Page 71 of A Scottish Lighthouse Escape

I pressed my lips together. ‘Kind of.’ I threw my head back. Snowflakes rocked past the windows. ‘Joe was running late. He always was. Didn’t matter what the appointment was.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Anyway, I was waiting for him to join me at my book launch, and after an hour, he still hadn’t appeared. He’d got caught up in the office. Well, that’s what he led me to believe.’ The memories of that evening darkened my mind. I took a moment. ‘Anyway, I was starting to get quite upset that he still hadn’t arrived, so I called him on his mobile and he answered.’

Mitch didn’t say anything.

I rubbed my hands together as I sat there. The only sound was our two slumbering dogs and the spitting fire. ‘I told him to hurry up, Mitch. I told him that I was waiting for him. So, he put on a spurt, dashed across the road and a lorry was coming the other way.’ I tried to bite back a gulp in my throat. ‘The driver couldn’t stop. Joe was killed instantly.’

Mitch sighed long and low. ‘Oh, Rosie. I’m so sorry.’

‘Thank you.’

Mitch looked pensive. ‘But it’s not your fault Joe died. It’s circumstances. A tragic accident, whatever you want to call it, but you’re not responsible for what happened.’

‘I thought I was. I was carrying around all this guilt.’ I pushed my hair from my face. ‘I tortured myself. I took on all the blame.’ I cleared my throat. ‘That was until I found out what he’d been doing.’

I sucked in some air. The whiskey was swimming inside me and Mitch’s big, silent support was encouraging me to carry on. I couldn’t believe I was opening up to him like this, but I decided not to question it, otherwise I’d clam up. I spoke again. ‘It turns out he was dashing to see me after having been in bed with another woman who he’d been having an affair with for three years.’

Mitch’s expression collapsed. ‘Jesus.’ He dragged a hand over his curls. ‘I don’t know what to say, except that he must’ve been an utter prick to cheat on someone like you.’

The snow continued to patter against the bothy’s windows. Our eyes sought out one another. I snapped mine away first. ‘Anyway, sometimes you just fall out of love with something and it takes time to readjust to life without it. That’s how I feel about my writing.’

He nodded, a knowing glint flashing through his eyes. ‘I understand that, but if you don’t mind me saying, I get the impression you haven’t fallen out of love with being an author. You just think you should because of what happened, because of how he treated you.’ Mitch flicked me a glance. ‘You didn’t deserve that.’

My head was stuffed with tiredness and whiskey, but my body was trying to fight it. I veered the subject away and onto safer ground. ‘Nobody knows I’m here, apart from my literary agent and my editor. Not my in-laws, other author friends…’ I raised my chin. ‘It’s what I wanted. To just escape and leave everything behind. I didn’t want to be answerable to anyone after what happened. It’s just Bronte and me against the world.’

‘I appreciate that, believe me.’ Mitch’s gaze was earnest. ‘And your parents?’

‘Both gone. Mum passed away two years ago and I lost my dad when I was ten.’

Mitch pulled a pained face. ‘I’m sorry.’ He sat up a little straighter. ‘Both my parents passed away years ago, too.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

His chest lifted. ‘Life ain’t easy sometimes, is it? In fact, it can very often be a pile of shit.’

I made a sound that was something between a laugh and a cough. ‘You said it. You think you’ve got everything sorted out and then it implodes.’

Mitch gave me a thoughtful look. ‘What did Joe do?’

‘He worked in the legal department of my publishers, Jarred Roberts Publishing. That’s where I met him.’

I found the whiskey had really prised opened the gate to my pent-up frustrations, despite my protestations to the contrary. ‘So now you know why I feel it would be hypocritical of me to write about something that I no longer believe in.’

Mitch shook his head and gave me a prolonged look that made my heart give an odd jolt. ‘You don’t believe in romance and love anymore?’

I reddened. ‘Nope.’

‘Why don’t I believe you, Rosie?’

Mitch’s directness, with the slumbering flames in the grate and the soft falling of the snow outside, made me swallow hard.

Feeling temporarily a little more sober, I straightened my back. ‘It’s true. I don’t. Not anymore. I did, but I’m done with it. I won’t be putting myself and my feelings on the line again.’ My voice disappeared. I was gazing across at him. I pushed myself more upright on the sofa. ‘So, enough about me. What about you? How did you end up here?’ I asked him, veering anyway from his line of questioning. I suddenly felt like my armour was being stripped away too fast, too quickly, and I wasn’t ready for it. I was being exposed far more than I’d intended.

A strange expression gripped his face. ‘Oh, I’m quite boring.’

I arched my brows. ‘I find that hard to believe.’

Mitch called Kane over from where he was nestled beside Bronte and made a fuss of him. ‘The fire needs a few more logs,’ he insisted, before vanishing out of the sitting room. ‘I keep a stock of them in a bucket out in the hall.’

Wow. Well, that was an abrupt end to that conversation. What was going on with Mitch? He seemed to go out of his way not to talk about himself. I mean, I could relate to that, especially lately, but his secretiveness was on another level.