Page 61 of Bonetide

“I’m coming in.”

His face contorts, and he looks both apprehensive and pleased. He doesn’t say yes, please, but he also doesn’t say no, don’t. He stands there with the water gleaming around his ribs, and watches me start to undress.

I’m quick about it. I’m quick about it because I know exactly what my body looks like in this light, and I know that quick is the most flattering. The last person I undressed in front of was Ryan, and I don’t have the body I had when I was first with him. I have softness in places I used to have firmness. I have the white lines on my hips from when I gained and lost weight in my twenties. I have the small belly that no amount of walking can lessen, but stress sure does know how to add to it. But the sundown is being kind to all of it, and if I am decisive, I can be in the water before he can find any of the parts of me I would rather he didn’t peer at too closely.

With my clothes off, I leave the pile on the flat rock and get straight into the water with laser focus. I try not to think about how dark it is, what could be in there—never mind Nessie; the last thing I want is to step on mussels or a salmon—or how deep it is. I just go, the water sloshing at my legs.

I shriek like a banshee.

No surprise—it is cold as fucking hell. It punches all the air out of me in one breath, the cold going up to my hips and then to my ribs and my breasts as I keep walking out. I hyperventilate slightly because my body is not under my command anymore. I just keep moving. If I stop, I’ll panic and flounder, and then I’ll be a naked embarrassment.

I get out to where he’s standing, chest-deep. He reaches for me before I quite reach for him.

I’m so cold that the warmth of his hands feels like fire. His arms come around me, one across my back and the other under my arms, and he pulls me close to him in the water, and the long press of his body against mine is—there is no other word for it—hot. He is so warm in the cold water that I cling to him without deciding to. Also, because he’s nice, and what was I saying earlier about climbing him like a tree?

“Christ, you’re freezing,” he says. His face is so close now I can’t look anywhere else. His hair is dark and slicked back, water beading along his lashes, the wet glinting at the line of his jaw and the small hollow at his throat. The sundown is doing ridiculous things to him—gold and burgundy in the wet of his skin, the high cut of his cheekbone catching the light, the cleft in his chin holding a small bright drop of water. He is impossibly beautiful like this and I feel dazed in response to it.

“It was warmer at the cottage,” I mumble, willing my teeth to stop chattering.

“First time in a Scottish loch?”

First time with a Scottish man too, I think.

“Aye,” I say with an exaggerated accent. “It’s fuckin’ freezin’.”

“You get used to it,” he says with a slight curve to his lips.

“You’re warm,” I point out.

“Aye, that I am.”

“But you’re like, really warm. How are you so warm?” Even still, I can practically feel the heat radiating off him. On land, he’s quite cool to touch, but underwater, he’s like a furnace.

“I don’t know,” he replies.

But I know he’s lying. It’s not even a good lie—I don’t know, about his own body, from a man who seems to know everything? I add it to the list, the one that’s getting long: the things this man won’t answer straight, the questions that hit him and slide off like rain off wax.

And then, the way it keeps happening whenever I’m near him, the wanting-to-know, the endless questions I have for him, my relentless curiosity just… loosens. Lets go of me. Like the warmth itself is talking me out of it, or his grip around me, or that dreamy look in his eyes. It’s not even that he looks dreamy, no his gaze is as intense as ever, but when I look into his eyes I get this sensation that I’m the one in a dream. And somewhere far off, the sensible version of me—the one safe on the shore, fully dressed, not wrapped around a beautiful stranger in a haunted bay—is pointing out that once again he evaded my question.

But I’m not on the shore. I’m out here, wrapped up naked in his arms, in a loch that should be killing me with cold and isn’t, and I let it go. And every time I let it go, is another moment when the truth slips right past me, and in its place lies something more dangerous than not.

He holds me against him in the water, his warmth going into me through every place we touch, and the cold of the loch continues to slowly losing its grip. My face is against his throat. I can smell him properly for the first time, his skin in front of me without fabric between us, the salt of the water on him, and something underneath the salt that is doing things to my brain.

He smells like cold water and warm smoke and something sweet underneath that, like wood that’s been burning a long time. I want to drown in it.

I press my mouth against the place where his throat meets his shoulder and breathe him in. He makes a small sound, his hand at my back tightening. His cock, this always-present behemoth, twitches, making itself officially known.

“There’s my foxglove,” he murmurs. “You have no idea how dangerous you can be. How badly I want things from you that I’m not allowed to have yet.”

I lift my head and look at him curiously. His face is close enough that the tips of our noses touch briefly. His eyes are doing the thing again, the vivid ice-blue almost gone, the dark center wide. He has me lifted slightly so the cold doesn’t get to my chest, and I can feel the long hard line of him against my hip under the water. In all the magic—and horniness—of the moment, I almost forget what transpired today. And though it will break the spell, I have to know.

“Tell me about Sinclair,” I demand, feeling like I had to fight through fog to ask the question.

He breathes out. He puts his forehead against mine, which makes my heart skip several beats, and then he starts.

“He sat in my front parlor, took my whisky, and made it clear he wasn’t there to charge me. Said he just had some questions. He asked me if I’d been on the road to Ullapool in the last two months, or to Applecross. I said I had not. I said he was welcome to check any CCTV of my car if he wanted. He asked me if I knew any of the missing women. I said I did not. He asked me where I was on the night the body washed up at Gairloch.”

“And?”