27. The Night Before
The Night Before
MORVEN
T he manor was strange at night the eve before something enormous.
I walked its corridors and each room held something different – the library held the memory of Lachlan’s hands ten days ago, the studio held the memory of Al’s mouth, the corridor held the memory of Ewan’s quiet half-smile at dawn – and the rooms didn’t compete.
They coexisted. The house had become a map of the things I’d chosen and the choosing had changed the shape of me, and the shape was good, and the shape was terrifying, and tomorrow was the Winter Wager.
I found Ewan in the kitchen at ten.
He was making tea. Badly. The kettle had boiled and he’d left the bag in the mug for too long and the milk was sitting on the counter unopened, as though the process of combining water and leaves had defeated a man who could dismantle a police investigation in forty-eight hours .
“You’re an engineer of human systems,” I said from the doorway, “and you can’t make a cup of tea.”
He looked up. The grin – not the full performance, the smaller one, the one that was just for me. “I can make tea. I choose not to make it well. It lowers expectations.”
“That’s your strategy for everything, isn’t it?”
“It’s got me this far.”
I crossed the kitchen. The stone floor was cold under my bare feet – the manor’s ground floor never warmed properly in winter, the heating fighting a losing war against three centuries of Scottish granite.
The kitchen smelled of the wrong-strength tea and the bread that someone had left out and the faint, herbal trace of whatever Ewan used on his hair – rosemary, something clean and green and entirely unlike the sandalwood-and-leather world of Lachlan’s study or the soap-and-iron world of Al’s room.
“You said you’d tell me something funny,” I said. “Before the Wager. You promised.”
He leaned against the counter. He crossed his arms. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled to the elbow and his forearms were lean and precise – not the heavy, industrial forearms of Al or the clean, tailored lines of Lachlan, but the functional musculature of a man whose body was built for dexterity rather than force.
“Right,” he said. “Something funny.” He paused.
“Catriona used to do this thing where she’d count the number of lies I told in a day.
She had a notebook. She’d tally them. And at the end of the day she’d show me the number and I’d have to guess which ones she’d caught.
And the thing is –” He stopped. He looked at the ceiling.
“The thing is, she always missed the same one. Every day. The same lie. ”
“Which one?”
“The one where I said I was fine.”
The kitchen was quiet. The clock above the door ticked. The bad tea steamed.
“That’s not funny,” I said.
“No,” he agreed. “But wait.” He picked up the mug.
He took a sip of the terrible tea and grimaced.
“The funny part is that she wrote it in the notebook anyway. Every day. ‘Ewan said he was fine – TRUE.’ She believed it. Every single day. The most perceptive woman I’ve ever known, and she believed the one lie I told her more than any other, because she needed it to be true.
” He put the mug down. “That’s the thing about love.
It doesn’t make you stupid. It makes you strategic about your stupidity. ”
I laughed. The sound came out before I could shape it – raw, real, the kind of laugh that happens when something is genuinely funny and genuinely devastating at the same time.
I felt the betrayal of it immediately – laughing at Catriona’s expense, at the dead woman’s blind spot, at the notebook and the tally and the lie she chose to believe. The guilt arrived like a reflex.
He watched me work through it. He watched me the way Ewan watched everything – patiently, precisely, already three steps ahead, waiting for me to arrive at the place he’d built.
“It isn’t,” he said. “A betrayal. I told you it wouldn’t be.”
He pulled me in.
His room was on the east wing. I had never been in it.
The door opened onto a space that was warm and cluttered in a way that the rest of the manor wasn’t – books stacked on the bedside table, a laptop open on the desk, a jacket thrown over the back of a chair, three coffee cups in various stages of abandonment.
It was the room of a man who lived in his head and let the physical world accumulate around him like sediment.
“Sorry about the –” He gestured at the cups.
“I don’t care about the cups.”
“Good. Because there might be more under the bed.”
He kissed me in the doorway. Not the careful, measured kiss of Al or the precise, commanding kiss of Lachlan.
Ewan’s kiss was conversational. He kissed the way he talked – with rhythm, with timing, with playful intelligence.
He understood that the space between words was where the meaning lived.
