Four
The sun slipped through the seam between the drapes to wake Edan the next morning. He groaned, sat up and looked about the spacious and fairly empty master suite he occupied in the turret of the old inn. His kilt was on the chair where he’d tossed it last night. His boxers were hanging off the post at the foot of the bed. His shirt was lying crumpled up on the floor. Sandra, his late aunt’s long-time partner, had minded this place for years and would not be happy with his slovenly dispatch of last night.
He hauled himself out of bed. He shoved his hands through his hair and padded naked across the room to the en suite. As he walked by one of the windows, a flash of orange caught his eye. Edan paused. He took a step backward and squinted out the window. That was the motor mouth Jenny, judging by the caramel hair. She was on the first tee of the little 9-hole golf course he’d put in two years ago to attract more guests. She was bent over, her hands and feet on the ground, her hair pooling on the orange mat she’d spread beneath her.
What the bloody hell was she doing? Edan squinted as she suddenly moved one leg back, then rose up, lifting her arms high in the air as she arched her back.
Yoga? On his tee box? What time was it? He glanced around to the clock on the mantel above the hearth. Half past six in the morning. Was she mad? It was a bloody golf course! It was too early for controversy, and yoga on a tee box was definitely his idea of controversy. There was a time and place for everything.
He walked on. Stomping, really, still disconcerted and at odds with the world. Between the wedding and her unexpected arrival, he couldn’t seem to find his bearings.
He was being ridiculous, he knew. Yesterday had been a perfect day—the air had been still and crystal clear, the hills around Lake Haven a verdant-green backdrop to the dancing of inebriated, happy adults. The bride and groom had made a beautiful couple.
Edan had known Rosalyn and Hugh since he’d come over from Scotland five years ago to help his aunt with the inn. They’d come a year before him, two ex-patriot Scots who had happened upon work at the inn. At the time, they’d been merely friends. Edan had known almost the moment they’d fallen in love.
Or rather, Audra, his ex-fiancée, had figured it out and had told him.
It had taken Rosalyn and Hugh a while to make their way to the altar. Edan and Audra were supposed to have been at the altar a full three months before them, but that obviously hadn’t happened.
Still, the wedding for Rosalyn and Hugh had been everything Edan could have hoped for them. They were like family to him, especially since he really had none of his own here now. His aunt was gone, his fiancée was gone. All he had was this bloody inn.
The Cassian Inn was an old family estate, left to his American mother and her sister. It had been in the family for generations, but Edan’s mother had met a Scot and married him, and had given the inn to Clara. When Edan was nineteen, his mother lost the battle with breast cancer. Fifteen years later, Aunt Clara was diagnosed with the same aggressive form of cancer and had died two years ago.
She’d left her money to Sandra, and the inn to him.
Edan had grown up in Balhaire, a tiny village in the shadow of an old Scottish Highland fortress by the same name. He was the son of a fisherman who was generally out of reach physically and emotionally. Edan’s older brother had gone into fishing with his father, and Edan had, too. But when Clara had asked him to come to America and help with the inn just before his thirtieth birthday, he’d lept at the chance. He liked fishing—he just preferred it standing in a trout stream, and not out on the ocean. He did not care for deep-sea commercial fishing at all.
The Cassian Inn was a shadow of what it had once been, as depicted in various old photos around the dining room. Modern finishes and the hacking of grand rooms to create smaller, functional ones, had replaced the Victorian charm. The population around the lake had grown up on the north shore, and even the addition of his golf course had not been enough to bring guests around to the south side of the lake. In the last few years, it had become increasingly difficult to keep the inn booked when just five miles around the bend one might have a room at a the Lake Haven Spa Resort, with upscale spa facilities, boats, and nightly concerts.
Still, for his aunt and Sandra, Edan had done what he could. Rosalyn was the head cook and Hugh the head groundskeeper. Sandra kept the inn clean and the old bachelor Ned manned their little farm. Together, they’d kept the inn lumbering along.
Three years ago, Edan had struck up an online relationship with a girl he’d known in Balhaire. Two years ago, just before Clara’s death, Audra had come from Scotland to live with him at the inn. Eight months ago, Audra told Edan she wasn’t feeling it anymore. It wasn’t the inn, she said. It was him. All him. They weren’t on the “same page,” whatever page that was. She missed Scotland, she said.
