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I think back to the shopping spree she took me on before I came to Scotland. We weren’t celebrating, were we. She was buying me those clothes out of guilt.
She knew it would be the last dollar she ever spent on me.
I feel so very alone. I feel the rejection deep, deep in my gut. I hear the front door open. He calls out, “Kitt?” as he’s done every time he’s returned home since he brought me here.
“Just reading in the living room.”
He gives me space, staying in the kitchen. I can hear him making a plate. Is he avoiding me? I hear the electric kettle quietly coming to a boil, but he doesn’t offer me a cup.
Childish.
You know what? He doesn’t get to be childish. If you’re man enough to kidnap a woman, you’re going to have to be man enough to handle her.
Because right now…
I need him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Bayne
I’m sitting at the kitchen table, eating a piece of warm banana bread slathered in butter when Kitt comes storming in the room, waving her phone in her hand. “I don’t really care if you want to talk or not because I just had the shittiest interaction with my mother and nothing in my life is how I thought it was.” She slams her phone down so hard on the countertop, I’m sure she’s cracked her screen.
I hop up from my favored chair to check. The girl’s got no idea how long it’d be before she’d be able to get a replacement out here. The phone is fine.
I turn to her. “What are you doing?”
And she breaks into huge sobs, her hands covering her face, her shoulders shaking.
Seeing her like this, my heart drops and I grab her up. “Come here.”
“I just don’t understand…” she cries.
I take her in my arms, holding her shaking body. She feels so small, so broken as she cries against my chest. “What did she do to you?”
Through her tears she transcribes the texted conversation. I have to say—I think her mom’s plan was solid, anything to get Kitt out of trouble, but I love how tenderhearted this girl is, worrying over her friend’s reputation when Lilly is long gone.
I just hold her, rest my chin lightly on the top of her head, and stroke her hair.
When she’s calmed down, she stares up at me, tears shining in her red-rimmed eyes. “You wouldn’t move away, would you?”
“From where? From who?”
She shakes her head sadly. “I don’t know.”
I think of Eamon. “I want Eamon to follow his dreams, and to be an actor, he’d have to leave the island. But I’ll always be here, right in this same house, so he has a home to come back to.” Is that what she means?
“You’d be a great dad,” she says.
Pride wells up in me. “I think you’d be a great mom.”
“Your dad was bad, wasn’t he?” I don’t answer but she reads the pain on my face all the same. “Really bad. Wasn’t he?”
I nod.
“I’m glad Eamon didn’t have to grow up with a man like him around, so I can kind of understand the bad things you do.”
“Why do any of us do what we do?” I ask, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, damp with her tears. She glances up at me, giving me a soulful look that hits me hard right in the center of my chest. I say, “To protect the people we love.”