He pulled back and smiled against my mouth and said, “I’ve been thinking about this since the fish and chips,” and I said, “That was weeks ago,” and he said, “I know. I’m strategic about my stupidity. ”
We fell onto the bed. The laptop slid. He caught it without looking – one hand on the device, one hand on my waist – and placed it on the floor. Casual, dextrous. He’d been multitasking since birth.
He was warm. That was the thing about Ewan – the overwhelming, defining physical fact of him.
Where Al was solid and Lachlan was precise, Ewan was warm.
His hands were warm on my skin, his mouth was warm on my neck, his body was warm against mine, and the warmth was not just temperature, it was attention – the focused, verbal, endlessly present attention of a man who talked all the way through and made the talking the most intimate thing.
“Here?” His hand on the button of my jeans. “Or here first?” His mouth at the hollow of my throat. “Tell me. I want to know what you want.”
“Everything.”
“Helpful. Very specific. I admire the precision.”
“Shut up and touch me.”
“See, that’s more like it.”
He undressed me slowly. Not with Al’s reverent care or Lachlan’s controlled authority but with warm, unhurried ease – enjoying every stage of the process and wanting me to know it.
He narrated. Not crudely – with affectionate commentary, the way someone who had spent enough time observing human behaviour found every detail worth mentioning.
“You have a freckle here,” he said, his thumb on my hip. “Right here. Has anyone ever told you about this freckle?”
“No.”
“Tragic. It’s an excellent freckle.”
I laughed against his mouth. The laughter and the desire coexisted – that was Ewan’s gift, the thing he brought that the others didn’t.
With Al, intimacy was sacred. With Lachlan, it was controlled.
With Ewan, it was human. Messy and warm and full of banter and the gorgeous absurdity of two people who liked each other enormously discovering what their bodies could do together.
He was attentive. He was thorough. He was, true to form, verbally present throughout.
His mouth moved down my body with the warm, unhurried confidence of a man who had decided to learn every inch and had cleared his schedule.
He kissed the hollow of my throat, the line of my collarbone, the space between my breasts.
His hand slid down my stomach – warm, certain, the fingers clever and unhesitating – and when he reached between my legs the first touch was light and precise and exactly right, and I made a sound that was not quite his name and not quite anything else.
“There?” he said against my ribs.
“Yes.”
“And here?” His fingers shifted. The adjustment was small and devastating.
“ Yes. ”
“Interesting.” He looked up at me. His eyes were warm and focused and entirely serious beneath the lightness of his voice. “You have opinions. I admire opinions.”
“Ewan. Shut up and –”
“I know.” He kissed my hip. “I know. But I want you to hear this first: you are extraordinary, and I am not going to rush this, and if you tell me to shut up one more time I will take it as encouragement.” His mouth replaced his fingers and the warmth of his tongue was thorough and attentive and narrated in the small, responsive sounds he made against my skin – sounds that told me he was enjoying this, that the giving was not a precursor to the taking but its own complete event, and the completeness of it built me steadily until I was close and he knew I was close because he listened with his whole body.
He pulled back. He kissed the inside of my thigh. “Tell me what you want.”
“You. Inside me. Now.”
“See? Specific. Precise. I’m having a positive influence on you.”
He moved over me. His body settled against mine – warm, lean, the weight of him different from Al’s density, lighter but entirely present.
He entered me slowly and his face changed – the grin dissolved, the charm dissolved, and what was underneath was open and serious and young.
He held himself still for a moment. His forehead against mine. His breathing careful.
“All right?” he said. The word was different now – not banter, not performance. The real question.
“More than all right.”
He moved. His rhythm was fluid and intuitive – not the measured patience of Al or the precise intensity of Lachlan, but something that felt like conversation, a call and response between his body and mine.
He talked through it – not crudely, not constantly, but in fragments that arrived between breaths.
“You feel –” He exhaled. “Christ. You feel –”
“Tell me.”
“Like the answer to something I didn’t know I was asking.
” He kissed me mid-thrust and the kiss was messy and warm and his hand found my hip and tilted it and the angle changed and I gasped against his mouth and he said, “There. Right there. I can feel you –” and his voice broke on the last word and the breaking was Ewan without the performance and the without was devastating.