“Then we’ll go home,” Edan had said instantly. He loved Audra. He had envisioned a quiet life for the two of them, with children eventually, all of them enjoying the relative peace at Lake Haven.
“Aye, Edan, I want to go home. But alone,” she’d said with a wince.
There was, of course, more discussion between them. More of his faults had been succinctly outlined for him. He understood Audra had grown bored of life in America, and maybe he’d been a little bored, too. But he’d been blindsided by the news she didn’t love him anymore. “I donna know if I ever did, if I am being honest,” she’d added, far too casually.
Edan hadn’t know what he was to do with that. They had a wedding date. Everyone back home had booked their tickets to the States to see it. He had plans, concrete plans, which started with a wedding.
But she’d packed her wedding dress and left, and Edan had been stuck listening to the happy planning of Rosalyn and Hugh’s wedding and listening to break-up songs in his spare time.
To the point he couldn’t take it.
To the point he’d decided he ought to be in Scotland. That of course Audra was right, it was too bucolic, too staid. He had come up with the altered plan: He would sell the inn and move back to Scotland and prove to Audra she’d made a mistake. Of course she had. They’d been wild about each other in the beginning. Wires had been crossed, that was all. What was he doing here, anyway?
Yes, Edan had a plan, and he was marching along with it, crossing item after item off the to-do list. He was going back to Scotland to start over.
Today was the last day of his little vacation. The inn would reopen Friday morning for the last bookings, and there was still much work to be done to close the inn down. He planned to reflect on it all with a bit of fishing, perhaps make some mental revisions to the blueprint.
Thank God Rosalyn wasn’t here to badger him about it. She said he spent too much time alone. Rosalyn meant well; she loved him like a brother. She and Hugh were concerned about him. Poor bloke, they said, he lost his fiancée. Poor man, they said, he rarely speaks.
That was just his nature. Jenny was right—he was a man of few words. He didn’t even know how to come up with more words if he were so inclined.
Audra had complained about it. “Why will you no’ say something?” she’d said after one heated argument. Edan had never understood what she wanted, exactly. He did say things. Just not in long sentences. In fact, now that he was alone, entire days could pass without him uttering a word.
God willing, today would be one of those blessedly quiet days.
Edan dressed, grabbed an apple on his way out, and went down to the shed to gather his tackle and waders. His two Scottish terriers, Wilbur and Boz, trotted along behind him, their snouts to the ground. They followed him to the river’s edge past the ruins of an old river mill and a pair of cottage rentals that sat empty.
There was a spot here that he liked very much, a natural outcropping of stones under which trout liked to hide. Old Buggar lived under those rocks. Edan had been trying to catch the brown trout for two years. He’d come dangerously close at the end of last summer, but the bastard had outwitted him time and again. That was disquieting, really, given that a brown trout’s brain was the size of an English pea.
Edan affixed his favorite lure to the line, one his father had given to him long ago. “Never lose it, lad,” he’d said. “This lure will catch the biggest fish, aye?” That particular day with his father was a vivid memory, and Edan was sentimental about the lure. He’d kept it all these years, but he’d never come close to catching the biggest fish with it.
He’d have to bring that up with his father when he saw him again.
He affixed the lure to his line and waded into the river. He cast his line. The lure floated softly along the current—until something nibbled at it, jerking it to the right, and Edan began the slow, methodic reeling in.
The line came up empty.
Old Buggar was hungry, was he? He began to swing his arm to cast again, and had just begun to throw when the dogs startled him by barking wildly. He jerked and cast his arm too wide as he tried to catch his balance and the line sailed into a thick hedge of wild bramble bushes on the shore.
“No! Bad dog!” a woman shouted.
“God save me,” Edan muttered. He turned and scanned the bank. There she was, the woman who couldn’t read a sign if it hit her on her nose, the woman who had taken his only bag of crisps, the woman who bent her body in strange ways on his tee box. And now, she’d caused him to toss his line and tangle it in a bush.
He whistled at Wilbur and Boz as he began to slosh toward his tangled line. “Come, you bloody heathens,” he shouted to them. The dogs obediently turned away from Jenny and trotted back to him.
“Oh, hey! I didn’t see you there!” she called out to him, waving as if he hadn’t seen her, either.
