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It was hard to believe that only twenty-four hours had passed since Finley and I quarreled. Already, the episode seemed a lifetime ago. What was fresh and real, however, was the memory of how he had carried me into the house en route to our night of passion.
I knew the term coitus interruptus. Unfortunately, there was no good description for what had happened to Finley and me. We’d never gotten past the first kiss. Thanks to Cinnamon’s antics, I would never know if intimacy with Finley Craig was actually as thrilling as the anticipation.
I stood at the window beside the front door, my palm pressed to the glass. Cabin fever set in with a vengeance, along with a healthy dose of paranoia.
It occurred to me in the midst of my mental gymnastics that I was well on my way to an old-fashioned fit of the vapors. There was no one around to see me have a meltdown, so why did it matter?
Since it was far too early to go to bed, I perused Cedric’s single bookshelf for something to read. I had my Kindle, but I wanted to preserve the battery for emergencies.
The choices in my current abode were limited. The Bible. A Scottish version of the farmer’s almanac. Several lurid crime novels. No, thank you. And last, but not least, five or six volumes of folktales.
At least, that’s what I called them. I guess if you were an old man from Scotland—like Cedric—they were simply stories.
I picked up the fattest of the lot and reclaimed my rocking chair. Though in the beginning, I had to force myself to absorb the words on the page, soon I was drawn into a world of fairies and witches and changelings and pagan dances under the harvest moon.
The Gaelic heritage came with a healthy dose of superstition and whimsy. Some of the stories made me smile. Others sent a shiver down my spine. My favorite was a tale so skillfully crafted, I found myself wanting it to be true. It was about a farm lad spirited away every night by a witch who put a magic bridle around his head and turned him into a horse.
The crafty witch forced him to gallop across the moors until he was dead exhausted. Then she led him home to his farmhouse, took off the bridle, and tucked him back into bed. Every morning the poor lad was gaunter and more ill than the day before. The boy’s brother began to suspect magic afoot. So one night he slept in the brother’s bed and let the witch take him.
The same sequence of events occurred, but when the witch stopped by the farmhouse of one of her evil acquaintances, she put the horse in a stall in the barn. The wily brother in horse form chewed off his own bridle and was changed back into a man. He slipped into the house and killed the witch and her cohorts. Only then did the other brother begin to recover from his mysterious illness.
I closed the book and stared into the fire, trying to imagine a time when every inexplicable twist and turn in life was explained by the work of unseen creatures, malevolent ones at that. No electricity. No hospitals. No instant communication with everyone else in a person’s life.
The entire world likely consisted of a few square miles where a man or woman was born, lived, and died. The book slipped from my lap. I let it fall, stricken by the knowledge that I had come to Scotland in search of a life that wasn’t even my own. I wanted to be someone else. Not the heiress. Not the dutiful daughter. Not even the friend who paid for an expensive trip.
I was thirty-two years old, and I had no idea who I was or who I wanted to be. What kind of messed up head-game was I playing with myself? Photography? A lonely house in the middle of nowhere? What did I expect to find on the Isle of Skye? A personal rebirth? A miracle?
The fire had burned down to nothing while I sat and rocked. I felt empty inside. Numb. Somehow, Finley had seen the truth and called me on my bullshit. Somehow he knew that my quest for adventure and my own Jamie Fraser was a cover for the fact that I had no idea what I wanted.
My whole life up until this point had been scripted for me. Even though I had moved out of my parents’ shadow long ago, I had never quite found my niche. Part society belle, part modern philanthropist, I was a walking, talking cliché.
