Chapter 4
FOUR
I’VE ONLY JUST MET YOU
Callum
It was official, I was careening full pelt toward a heart attack before I reached thirty. Probably within the next hour at this rate.
After travelling all the way to London on the hunt for a businessman who refused to return my calls, I was going to have to jump on a plane back to the Highlands. A different pursuit in mind.
The twins, my sixteen-year-old brothers who lived under my roof, were up to no good.
They’d left their ma’s house where they were meant to stay put for the weekend and neither of them were answering my calls.
I’d cut their bloody phones in half when I caught up with them.
They’ve scarpered, over to you, read the text message Patricia sent half an hour ago while I’d been flat on my back hefting weights, and now she wasn’t answering me, either.
I pictured the woman finding her spare room empty, rolling her eyes, and returning to her snug bed with her new husband and new baby daughter.
Not that I blamed her. The boys drove me to distraction, but I had the space and time for them.
The havoc they’d wreak on her neat Edinburgh home would be second only to a hurricane dropping by for tea.
The twins would give a saint a stroke.
“For fuck’s sake.” I sent yet another message as we readied to leave the gym. “We’re going to need to go back early. Check flights, will ye? I’ll call Gordain and see if he’s around to go chase them down.”
James made a humming noise, staring at his own phone.
Then his eyebrows pulled in. “No need. They’ll be home before we get there.
” He pushed the glass door to the gym open ahead of me, and we entered the cooler reception.
“Look. Ally shared a picture of his coffee. The location reads Pitlochry. They’re driving back. ”
I blinked in surprise at the screen held in front of me. For one, that my friend had social media accounts. My youngest brothers were rubbing off on him. For two, he was right. Pitlochry was on the way home to the Highlands from Edinburgh. The twins were heading back to the castle.
My pulse rate reduced a dram, and I made my mental search party stand down, but I huffed a breath in frustration, trying to dislodge the fear of them getting hurt.
“Aye, but that’s nae the point. I told them to stay.
It was two days. Not even that. How hard is it for the wee beggars to follow orders? ”
James chuckled, and we made our way across the lobby.
An arsehole in a suit, importance stamped all over him, tried to get in my way, until he looked up and thought better of it.
Good, because I wasn’t in the mood. I glared, and the man ducked around me.
I had a shower and a hearty breakfast in mind, to power myself up for the day ahead.
Then my friend laid his hand on my arm.
“Do you recall what you said this morning?” James placed the words carefully, something like enjoyment playing over his face and into his formal speech.
Now, I knew he was changing. In the first weeks of him living with us, I’d barely got him to crack a smile.
Now, a few months under my mentorship, he was almost grinning as he said, “That I wasn’t to let you make a fool of yourself over the woman who’d told you no twice? ”
I drew my eyebrows in. What was he getting at? Mathilda had said she was leaving early, and I hadn’t chased her down despite every bone in my body telling me to.
Then my heart jumped as I caught his drift and I swung my gaze around. Holy Christ on a bike. Sitting pretty at a low table was Mathilda. Still here.
Adrenaline jolted me.
I cleared my throat. “Forget what I said. Do you think… I might just…”
“I’ll keep trying the office number. Why don’t you go and say hello?
Maybe it will be third time lucky.” James patted my shoulder and headed over to the stairs.
I didn’t need telling again. Ideas of taking an earlier flight home to bash my brothers’ heads together left my mind like they were never there.
My strides ate the ground.
It didn’t matter how complicated my life was—I wasn’t lying to her when I’d said I’d no time for anything, let alone asking out a beautiful woman who lived in a different country—I knew when I’d made a mistake.
I was more than man enough to admit my faults, and I knew to listen to my thumping heart.
My hands had shaken as I’d tended to her poor ankle. My pulse had raced when I’d placed my coat around her while we’d waited in the cold.
She’d been in my dreams, before and after the alarm. Pretty eyes and long legs I couldn’t avoid noticing. If that wasn’t a clear enough message, who knew what would be. I had let her walk away without even trying. Not good enough. Not by a mile.
At the last moment before I reached her table, I recalled I was wearing my gym clothes. Skin tight Under Armour. And I was sweaty from my head to my balls from working the weights.
I stopped two feet away and linked my fingers in front of my shorts.
Mathilda’s polite smile of recognition broadened with amusement, and she held up a finger to pause me while she finished her call.
