Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
GRAHAM
I’d been watching Agnes earlier that night.
Not in a creepy way—at least, I hoped not—but in the way a man watches a woman he’s loved for the better part of a decade.
I knew her tells. The slight tension in her shoulders when she was overwhelmed.
The way she twisted her bracelet when she was too anxious to say what was on her mind.
The laugh she used when she was deflecting …
sharper and more performative than her natural laugh.
It was like hearing someone hit a wrong note on the piano.
The men had been banished to the games room while the women had their gathering in the library, which suited me just fine.
Lachlan had put a rerun of a Scotland vs.
Denmark football match on the big screen, and Munroe had brought up a few bottles from his distillery, so we weren’t exactly suffering.
But my mind kept drifting downstairs, wondering what Agnes was doing and what she wasn’t telling me.
Or anyone, really. Agnes always took care of everyone else but herself.
“You’re distracted tonight, mate.” Lachlan, one of my very best mates, straightened from where he’d just neatly pocketed the eight ball to win. Sighing, I handed him my pool cue and rolled my shoulders back to ease the tension creeping up there.
“Aye, can’t be helped, I suppose. A touch on edge these days.”
“Aren’t we all?” Ramsay asked from where he scowled at the cards in his hand, sitting across from Munroe.
“It doesn’t exactly help that our women are constantly throwing themselves in front of magickal beasts,” Owen muttered.
“Ahem, nothing wrong with some magickal beasts.” Luch, who I’d just recently learned was secretly a wulver, shot him a glowering look.
“Nothing to be done, though, is there? We can’t stop them.” Munroe shook his head as he laid down another card. “Not that I’d ever really try. This is what they were born to do, and us lads are just lucky enough to be by their sides, aren’t we?”
The men murmured their agreement, but I drew back, stopping to crack a fresh beer, before wandering over to the window to look out over the loch.
I didn’t have a woman to worry over.
Which was an absolute lie, even to myself, but it annoyed me more than I wanted to admit that I one hundred percent did worry over one Agnes Wright, no matter how hard she tried to push me away.
It had been years since we’d dated, years, and still every rejection felt like slicing open a freshly healed wound. I’d tried to distract myself through the years, but it turned out, there was no other woman like Agnes.
I was for her and she was for me, if only her stubborn arse would let me in.
I stared out at the lights of Loren Brae twinkling in the backdrop of the dark hills as the men debated the merits of trying to stop their partners from jumping into the magickal fray to protect Loren Brae, when I caught movement down below.
Agnes emerged from somewhere in the back of the castle, her coat already on, her bag clutched against her chest like a shield.
Was she leaving on her own?
Already annoyed, I put my beer down and crossed the room, grabbing my coat on the way.
“Where ya off to, lad?” Finlay called, glancing up from his darts game with Lachlan.
“Agnes is walking home on her own.”
“Bloody hell,” Lachlan said, stepping forward. “Has she learned nothing?”
“I’m going, I’m going. Night, lads.” I waved them away and was out the door, hurrying down the stairs to catch her before she got too far.
She was being stupid, and I planned to tell her just that as soon as I caught up to her. Annoyance mixed with fear, and I picked up my pace, so by the time I reached her across the wide expanse of lawn in front of the castle, I was almost at a run.
“Damn it, Graham!” Agnes whirled, her hand at her heart, as I reached her. “What in the hell are you doing running after me like that? You’re going to give me a bloody heart attack.”
“I would say the same of you, darling.” I gripped her elbow lightly. “What are you doing walking home alone?”
“What I do most days of my life.” Agnes’s chin went up, and color dotted her cheeks. “Navigating the world as an adult woman who takes care of her needs. On her own, Graham.”
My brain short-circuited for a moment as my thoughts went to Agnes taking care of her very personal needs on her own, and she was already several steps ahead of me when I recovered the ability to think straight.
“Agnes! Wait, damn it.”
“What has got you in such a huff tonight, Graham?” Agnes asked, pulling her scarf more tightly around her neck as icy wind buffeted the hills around us.
“You,” I answered, honestly, and fell into step beside her.
“Uh-huh. Try again.” Agnes rolled her eyes and shoved her hands in her pockets, her expression mulish.
“Agnes, you saw what happened in the loch just a few weeks ago. Surely you can’t think that nobody cares about you. There’s stubborn and there’s stupid. And it’s stupid you’re being to crack on into the dark night on your own when there’s a very real threat out in the loch.”
