* * *
Waouh…
Tout simplement waouh…
Tilly was still a little stunned by what had happened.
She’d always known perfectly well that dragons do not exist, and wanting a man who might slay one for her was only symbolic of a desire to be important enough for someone to be prepared to face danger in order to protect her.
That was exactly what Angus McLeod had just done.
For a split second there, he looked quite intent on slaying a pig if that was necessary.
And a piece of her heart had just melted.
But now he was stomping across the muddy field – and was he holding his head in both hands? As if he was so totally fed up he just wanted to get as far away from her as possible?
It felt like another small piece of her heart had just cracked in sympathy.
It had been a courageous thing to do, coming here to do this holiday alone, given its whole purpose had been to cement his future happiness. Had he known that he might be wigglingthat knife in the wound himself? Was that why he was putting himself through the ordeal – to deal with the heartbreak in one fell swoop and then move on with his life?
Tilly had to admire that kind of courage.
He was walking back towards her now, his face like thunder, and she’d never seen his hair so… rumpled. Sticking up in tufts.
It made him look like a small boy who’d defied an order to comb his hair and had messed it up even more with his fingers.
No… It made him look like a fully-grown man who’d just tumbled out of bed after a night of passionate lovemaking.
There was a lot more than a piece of heart melting now. Something as warm and compelling as coming home when you’ve been too far away for too long was escaping her veins to fill her entire body.
It was almost a sense of finding the place where you knew you belonged.
How ridiculous was that?
Here she was standing in a revoltingly slippery, smelly toilet area that many, many pigs had been using and she was being glared at by someone who was obviously furious withher, this situation and probably life in general, but she was also aware that she was standing on an emotional precipice. One wrong step and she’d be falling head over heels in love with Angus McLeod.
It was just as well that he had shown his disrespect for even those small gestures that were such a vital part of the language of love by dismissing them as no more than performative art.
Oh, he’d jumped through the hoops well enough. He’d made her catch her breath at the evidence of his passion for Moira when he’d said he was only going to do this once, but he hadn’t been talking about the proposal, had he? He’d been referring to all the romantic nonsense that was required to persuade someone to marry him.
He had to bethemost unromantic man on earth.
Perhaps Sophie’s advice – to treat an unseen destination as being hidden by a curve and that the road might, in fact, lead to where she wanted to go – was something Tilly would take on board for the future.
But not this time.
She didn’t even need to see a curve in this road because there was a huge warning sign that was visible before you even set foot on it.
Impasse.
A road that wasn’t going anywhere.
A dead end.
7
The pungent aroma filling Roy’s double-cab Toyota Hilux, which had the balloon packaged and loaded inside the basket currently being secured to the trailer, was making the tension even more unbearable.
