“Now who’s making assumptions?” I answer brightly, spinning away and opening my arms. “Everyone has Instagram. Facebook. Some form of social media.”
“Not everyone.”
“The castle has social media,” I retort, turning to face him again but from a distance. “Maybe I’m just vain. Maybe I want people to know I’m just in Scotland and having a fabulous time.”
“And are you?” he asks almost haltingly. “Having a good time?”
I find his concern strangely endearing, which I guess should be weird, given his recent behaviour.
“Instagram doesn’t have to be about the truth,” I hedge. It’s certainly not why I post. I tell people I left Portland because I wanted to travel, but the truth is, I needed to be as far away from there as possible. So here I am, far from home. A whole different person with the Instagram account to prove it.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says. His eyes are so blue as he lifts them to study me. “About a lot of things, but particularly about what you said in my study the other day.”
When he threatened to tongue-fuck you senseless, my mind whispers, causing my insides to tighten in a thoroughly treacherous way.
“You said that you would never become involved with someone you work for.”
“Yeah, I did,” I answer, forcing myself to hold his gaze. “What about it?”
“It made me wonder about your past.” He takes a step to the right, which is really a step closer, resting his shoulder against the stone wall, sliding his hands under his arms. It’s such a casual stance, though something tells me that’s not how he’s feeling at all. “Did something happen to you? Where you worked before?”
“Maybe that’s just a rule I have. You have rules too, remember?”
“Holland.” He drops his head with a deep sigh, the rumble of my name almost disappointed. “My rules went up in flames the night I held you in my arms. The second night,” he qualifies, his head coming up sharp. His eyes burn blue in the gloaming light. “Rules are, after all, made to be broken.”
“Not this one.” I can’t believe I’m saying this when my body aches for his. I find it so hard to tear my gaze away, but I force myself to do it anyway.
Because what choice do I have?
“Am I allowed to ask why?”
I could tell him a beautiful lie. Or I could tell him the ugly truth.
“I fell in love with the wrong man.” I shrug. It sounds so ridiculous. How could I ever have loved someone like him? “And yes, that’s why I left Oregon. Like the saying goes, a tale as old as time.”
“You worked for him?”
“Not like this.” Not as a nanny or whatever I am here at the castle. It didn’t feel like this either. This all-consuming experience. I’d never once feared I’d be burned back then. “He was the principal of the school I worked at. When we broke up—actually, no,” I say with a hard-sounding laugh. “When he dumped me a week before our wedding, I not only ended up alone but I also ended up jobless.”
“You were going to be married?”
“Mm-hmm.” I thought that’s what I wanted.
“And he fired you?”
I shake my head. I could’ve looked for a transfer. I could have moved to another school, but none of that seemed far enough away from the looks and questions. From my humiliation. It’s strange because I’ve been over him for a long time. What I’m not over is how the experience left me.
“I couldn’t go back to work the next week as though nothing had happened. Never mind about my dress or the venue or that my sister had to ring around and tell everyone. I was supposed to turn up to class and smile at him over the coffee pot in the staff room? Nope. That was never going to happen.”
“So you left. You left your family and your home.”
“I couldn’t stay after that. So, yeah, I guess I ran away.” It all sounds so simple. I ran away from the man who jilted me. But it was running away from more than just him. I was running away from myself, from the failure I saw as my own. I could barely stand to be around me, and I certainly couldn’t stand the thoughts rolling through my head. My family has always endured some level of trash talk, and I hated how I’d given the gossips something else to talk about. I didn’t want to be around to see their fake pity, knowing all the while I’d given my family more airtime.
I knew it wouldn’t last.
He was too good for her anyway.
Like mother, like daughter.
Well, screw all that.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“I guess I lost myself for a while, and I didn’t want to be the person people thought I was. But I wasn’t heartbroken, which tells me at least that he did the right thing.” Alexander continues to watch me. I fall quiet, wondering why this has only occurred to me now. I was using him as a shield. Someone to hide behind. Someone to make me seem like someone else.
“Holland.” Alexander reaches out, his fingers ghosting my bare arm as though he’s afraid to touch me right now. The sky is so dark and the wind so wild. I wonder if the land possessed the personality of its owner or if it was actually the other way around.
“I’m fine,” I protest. “He did me a favour because I’ve seen so much more of the world than I ever expected to. I went to London to . . .” Have some fun, my mind says. Though my mouth says something much worse. “To reinvent myself.”
“The Holland I know is perfect.”
“Which just goes to show you don’t really know me at all.” I glance down at the grass stain on my left knee and absently swipe my hand against it.
“I’m trying to know you. I want to.”
“Don’t.” I study the chipped nail polish on my big toe. If I can’t keep the principal of a rural middle school, how the hell could I keep a duke? “Please, just . . . don’t.”
Don’t tempt me.
You’ll only break me.
And my heart couldn’t take that.
“I think this is the most honest conversation we’ve had,” his low tone rumbles.
“Ours hasn’t been a connection of words.” I wince immediately at how that sounded and glance out at the hammering rain so he can’t see my lie.
“I wish I’d done as Isla suggested, insisted really, when I’d discovered you here.”
“You mean you wish you’d left.” I don’t know if that would’ve been better or worse. But when he nods, my heart gives a painful pang, and I discover I already know.
“I don’t mean how you think. If I’d left, I could’ve come back periodically. Weekends perhaps. I could’ve given us time to get to know one another better. Perhaps you would’ve been surer of me then.” His eyes drink me in, but somehow, the set of his mouth seems reflective. “It might’ve worked for you,” he adds, “but for me, there was only one way to go once I found you in my path again.”
As the saying goes, the only path is through.
To push through until we burned to an inevitable end, I guess.
“Something else that’s been bothering me about something you said. You aren’t my type.” Our eyes lock, and I watch as his expression seems to flit through a range of emotions: annoyance, disbelief, disappointment, ending in something that looks like pity. “You’re so wrong, you know.”