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Liam didn’t answer. He hadn’t thought they’d be able to keep it quiet this long.
*
Kris returned to the cottage, hoping she could fall into bed and straight into sleep. Instead, as soon as she closed her eyes, she saw the face of a nameless dead girl.
Still, Kris tossed and she turned and she tried for quite a while, but eventually she sat up and turned on the light. Where was her book?
Kris padded into the living area, where her copy of Supernatural Secrets—always a good place to ferret out her next hoax—lay on the couch. She leaned over to pick it up, glancing through the window as she straightened.
Someone stood near the water.
Her heart leaped. The murderer perhaps? How long until he headed for the cottage? Kris wished Edward had handed over one of his guns along with his money.
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As if she’d know what to do with a gun if she had one. Though how hard could it be? Long end pointed toward what you wanted to shoot and then—
“Bang,” she murmured, still staring at the figure near the loch.
The moon shone down like the beam of an alien spacecraft. If she were fanciful she’d expect him to drift upward, captured forever and gone.
Instead, he bathed in the light, as if the moon were water and he was parched. The sheen sparkled in his hair like dew, and suddenly she realized who it was.
Despite the chill and her bare feet, as well as her nighttime attire of T-shirt and flannel pajama pants, Kris slipped out of the cottage and down to the loch.
If he heard her coming, he gave no sign, continuing to stare into the water. The mist had disappeared as quickly as it had come, and the night was clear and cool.
He wore the same thing he’d worn the first time she saw him. Dark jeans, dark short-sleeved shirt—in this climate he should be cold; she was—yet he stood there on the banks of Loch Ness, arms at his sides instead of wrapped around himself like hers were, as if it were the first day of summer in the tropics and not the beginning of autumn in the Highlands.
Kris paused a few feet away, waiting for him to speak, to offer some sort of explanation, but he didn’t. Eventually she had to ask: “Why did Alan Mac say a boy had come to tell him about the dead girl?”
He breathed in and out a few times. Kris didn’t like the hesitation. In her experience, hesitation meant lies. Of course, in her experience, a too-quick answer meant the same.
Hell, be honest. In her experience, damn near everything that came out of people’s mouths was a lie.
“I couldnae find him,” he said at last. “So I snatched a lad, sent him one way, and I went in the other.”
It sounded plausible enough; however— “You have an answer for everything.”
“Shouldn’t I?” He continued to stare at the loch as if transfixed.
“Alan Mac thinks I imagined you.”
“Alan Mac thinks many things. ’Tis his job.”
“Why is it that no one seems to know who you are?”
“I couldnae say.”
“Couldnae?” she mocked. “Or wouldnae?”
He took another deep breath and let it out. “My name is Liam Grant.”
She waited, but he said no more.
“That’s it? You kiss me in the moonlight and all you tell me now is your name?”
“What would ye have me say?”