“And what will you do about it if something happens?” Agnes whirled on me and I shrunk, hating the fact that she was, as usual, right. I had no magick. I had nothing in my toolbox to fight against a Kelpie, or God forbid, a Beithir.
All I could offer was my heart.
Not that Agnes would ever accept that, stubborn woman that she was.
“I’d step in front of you, Agnes. I’d go first, hold it off best I could, while you saved yourself.”
Her eyes rounded and she shook her head, muttering something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like “stupid eejit.”
“Well? That’s the way of it, isn’t it? At the very least, it would buy you some time to get the others.”
Agnes huffed out a small sound of annoyance, but didn’t respond, burying her face more deeply in the scarf wound around her neck instead. There were times I wanted to shake her and demand more from her, but I’d learned long ago that patience was the only tool I had to win at anything with Agnes.
Silence drew out between us. The sky was clear, stars scattered across the darkness like broken glass. Our breath fogged in front of us as we walked, the crunch of gravel beneath our feet the only sound.
MacAlpine Castle loomed behind us, its windows glowing gold, and ahead the village waited, lights twinkling in the darkness. Beside us, Loch Mirren stretched out like a sheet of black silk, perfectly still.
Too still, maybe.
I couldn’t look at the loch the same way anymore. Not after seeing that massive serpent roar up from the depths, all lightning and ancient fury, while we’d scrambled to protect Zara and fight off the Kelpies.
The Beithir—basically a dragon—one of the great beasts of Scottish legend.
She’d known what it was. Of course she had. Agnes knew everything about this place, its history and myths and secrets. It was one of the things I loved about her—that endless well of knowledge, and the way her eyes lit up when she talked about old stories and even older magick.
But tonight, walking beside her in the darkness, I wondered if she knew more than she was telling me, because she was like that. Always shielding others and yet refusing the shield when I offered it. Frustrating woman.
“You left earlier than everyone else,” I said, after we’d walked in silence for a few minutes. “Is something wrong?”
Agnes’s step faltered almost imperceptibly. “I’m tired.”
“Wrong answer. Try again.” I knew Agnes’s malarkey as well as I knew my own.
She sighed, the sound heavy with exhaustion. “It was just ... a lot. All the couples. All the happiness.” She waved a hand vaguely. “Sometimes it’s overwhelming.”
I knew what she meant. I felt it too—that particular loneliness of being surrounded by people in love when the person you wanted was standing right next to you, unreachable as the moon. Not that I could ever tell Agnes that. She’d made up her mind about us a long time ago.
“It doesn’t have to be—”
“Graham.” She said my name like a warning.
I should have let it go. I should have nodded and made some joke and walked her home like a gentleman, and then gone back to my empty flat above the pub and poured myself a whisky and stared at the ceiling wondering what the hell was wrong with me.
But I was tired. Tired of pretending. Tired of watching her from across rooms and aching for something I couldn’t have.
Tired of being kept at arm’s length by a woman who sometimes looked at me like I was the answer to every question she’d ever asked—and then looked away as if the answer terrified her.
“Something’s going on with you,” I said, letting my frustration bubble over.
“Bloody hell, Agnes, I can see it. I’ve been able to see it for a while now.
You’re upset. And I know you’re not going to tell me what it is, because you never tell me anything, but I want you to know that I see it.
I see you, Agnes. Even when you don’t want to be seen. ”
She stopped walking.
We’d reached the edge of the village, the cobblestones beneath our feet, the streetlamps casting pools of golden light. Agnes stood frozen in the space between one pool and the next, her face half in shadow.
“You shouldn’t,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Shouldn’t what?”
“See me. Watch me. Any of it.” She turned to face me, and even in the darkness I could see the turmoil in her expression—the fear and longing and something that looked almost like grief. “You should have moved on years ago, Graham. Found someone who could give you what you want. What you deserve.”
My mouth dropped open. I couldn’t believe she was finally addressing this only to toss it away so quickly.
“And what’s that?”
“A life. A family. Someone who—” She broke off, pressing her lips together.
“Someone who what? Loves me?” I stepped closer, close enough to see the rapid pulse at the base of her throat. “Because here’s the thing, Agnes. I’ve tried that. I’ve dated half the eligible women in the Highlands, trying to find someone who could make me forget you. And you know what I learned?”