Shame to say, but I hadn’t noticed the phone in her hand, only the blonde spiralling curls of her hair and the way they tickled the curve of her neck.
“You’re still here. My damsel in distress,” I murmured.
“Sorry, Dad,” Mathilda spoke into the phone. “I’m not free this morning. There’s someone here I need to talk to. Bye.”
With an over-emphasised action of irritation, she cut off the call even though I didn’t think the other person, her father, had finished talking. Mathilda tossed the device into her bag. Then she drew a long breath.
So, her da was a problem. I logged the information away.
“My knight in shining armour. Looking a little warmer now.”
I had any number of troubles. From the backtracking bastard I’d force one way or another to meet with me today, to two missing teenagers, but my priorities shifted as Mathilda gestured at the too-small chair opposite her.
The invite couldn’t be ignored. I dropped into it. The fake leather creaked, and my muscles bunched.
I bounded right back up.
“If I can shower and change in ten minutes, will ye still be here?”
Mathilda blinked.
“Whatever your plans are, shift them. Have breakfast with me,” I demanded, aware I was looming over her and barking orders. What the hell was wrong with me? “I mean to say,” I started, casting about for better words, but she held up a hand.
Her face, finely made and with schooled features, tipped up to regard me. Humour lit her eyes. “Did you just ask me out again? Even though I’ve turned you down twice?”
“Aye. I ken what you’re going to say, but I have to ask. Persuade ye, somehow.”
“I told you I can’t date.”
“Neither can I. Come anyway. Tell me why.” I had a burning need to know what her complications were. A compelling urge to fix them.
I’d been a big man from the time I was a thirteen-year-old boy, and now I had all the eloquence to match. It was like I’d never met a woman before. She’d send me away, and rightly so.
“Ten minutes, Mr McRae. I’m free for an hour. But it isn’t a date. Just breakfast.”
Time slowed, and my pulse pounded in my ears. Was that…? Had she…?
“Hadn’t you better get going? Don’t keep me waiting.”
Fuck me. She’d agreed. “I’m a lot of things: stubborn, impulsive, and overbearing,” I said in a strange amount of oversharing. “But I have never, ever let anyone down.”
She fought a smile and checked an imaginary watch on her bare wrist. Right. With a long last look, I was away.
Mathilda kept her cold fingers in mine as we entered a half-empty hotel restaurant, and I had the urge to pull her into a hug to warm her bones. After I’d flown down the stairs, I’d taken her hand like I’d had no choice, leading her through the foyer.
A chirpy waiter seated us by the window, looking out on a dirty grey street, and my pang of missing home grew stronger. My mountain, my loch, my open space and sky. I wasn’t suited to being in town. This wasn’t what I was built for.
The lass lived in a city. Bristol. Almost the farthest city in the opposite corner of the United Kingdom from mine. But I was never a man to be daunted by obstacles. And at least it wasn’t the U.S.—I’d picked up a hint of an accent.
“You have a bonnie lilt to your voice. Not solely English.”
“You can tell? My mom is Californian, though we’ve always lived here. Dating would be even more problematic across five thousand miles.”
With a huff of a laugh, I placed my phone next to my cutlery, and Mathilda eyed it.
“I dinna mean to be rude, but I’ve a need to keep my phone in sight. I’ll ignore it for all but one call I’m waiting on.” The twins had yet to open my messages, but when they did, they’d know better than to ignore me.
“Work?”
“Family. A wee problem I’m trying to sort out.”
Her shoulders lowered, and she slipped her smart coat from her shoulders, tucking it on the chair next to her.
The waiter reappeared and took our order and, as he left, Mathilda checked out my hand as I replaced the menu.
Sneaky. I caught her eye and bit my lip, enjoying the hint of pink that flooded her cheeks.
“You said family, I heard wife. You’re not married, then?”
“Never tried it, but I’ve only just met you.
Give me a chance,” I joked, but the pensive look she’d been carrying since the lobby intensified.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that she might be hitched, as I’d say she was a few years younger than me, but I slid my gaze to her hands to carry out the same check.
Bare. Good.
Eight years ago, at eighteen and scarcely a man, I’d become laird and master to the McRae ancestral estate, only my instincts and brawn on my side. With three younger brothers, a stepmother on the brink of a nervous breakdown and near bankruptcy from Da’s death, I still held it together.
Instincts kept me going and served me well. They could not be wrong for the gorgeous woman in front of me who regarded me like I was a puzzle she had to figure out.