Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
The first thing I do when I get home is pour myself a glass of wine, which I drink in the bathroom while I freshen up and do my business that needed doing.
Then I go upstairs, change into leggings and a sweatshirt because my body suddenly wants to be warm and hidden, come back down, refill the glass, and sit at the kitchen table. I make myself a bowl of soup and crackers which I barely eat, but I do drink the fuck out of that wine.
The bay is going gold outside the back window.
The afternoon light has turned that low slanting Highland color that makes everything in this country look like a painting, especially as it lights the top of the castle.
Surely, Alasdair and Sinclair have run into each other by now, but I don’t know whether Sinclair has cuffs out and a charge sheet open, or whether the two of them are sitting in those leather chairs in the firelit library with their whiskies, talking around the things they mean to talk about.
I don’t know anything, anymore, really. Today was proof of that.
I take another sip of the wine.
My phone is on the table. I pick it up. I open the message thread with Maddie.
She’d kill me. She’d kill me twice. Once for what I did against a tree on a road in the middle of the afternoon with the man she told me to stay away from—and who is probably the man my aunt told me to stay away from, too— and once more for what I’m planning to do about it.
She’d probably try to convince me to talk to Sinclair again and tell him all that I know, which is that I know nothing.
Worst case scenario she might even tell me to give up on the cottage and come back to Chicago.
But I can’t have that conversation. Not tonight. Not yet.
I put the phone face-down and push it away with my fingertips.
The trouble with Maddie being right is that, well…
she’s right. Officially, as of today, I have gotten involved with a man a detective is investigating, whose attention I unwittingly called to the situation to begin with.
I have lied for him by way of not informing on him, by way of sitting here and drinking wine and not saying a word.
I’ve allowed my body to be put in a kind of debt I’m not, in my saner moments, capable of carrying.
A man who might be a killer. A man who, in some other reading of the evidence, is something even less likely than a killer, and yet somehow more dangerous. A man who no doubt is hiding things. A man who walked toward a police inspector without flinching while the taste of me was still in his mouth.
As of today, I’m involved with him in a way I wasn’t before. Yes, only his fingers have been inside of me, but it’s the beginning of the end anyway, the start of what I knew to be inevitable.
Because I want him inside me.
I want him inside me badly enough that the wanting is making it hard to sit still in this chair, even after I have come for him in the forest this afternoon.
The wanting is its own thing now. It has its own gravity, its own direction.
It is sitting in my chest like a small additional heart, beating just and only for that.
I keep waiting for the panic. I keep waiting for the part of me that should be sensibly losing her mind about all of this—the disappearances, the lies, Sinclair’s investigation, the names on the list, my dead great-aunt’s letter that says don’t let him in in a hand that has clearly seen things—to wake up and start kicking and screaming.
But that part of me isn’t screaming. It’s sitting in the kitchen with me drinking the wine, watching the bay go gold.
It’s keeping me company.
And that is what’s scaring me. Not him.
Me.
I drink the rest of the glass.
I sit at the table for a long time until the gold darkens and the sun starts to go down, the kind of sunset where you think it’s going to be a good one judging by the high fluffy clouds in the sky, creating the perfect canvas to catch the colors.
Then sunset arrives in full and the sky goes from gold to bruised, that strange burgundy and orange, the kind of evening light that makes you want to break out the alizarin crimson and goldenrod and make a shoddy attempt of capturing it.
But there is no painting tonight.
I step outside to find the breeze enough to keep the midges at bay and strangely warm for this time of evening. I gaze at the surface of the loch, that metallic sheen rippling slightly in the wind, and then I see him.
He’s halfway across the bay, his head surfacing, dark and featureless and backlit enough that his black hair shines dark rose gold.
I’m down the slope and onto the rocks in less than a minute. He is closer than I thought, he has crossed most of the bay already, the white of his shoulders breaking the copper of the water with a slow easy stroke. Fuck, he’s fast.
He sees me come. He stops swimming for a second. and lifts his head out of the water. Even at this distance I can see the smile he gives.
He swims the rest of the way toward me with a slow easy stroke.
