the doorbell rang. The sun was still low in the sky, and the loch was wraithed in mist. Anna answered and found Brando on the stoop, stamping his feet against the cold. “We have another problem,” he said, brushing past her. “The posters are gone again. I’ve replaced the bloody things around the village three times already, and the one on the highway at the glen turnoff as well. What do you want to do? I’ve only got one left out of the batch I picked up from the printers.”
He followed Anna into the kitchen and dropped into a chair as Elspeth said good morning from where she was making pie crust at the counter. Brando blew on his hands to warm them, and Anna huddled deeper into her sweater as if he’d brought the cold in with him from outside as she stood beside him.
“Whoever’s behind it is getting a bit more creative,” she said. “We’ve been assuming it was kids, or pranks, but someone called and canceled the order for portable toilets yesterday. I spent an hour calling some of the other vendors last night and found two more who’d had calls asking for changes or cancellations. Needless to say, neither Elspeth nor I are making those calls.”
Brando’s eyebrows rose. “You think someone’s actively trying to sabotage the festival?”
“I don’t know what to think. Maybe the posters are actually a blessing in disguise. Are you going back to Edinburgh today?”
“Julian Ashford’s arriving this afternoon, but he’s driving himself from the airport. I suppose I could run in before that if you needed, though I don’t see much point in putting more up if they’re going to disappear again.”
“No, what I’m wondering if there’s a store in Edinburgh somewhere that sells camera traps. The kind people use for photographing wildlife.”
Elspeth turned where she was rolling out the dough. “You want to catch whoever it is in the act? I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?” Eyes narrowing, Brando shifted to study her. “Do you suspect someone? Aye, you do. Who is it, and what do you know that you’re not saying?”
Elspeth shook her curls and turned back to rolling out the dough. “I don’t know anything. It could be anyone,” she said too quickly. “There’s still Rhona for one thing. We’ve suspected her all along, and I wouldn’t put it past either Erica or Sorcha to do som
ething sly to get back at us. Kirsty and Angus are barely speaking to each other, and Kirsty blames it all on the festival. They’ll end up divorced over the piping competition if he’s not careful—”
“You think it’s JoAnne, don’t you? That’s the only person you’d protect,” Anna said.
“Now, why would it be JoAnne?” Elspeth asked, her voice rising as she hastily turned away.
“Come on. Kirsty? You didn’t really expect to sell us that, and JoAnne’s made no secret of how much she hates the festival. She’s barely even speaking to you—and you should see how she glares daggers at me whenever Connal and I take Moira out walking with us in the afternoons.”
“Plenty of other people have better reasons than that.” Elspeth dropped the rolling pin on the wooden cutting board, sending a puff of flour into the air. “Lilieth down at the farm across from the campsite, for example. She’s fit to be tied over what the extra campers will do to upset her livestock. Not to mention there’s Mackenzie Stewart who’s livid because we wouldn’t pay to set up concrete pads for caravan sites in his back pasture. Other people are angry that the guest list for the Beltane Ball is smaller because we have to hold it here. It could be anyone.”
Brando watched Elspeth a moment longer then gave a barely perceptible shake of his head and turned his attention back to Anna. “If you’re serious about the camera trap, I could have a chat with Connal’s groundskeeper. Logan’s had a camera set to catch poachers at the osprey’s nest at the end of the loch, but he might loan it to us for a night or two. Problem is, whatever I tell him will be all around the village in half an hour.”
Lake of Destiny Page 12
