Cecilia, eight years before

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She was in a pub. A real pub. It felt a little dangerous, a little naughty. After all, she was only eighteen. Yes, Cecilia understood that she wasn’t really doing anything wicked since the drinking age was eighteen in Scotland rather than the twenty-one it was at home, but she couldn’t help feeling very grown-up and adult.

Until she actually took a sip of a pint.

Blegh.

Beer was disgusting.

She set the glass on the table—she’d try to choke down a little more later since it had cost her close to ten pounds—and pulled out her journal.

Her visit to the cliffs and the gorgeous castle beyond had been the stuff of dreams.

Complete with a gorgeous Scottish hero.

Of course, he’d been a surly Scottish hero, but the world wasn’t always fair.

Her lips curved into a smile at the memory of the man, a few years older than herself, given his build—bulky rather than the lanky leanness of boys her age. Instead, his shoulders had been wide, his waist narrow, and his thighs had threatened to burst the seams of the riding pants he’d worn.

Yup. He’d definitely been yummy.

Though unable to control a horse, apparently.

Which was a definite strike to her fantasy.

Still, she pulled out her sketchbook and stack of pencils. His looks alone warranted at least one page in her journal.

Right after her drawing of the cliffs, but just before the one of the stained glass window from the castle that had stolen a piece of her heart.

She started with the man’s boots, since she’d seen those first—black but coated with mud—and worked her way up, only stopping briefly to thank the waitress who brought her food.

Fish and chips, not haggis. Because while she considered herself to be adventurous, she wasn’t quite without fear of offal.

Offal. Awful.

The two were just too similar in her mind.

So she’d stuck with something closer to her comfort zone. Though honestly, it was the first time she’d ever had fried fish.

Her dad didn’t like fried food, and so she hadn’t been allowed to eat it.

No fries. No chicken nuggets. No donuts.

“That stuff will kill you,” he’d said.

Yeah, it could. But so could living in a stifling environment where every decision, every piece of clothing, every essay and math problem, every stroke in her hundred meter race was broken down and criticized and remarked upon.

She could always get better. There was always something to fix.

Which wasn’t bad in theory. Unfortunately, without a single sentence of praise, “having a growth mindset” was a little challenging. In her parents’ quest for her to always be better, she wasn’t allowed to misstep.

Mistakes were unacceptable. Despite the saying, there was nothing to be learned from them.

When she’d gained five pounds after getting her period, her mother had panicked about her curves. She’d gone from a double zero to plain old size zero and had been on the verge of obesity . . . at least according to her parents.

And—

CeCe sighed because this was so not the point and also because . . . frankly, she was beyond tired of wasting her energy worrying about what her parents said and did and threatened. She had three weeks left in this gorgeous country and she wasn’t going to fritter away any more of her time, already precious and sorely limited, thinking about them and all of the various hurts they’d caused.

This was a new beginning.

She was going to hold on to it tightly with both hands.

So, boots. With mud stains and strong muscular thighs and a rakish lock of black hair slashing across an unlined forehead.

“You know, pints are better when they’re actually consumed,” came a masculine rumble.

Or rather, slid a masculine rumble. As in it slid down her spine, curling deep in her belly, dipping between her thighs.

She froze, one hand resting on the basket, about to grab a fry and deliver the delicious “friedness” to her mouth.

But it was him.

Tall, dark, ridiculously handsome . . . and that sounded like a cheesy line from a movie, but he was there. Her cursing Scottish hero was sitting across the booth from her.

“What are you drawing?” he asked, extending one hand as though to tug her sketchpad in his direction.

CeCe slapped her palm down on the book, thankful that her drawing didn’t yet have a torso, and turned it to the previous page that showed a far safer scene of the cliffs. “I’m not done yet,” she murmured. “But I like to make sketches of the things I’ve seen rather than keeping a journal.” A shrug. “Sometimes a picture can spark a thousand words in your mind. It’s like I look at this”—she ran a finger over the jagged outcropping of rock in her drawing—“and I remember the wind whipping through my hair, freezing cold and cutting through my T-shirt. I remember the hills being so green that it was almost unbelievable. It’s so different from home and more beautiful than I could have imagined.”

Her eyes drifted up, saw that his jaw had dropped open, and his eyes . . . well, they were unreadable.

Idiot.

She clamped her mouth shut, cutting the words off and leaving the air filled with awkward silence.

And she’d take verbal diarrhea for one thousand, Alex.

“Uh, never mind,” CeCe muttered, flipping the cover over to close her sketchbook and shoving it into her backpack. He was staring at her as though she were a specimen under a microscope, some strange phenomenon never before witnessed by human eyes.

“What’s your name?” he asked and she felt her cheeks heat. The question may as well have been, “What species are you?”

Because surely not human was implied.

“Cecilia,” she muttered and then soothed her embarrassed soul by shoving a handful of fries into her mouth.

Eating your feelings definitely wasn’t overrated.

Eat like a lady!

Her mother’s voice blared through her mind, and CeCe silenced it by picking up a piece of fish and taking a giant bite. She chewed and swallowed, watching the man as he continued to stare at her.

Ugh. She wasn’t a flipping sideshow exhibit.

“Like what you see?” she asked testily.

“Yes,” he said simply.

She melted, absolutely melted when he said that three-letter word. As though it were fact, as though there weren’t any strings. And frankly, to not have strings wasn’t something that she’d ever experienced.

“Yes?” she asked once she’d chewed and swallowed. Because she might have been stuffing her face but she wasn’t a total lost cause.

“You’re beautiful,” he said and shrugged.

As though the statement was a simple fact.

When she knew she wasn’t beautiful. She was legs and sharp angles, not curves like her friend Stacy, and she definitely didn’t have boobs like Helen. CeCe was straight. Boys didn’t notice her and men certainly didn’t.

“What’s your name?” she asked, her tone now the one laced with wonder.

“Colin McGregor,” he replied and gently wove his fingers with hers, not caring that they were greasy from the fries and fish, and when he brought her hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to the back of it she lost her heart.

Cecilia Thiele, quite simply, fell in love.