Edan reached the bush where his lure had gone. Sharp thorns were thick in the branches. His line was hopelessly caught, the lure dangling in the middle of the stems. Edan reached into a pocket for a knife, cut the line from his pole and set his pole aside. The lure was in the thickest part of the damn bush. Edan carefully reached in. As he worked to free it, grimacing at the nicks of the thorns, he heard feet clomping toward him on the well-worn path beside the river.
Her legs appeared, visible through the stalks of the bramble. “Are you fishing?”
No, he was playing tennis. “I was.”
“What are you looking for?”
“My lure.”
“What’s it doing in there? I don’t know that much about fishing, but isn’t the lure what the fish tries to get? Maybe you could use worms. I went fishing with my grandfather when I was like, four, and he tried to get me to put a worm on a hook. Disgusting. I never went fishing again.”
Edan could almost reach the damn lure and stretched his arm, but his shirt caught on a thorn.
Jenny squatted down. He couldn’t see her face through the gap in the bramble shoots, but he could see long, wavy tresses of her hair. “Oh, I get it, you lost it. Wow, that’s a lot of thorns. You’re going to hurt yourself, you know. You should leave it. You can buy more at the gas station, I’m sure. They have everything.”
He was trying to concentrate and her chatter was not helping.
Her hand suddenly appeared between the shoots of the bush. She had a leather tie and silver bracelet around her slender wrist that momentarily distracted Edan. “I can get it!”
“No—” Edan tried to grab the lure before it slipped, but he was a moment too late—it sank deeper into the bush. And he had a nice long cut across the back of his hand for it.
“Sorry. I thought I had it.” She withdrew her hand and began to scratch Wilbur behind the ears. Wilbur. The only dog on the face of God’s green earth that did not care to have his ears scratched. Not even by Edan, to whom the dog was ridiculously devoted.
Edan was more concerned about the lure. He decided he’d have to fetch a tool to free it. He washed his hands in the water, then stood up, shielding his eyes from the sun as he looked up at Jennifer Turner.
She was standing just above him on the bank, her legs braced apart, her hands on her hips, lightly swaying from side to side as if she were listening to a song in her head. She had changed from the tight-fitting clothing she’d worn to defile his tee box, and was wearing a silky dress that hung to her knees, a sweater over that and, of course, the hiking boots. Her hair, wavy and golden, hung loosely to her waist. She reminded Edan of the flower child of the sixties—natural and free and a wee bit barmy.
“That’s really too bad you lost it.”
She made him think of sex. Hot, grinding sex.
“Sorry about that. It really sucks because you couldn’t have asked for better fishing weather. I’ve been looking around. This is one gorgeous spot, Mr. Mackenzie. I mean, look at the lake! It’s so many colors of blue, and it glitters, like it’s studded with crystals. And the hills are so green. I mean, seriously, have you ever seen a more beautiful day?”
No. It would have been perfect for fishing. He swept off his hat and pushed his fingers through his hair, hopefully knocking loose all the thoughts about sex. What he needed was a machete. He couldn’t recall seeing one in the tool shed—after all, it wasn’t as if they had to hack their way through the bramble for anything.
“Cool boots,” she said, nodding, as she checked out his waders. “Very hip. They make your look very outdoorsy.”
His waders were not hip, they were a functional piece of his favorite pastime, and he was outdoorsy.
“I’d be outdoorsy, too, if I lived here,” she announced. “But with sunblock. Gotta have that.”
He stepped up onto the bank and looked down at her. She smiled up at him. “Is there a reason you’ve come down to the river, or is this merely a happy coincidence?” he drawled.
“Oh! I almost forgot. Yes, I wanted to ask if there was a bus or something that might take me into East Beach.”
“No.” He picked up his tackle and his pole and began to walk.
“No? Really? I wonder how I’m going to get there,” she said, falling in behind him as he strode up the path. Edan glanced back for his dogs—the bloody beasts were trotting along behind Jenny as if they knew her.
“That’s the big difference between California and here, you know,” she said. “Public transportation. Did I mention that’s where I live? I can’t remember. Have you been there?”
“No.”
“Too bad. Well, anyway, wouldn’t it be great if a bus came out here?” She suddenly materialized next to him on the path, her eyes bright as she smiled up at him. “Hey, that’s an idea. You could ask whoever runs the buses around here to stop at the top of the road, and then it would be easier for people to find your inn.”
Did she honestly think he’d not thought about that? One did not build a golf course without thinking through a thing or two. “No’ enough people for it.”
