Chapter 12
12
Lachlan
I never thought that at thirty-four I would find myself actively avoiding a person as if caught up in some schoolyard drama—and yet for the last week, I’ve been doing exactly that. It’s become all too obvious that Keyanna MacKay is not someone easily ignored, however. She’s a constant thorn in my side, hounding me around the farm and trying to corner me at every turn, no doubt doing her best to catch me alone and grill me about what she knows. Because of course she couldn’t just make things easy and cart herself back to America. No, now she’s dug her heels in as if she’s got all the more reason to stick around.
Not that I have the slightest clue as to why.
There’s no good reason for her to want to help me as she continues to claim. In fact, if my family has learned anything from history, it’s that the MacKays are the last people to expect help from. Rhona and Finlay might be the right sort, as far as I can tell, but they’re surely a fluke in an otherwise ghastly line of folk that I’ve been taught to avoid since before I knew how to walk. And given what I know about daughters of MacKay —I have all the more reason to keep slipping away whenever I find myself in a nearby radius of the determined redhead.
Last night was a doozy, another disappointing venture of trying to make contact and ending up retreating to a secluded bay licking my literal and metaphorical wounds. I don’t know why I’m still subjecting myself to this, since I know nothing good can come of it, but I can’t seem to make myself give up completely. As long as he’s out there, it seems that some part of me will always hold on to the foolish hope that I can get him back.
The sun is high when my eyes open, and I can tell from the way it streams through the curtains that I’ve already got a late start to the day. I stretch my arms above my head as my jaw cracks with a loud yawn, scratching my stomach as my lashes flutter closed in a last-ditch effort to grab a few more minutes of rest.
I’ve just started to drift when a loud banging sets off at my front door.
“Lachlan! I know you’re in there.”
I groan. It’s the third time this week she’s come pounding on my door. I grab the pillow from under my head and bring it to my face, trying to drown out her voice.
“I’m not leaving,” she calls through the wood. “I’ll wait out here all day if I have to.”
That’s what you said on Tuesday , I think with a mental smirk.
“I mean it this time! My ass is not leaving this stoop until you talk to me.”
I can hear the determination in her voice, and I sigh into the pillow, fearing this might be the end of my streak of luck. It seems that no matter how much I might like this problem to go away, she’s stubbornly decided to insert herself into the situation.
Maybe I really should have just let her be eaten , I think wistfully.
I chide myself for even thinking it; I definitely wouldn’t have let that happen, but I can’t help fantasizing about the quiet it would have given me. I swing my legs over the side of the small bed, glaring at the door across the room, where the squalling sounds of The Proclaimers start drifting through the wood, horribly off-key.
“—well I know I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be the man who wakes up next to you!”
Would have been nothing , I mentally grumble, shoving off the bed. Could have just looked the other way.
I stomp across the short distance.
“And I would walk five hundred miles, and I would walk five hundred more, just to be the man who walks a thousand miles to fall down at your—”
I wrench the door open. “Will you knock it off?”
She’s sitting with her back to the door, and she tilts her head back to peer up at me, a triumphant grin spreading across her mouth as her long red curls spill toward her waist. Her green eyes almost glimmer in the midmorning sun, and the light touching her lashes makes them seem to burn a golden red.
I hate how fucking lovely she looks when she’s being a pain in my arse.
“You don’t like The Proclaimers?”
“Be honest,” I huff. “That’s the one Scottish song you know, isn’t it.”
“I plead the fifth,” she answers with a shrug. She pushes herself upright, dusting off her jeans and turning to flash that same smug grin my way. “You ready to talk to me like a big boy, Nessie?”
“Keep your damned voice down,” I hiss, glancing around as if Rhona’s house isn’t more than a mile from the guest cottage. “And that is not going to be a thing.”
“Sure,” she says sweetly. “Whatever you say…Nessie.”
I narrow my eyes. “I really wish you would just let this go, princess .”
She doesn’t reward me with her usual irritation, just clucks her tongue, shrugging one shoulder.
“Yeah, not gonna happen. So can I come in? Or would you like to talk in the doorway?”
I silently fume for a moment, fantasizing about throwing her into the bloody loch myself, finally moving to the side so she can push past me while I mutter under my breath.
“Pain in my arse,” I grumble.
She ignores me. “Oh, wow, this is so tiny! Do you even fit on the bed?”
“Ten seconds, and you’re already thinking about my bed?”
This does earn me a withering look, and now it’s my turn to grin in triumph.
“Cute,” she says flatly, just before plopping herself down into one of my kitchen chairs. She gestures to the one across from her like she owns it, cocking an eyebrow expectedly. “Well?”
I release a sigh that I feel down in my bones, closing the door and shuffling after her to drop myself into the empty chair across the table from her. I scrub a hand down my face, letting it hover over my mouth as my eyes drift closed wearily.
“Ask your bloody questions.”
“I have so many!” Her voice is bright and animated, full of genuine wonder. “How long has this been going on? How did it happen? Who was that other monster? Can you breathe underwater all the time or just when you change? Do you do any magic?”
I crack open one eye, frowning as I let my hand drop to the table. “That’s…a lot of questions.”
“ Excuse me,” she scoffs. “ You meet a magical cryptid and see if you don’t have a million questions. If Bigfoot walked into your kitchen right now, pretty sure you’d have questions.”
“Bigfoot isn’t real,” I mutter.
Her jaw drops. “Are you kidding? You’re out here practically fueling podcasts worldwide and covering tabloid pages, and you’re telling me you don’t believe that Bigfoot might be real?”
“Is this what you’d like to discuss?”
