Page 67 of Bonetide

He gives me a small smile and pulls a chair close to the fire—not the chair he reads in, a different one—and gestures to it. I sit. He goes to the wooden chest on the side of the room and brings out the velvet blanket again, the crimson with the gold-tarnished crest. He drapes it over my shoulders without asking. The weight settles on me, somehow calming. I feel like there’s something ceremonious about it all.

He sits across from me. He does not sit far; his knees almost at mine.

I run my fingers over the crest. “This crest. What clan does it belong to? Don’t make me google it.”

Those vivid pale eyes study me for a moment and then he nods. “Ah, yes. Google.”

“Yeah, google. When Sinclair came here, you must have given him a last name, one you haven’t given me. So, what’s your last name? What’s your clan?”

He continues to stare and then runs a finger over his chin, as if in thought. “MacCoinnich,” he finally says.

“MacCoinnich?” I repeat, the name pronounced Mac-KEN-ich. “Never heard of that last name before.”

“It’s old. Comes right from this area, from this coast.”

“And this crest?” I ask, looking down at the gold threads.

“It’s a bit worn, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be a mountain in flames. Same as our motto, Luceo non uro, which means I shine, not burn.”

“That’s beautiful,” I comment.

“Are you sure you don’t want something to drink?” he asks, clearing his throat.

“I’m fine, really,” I assure him.

“Then I would like to ask you,” he says, adjusting himself in his chair, “what you’d like to do.”

“What I’d like to do?”

“With the afternoon. With the evening. With the day, foxglove.”

“I don’t know.”

“Aye, you do.”

I look at him. He is watching me with the kind of patience he has been using on me for three weeks. He has no expectations; that much is clear. He’s offering me the day, and waiting for me to tell him what I want to do with it.

I want to get fucking railed, I think.

But instead, I say, “I want to know your house. This castle.”

He looks pleased with that, so I suppose I said the right thing.

“All right, then.”

“I want to see the library. I want to see the kitchen. I want to see wherever you spend your time.”

“It would be my pleasure.”

He stands, looming over me, and offers his hand. I take it. The blanket stays on my shoulders, like I’m a queen wearing a royal cape.

He shows me the library first, a long room behind the one we were in, two stories tall, the shelves going up past my head with a wooden ladder on a brass rail that rolls along the bottom shelves so a person can reach the upper rows.

How very Beauty and the fucking Beast.

The books are mostly old, like really old, but some are new. A clothbound Italo Calvino in English sits on a shelf next to a leather-bound something in Latin. There is a copy of a book about lichens of the British Isles that I actually have back at the cottage, having bought it right before I left the States.

“I have that one,” I say excitedly.