“Huh,” she said, as if surprised by that. “Then how does everyone get around?”
“The usual way—car.”
“Ah. Is there a driver?”
Edan stopped. “A driver?”
She nodded. “To drive the car. I don’t drive. And I obviously don’t have a car.” She laughed.
“Here’s an idea, then—walk.”
“Walk!” She laughed again. “I can’t walk there. It’s like five miles! Granted, I am in great shape, but I can’t just walk five miles there and then five miles back. First, I’d be gone all day, which normally would be okay, but I really need to send that email to my dad, which between you and me is going to take some time to compose. I have to finesse it, you know what I mean?” she asked, wiggling her fingers. “And I so want a long bath. A soaking bath. I like to take long baths and read. Real books, not an e-reader. I bought this great book at the airport. It’s a thriller. The girl gets on the wrong train and ends up in a place she’s never been. I’m dying to get into it, but I can’t do all that and walk five miles to East Beach and five miles back.” She threw up her hands and dropped them again, signifying that was that.
Edan stared at her. “It’s four miles. No’ five.”
“It is?” she asked, looking at him skeptically. “Well, my point still stands.”
Edan carried on to the shed and left her point on the path with her.
She suddenly reappeared beside him. “I guess I could walk four miles,” she said thoughtfully, following right along. “It’s not that far.”
It was precisely one mile less than the impossible five. Edan put his tackle aside and opened the door of the shed and walked in. He looked around. There was no machete and no pruner.
“I ran a half marathon once,” she said.
He glanced over his shoulder; she was leaning against the doorframe, holding a daisy. A bloody daisy. Where had she found that? Ah, of course—from the garden beds they’d passed. So she’d bent down and helped herself, had she? He’d have to keep an eye on her—he wouldn’t be the least surprised to see her wearing a wreath on her head made from all his daisies she’d pilfered.
“That’s thirteen miles. I was dating this guy who was into running, and it seemed like a healthy thing to do. So I signed up and did it! I had to walk some of it. A lot of it. But I did it. FYI, we aren’t dating anymore.”
“Non-negotiable, was it?” Edan drawled, and passed her in the doorway of the shed on his way to the garden shed a few feet away.
“I think you’re getting it,” she said. “But that was my choice.” She proceeded to explain her brief history of dating a marathon runner as Edan discovered the garden shed was locked. Of course it was—Hugh was very protective of his tools. Bloody key was probably hanging from his belt even now, and Edan wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Hugh had worn the belt on his wedding night.
“And who knows? They might swim across the lake.”
“Aye? Pardon?” he said, turning back to the daisy girl. Except that the daisy was gone.
“The bears.”
What bloody bears? He hadn’t been listening.
“Do you agree with me?”
What was he agreeing to? “Aye,” he said uncertainly.
Her face broke into a brilliant smile. “Fantastic,” she said, and her eyes narrowed. “Except that I didn’t actually say anything about bears or swimming.”
“Did you no’?”
“Nope,” she said pertly. “I was just talking about your adorable little dogs. But then I changed them to polar bears just to see if you were listening,” she said, pointing to his head and making a circular motion with her finger. “It’s a trick I use to see who is paying attention.”
“One I would guess you employ quite a lot.”
“Ooh, snarky,” she said, nodding approvingly. “I like it.”
Aye, she was right. She was a guest at his establishment, the blue streak of words emanating from her lovely mouth notwithstanding, whether he liked it or not. “I apologize. But it’s a wee bit hard to listen to all you say, Ms. Turner.”
Her big blue eyes widened and Edan thought he’d offended her until she burst into gales of tinkling laughter. “I know, right? Don’t look so horrified, Edan. It’s sure not the first time I’ve heard that.”
Edan had to grudgingly admit to himself that he liked her laugh. It was light and almost lyrical. And he liked the way she had little patches of bird’s feet by her eyes when she laughed. “I’ll take you to the village,” he heard himself say.
She gasped with delight. “You will?”
What in God’s name had made him say that? “I need a pruner,” he said. At least that much was true. “The hardware shop is near a market.”
“Thank you so much! I’m just going to grab my wallet!” she said, and skipped off, turning halfway up the path to shout, “Don’t leave without me!”
She continued on, and damn it if his bloody beasts for dogs appeared from nowhere to romp after her.
Now, to determine precisely how he could manage this foray into East Beach without being made deaf by her constant chatter.
A half marathon, indeed.