He is maybe fifteen feet out from the rocks when his head comes up out of the water properly and he plants his feet on the bottom, the loch chest-deep on him, his hair slicked back, the wet of his face catching the gold-burgundy light. He starts wading in.
“Stay in the water,” I tell him. It comes out of my mouth before I have worked out what I’m going to say.
He stops and blinks once. “Pardon?”
“I’m coming in.”
His face contorts, and he looks both apprehensive and pleased. He doesn’t say yes, please, but he also doesn’t say no, don’t. He stands there with the water gleaming around his ribs, and watches me start to undress.
I’m quick about it. I’m quick about it because I know exactly what my body looks like in this light, and I know that quick is the most flattering.
The last person I undressed in front of was Ryan, and I don’t have the body I had when I was first with him.
I have softness in places I used to have firmness.
I have the white lines on my hips from when I gained and lost weight in my twenties.
I have the small belly that no amount of walking can lessen, but stress sure does know how to add to it.
But the sundown is being kind to all of it, and if I am decisive, I can be in the water before he can find any of the parts of me I would rather he didn’t peer at too closely.
With my clothes off, I leave the pile on the flat rock and get straight into the water with laser focus.
I try not to think about how dark it is, what could be in there—never mind Nessie; the last thing I want is to step on mussels or a salmon—or how deep it is.
I just go, the water sloshing at my legs.
I shriek like a banshee.
No surprise—it is cold as fucking hell. It punches all the air out of me in one breath, the cold going up to my hips and then to my ribs and my breasts as I keep walking out.
I hyperventilate slightly because my body is not under my command anymore.
I just keep moving. If I stop, I’ll panic and flounder, and then I’ll be a naked embarrassment.
I get out to where he’s standing, chest-deep. He reaches for me before I quite reach for him.
I’m so cold that the warmth of his hands feels like fire.
His arms come around me, one across my back and the other under my arms, and he pulls me close to him in the water, and the long press of his body against mine is—there is no other word for it—hot.
He is so warm in the cold water that I cling to him without deciding to.
Also, because he’s nice, and what was I saying earlier about climbing him like a tree?
“Christ, you’re freezing,” he says. His face is so close now I can’t look anywhere else.
His hair is dark and slicked back, water beading along his lashes, the wet glinting at the line of his jaw and the small hollow at his throat.
The sundown is doing ridiculous things to him—gold and burgundy in the wet of his skin, the high cut of his cheekbone catching the light, the cleft in his chin holding a small bright drop of water.
He is impossibly beautiful like this and I feel dazed in response to it.
“It was warmer at the cottage,” I mumble, willing my teeth to stop chattering.
“First time in a Scottish loch?”
First time with a Scottish man too, I think.
“Aye,” I say with an exaggerated accent. “It’s fuckin’ freezin’.”
“You get used to it,” he says with a slight curve to his lips.
“You’re warm,” I point out.
“Aye, that I am.”
“But you’re like, really warm. How are you so warm?” Even still, I can practically feel the heat radiating off him. On land, he’s quite cool to touch, but underwater, he’s like a furnace.
“I don’t know,” he replies.
But I know he’s lying. It’s not even a good lie—I don’t know, about his own body, from a man who seems to know everything? I add it to the list, the one that’s getting long: the things this man won’t answer straight, the questions that hit him and slide off like rain off wax.
And then, the way it keeps happening whenever I’m near him, the wanting-to-know, the endless questions I have for him, my relentless curiosity just…
loosens. Lets go of me. Like the warmth itself is talking me out of it, or his grip around me, or that dreamy look in his eyes.
It’s not even that he looks dreamy, no his gaze is as intense as ever, but when I look into his eyes I get this sensation that I’m the one in a dream.
And somewhere far off, the sensible version of me—the one safe on the shore, fully dressed, not wrapped around a beautiful stranger in a haunted bay—is pointing out that once again he evaded my question.
But I’m not on the shore. I’m out here, wrapped up naked in his arms, in a loch that should be killing me with cold and isn’t, and I let it go. And every time I let it go, is another moment when the truth slips right past me, and in its place lies something more dangerous than not.