“No.” She scowls. “Answer my questions.”
“I still don’t see why I should.”
“Because I can’t help you if I don’t know the facts!”
“And what makes you so sure you could help me?”
“I…” She looks thrown by the question, pausing with her lips parted as if she’d just been about to speak. She closes them, presses them together, an act that makes them look even fuller, and my eyes dart unwillingly to the soft pink of her mouth briefly before I drag them back to her eyes. “I guess I don’t know for sure,” she admits. “But I want to at least try. You said it was a curse, right? That doesn’t exactly sound like a fun time. That’s what you’re doing here, isn’t it? You said you were looking for answers. Let me help you.”
I narrow my eyes, studying her. She looks so…earnest. Guileless, even. It’s true that she wears every thought in her expression for the world to see, which means that it’s painfully obvious that Key truly wants to help me, that she thinks—or maybe just hopes—that she might be able to. I can’t make heads or tails of it. It goes against everything I know.
“I don’t understand why you would want to help me,” I tell her honestly. “We’re not exactly friends. We don’t even like each other.”
Which I don’t , I confirm in my head. I don’t like her. I don’t care how bonnie she is.
“I’ll admit we’ve had…a rough start,” she ventures, reaching to rub her hand at her nape in a seemingly nervous gesture. “But I just feel like…” She huffs out a breath. “I know that I’m supposed to help you. It’s what my dad would have wanted.”
I frown. “You said that before, but it doesn’t make sense. Why on earth would Duncan want you to help me with this?”
“Because you saved him!”
I cock my head. “I…what?”
“I mean…Well. Now that I think about it, it couldn’t have been you —but someone like you.” She rubs her temples. “He told me this story so much growing up that I know it by heart. He was at the cove, and he fell, and he thought it was all over, but then—” Her eyes round as she looks at me earnestly. “ Something saved him. Something like you. I always wondered…” She bites her lip. “When I was a kid, I believed every single word. All of it. As I got older…part of me thought that it was just my dad’s way of bringing some kind of magic in my life, but…near the end…” Her hands clasp on the table in front of her, her fingers twisting as her brow furrows. “He was so adamant. So insistent that it was all real. In the end…it was the only thing he could remember.”
“Finlay told me,” I murmur, a bubble of discontent in my chest from seeing her so distraught. I reach to rub the spot. “He told me about your da and his illness.”
She nods solemnly. “It was just me and him in the end. I took a leave of absence from my job to care for him; I used to work for this small accounting firm back in New York. My boss was old friends with my dad, so he was very good to me as far as assuring me that my job would still be there. I didn’t know how much time he’d have before he—” She sucks in a shaky breath, her throat bobbing with a swallow. “After the pneumonia, he just…It’s like his body couldn’t do it anymore. Like he was just tired. He still hung on for four months after he got out of the hospital, though. His memories were a jumbled mess by then; hell, he barely knew who I was most days, always called me by my mom’s name.”
“I’m sorry,” I manage, not sure what else to say. It feels odd, sitting here and commiserating with her this way when I’ve known nothing but barbs and glares since the moment I met her. “That must have been terrible.”
She nods heavily. “It was.”
“But you don’t think you’ve already done enough?” I wonder. “Like you said, you already saved me.” I frown at my own words. “Do you even know how you did that?”
“I…” She bites her lip, and I can’t help but be drawn to the sight of her teeth worrying at the soft flesh. “I have no idea. That night is kind of hazy.” Her brows raise. “Do you have any idea?”
I do, actually, now that I’ve had time to think about it, but I’m not sure if she’s ready to hear it; if it weren’t for my own cursed predicament, I would say that it’s too fantastical to even consider.
“Does it matter?” I counter, ignoring the question for now. “My point is, you could argue that you’ve already paid this debt you’ve built up in your head. You don’t owe me anything.”
“You don’t understand.” Her eyes flash to mine with a determined glint. “My dad forgot almost everything about his life at the end, but he never forgot that story. It was all he took with him.”
“But I don’t see why that would make you want to—”
“You saved him,” she says firmly. “Or, well, someone like you did. If you hadn’t…I never would have known him. I wouldn’t even be here.” She nods again, the motion resolute. “So if I can help you, then I owe it to whoever it was like you that pulled him out of the water that day to try.”
I sit across from her in stunned silence for several moments, and for every second that passes, her gaze never leaves mine. Her eyes seem so bright they almost burn, a fire in them that almost rivals the blazing curls framing her face. I realize she means every word of it. That in her mind, helping me is some final homage to the father she lost. Like saving me will somehow ease the pain of it. That it will somehow make it all not have been for nothing.
And knowing that…it hits far too close to home.
I don’t say anything as I push away from the table, rising from the chair and turning to the kitchenette behind me as I start up the coffeepot. I stare at it for a few more seconds until it starts to sputter with steaming liquid, finally turning my face to cast her a long look.
“How do you take your coffee?”
My banal question has an immediate effect, her pink lips forming an indignant pout and her copper brows pulling together. “That’s it? That’s all you have to say? How do I take my coffee?”
“Aye,” I answer, crossing my arms over my chest and leaning back against the counter. “For the moment.”
“Are you purposely trying to infuriate me?”
I shake my head. “No, I’m trying to caffeinate you. You’ll need it.”
“I’ll need it,” she echoes, her eyes turning a wee bit suspicious. “And why is that?”
I turn to reach for two mugs from the cabinet, giving her my back as I let out another weary sigh, coming to terms with the fact that, for better or worse, it seems I now have a tentative ally. The last one I ever expected.
“Because I have something to show you.”