Page 53 of Bonetide

“You deserve to be named after all the flowers,” he insists in his rough brogue.

We stare at each other for a moment as I take in the beauty of his face, the slight cleft to his chin, the cut of his jaw, the mouth that’s both hard and soft at the same time, those eyes that pierce through the dimness with an intensity that rivals the fire.

Who are you? I think, as I have been asking myself this since the day I first saw him.

What are you?

“I should go,” I declare. “While I’m still capable of it.”

He doesn’t ask me to stay, which is kinda worse.

He stands when I stand. He carefully takes the velvet blanket from my shoulders, folds it once, and lays it over the back of his reading chair.

Then he walks me to the door.

In the hall, before the door, he stops.

He turns to me, and before I know what’s happening, his hand comes up. He cups my face with one hand—palm flat against my cheek, fingers light along my jaw—and he holds me there. He doesn’t pull me toward him. He doesn’t lean down, or try to kiss me. He just holds me and looks at me, like someone who is trying to memorize someone in case they don’t come back.

And his eyes…his eyes are wet.

I almost miss it. The firelight catches one of them; there is a brightness there that has nothing to do with the fire, and his throat moves once before he speaks

“I have waited a long time for a Galloway to knock on this door. If you come back,” he says thickly, “come back knowing what you are doing, and what you truly want with me. And I will tell you what I want with you.”

He lets my face go, my skin feeling impossibly cold without his touch while buzzing with electricity that seems to flood my whole body.

He opens the door.

I step over the threshold and the rain is still falling, the courtyard is silver in it. I walk back across the flagstones with the velvet of his hand still on my cheek, and my breath caught somewhere behind my collarbone, and I don’t look back until I am at the gateway.

When I do finally look back, he is standing in the doorway, watching me go.

He raises one hand.

I raise mine.

Then I’m on the road, and the rain is in my eyes again, and all I can feel is him.

That one touch wasn’t enough.

Chapter

Twelve

I’m shaving my legs.

This might not seem like much to some, but, to me, it’s the equivalent of putting banners and a wacky inflatable tube man outside of the cottage and announcing that my vagina is open for business.

I haven’t shaved my legs for a long time is what I’m getting at, and the only reason I’m doing so now isn’t because I’m planning on taking a dip in the loch and I want to look good for the drowned wives, but because I know I’m going back to the castle tomorrow.

Alasdair, in his ever-so cryptic ways, had told me that I would come back when I know what I’m doing, and what I truly want with him.

Well, unfortunately for him, for my mother, for my bank account, I’ll never truly know what I’m doing. I think that’s one of the great mysteries of my life that will keep on being a mystery, because at no point have I ever figured anything out, and I’m not sure if that’s going to change in the future. Being Iris Galloway means I’m one giant work-in-progress, a sketch that I keep erasing and redoing in the ongoing pursuit of completion. Of satisfaction. Of something close enough to be perfect so I can sit back and say, I did it! I know what I’m doing! Hang me up on the wall, I’m done!

But at least I know what I truly want from him…

His dick.