Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 43714 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 219(@200wpm)___ 175(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43714 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 219(@200wpm)___ 175(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
Shifting my weight on my feet I wince.
“And my ankles. I don’t think these hiking boots were a good idea to wear out here.”
He looks down and then up, his gaze seeming to travel over every inch of my body until it returns to my face.
My body trembles just from the look in his eyes.
It’s as though he’s undressing me with his eyes, but I must be imagining it. With our age difference, he probably sees me as a baby – and a stupid tourist baby, at that.
“They never usually are,” he says, and it takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about my boots. “Good boots are hard to find. When you find a pair, stick with them – and buy five pairs so you’ll never have to worry about finding another.”
“That’s good advice,” I say, shifting awkwardly again.
This was odd, wasn’t it? It felt odd. I had been running from him a moment ago and now here I was, my hands in his.
My gaze drifts down to the gun again as if the fight-or-flight part of my brain needs to check that it’s still out of reach, unable to harm me.
He follows my gaze and shakes his head as if to tell himself off. “Sorry, I probably scared you quite a lot, right?”
“Um,” I mutter. He had come running toward me, yelling, with a shotgun. “Yeah, I didn’t know if you were some kind of crazed madman or not.”
The handsome stranger does something that utterly fascinates me.
He blushes.
I couldn’t look away.
“Sorry, again,” he says. “Look, we just get a lot of problems with people trespassing around here. The thing is, this is private land. You’re not supposed to be here. Nobody is.”
“Oh.” I look back in the direction I had just come from, feeling hot shame threatening to rise in my throat and color my face. “I didn’t see a fence or anything – I’m really sorry. If I’d have known….”
“Yeah,” he says, shaking his head dismissively as if I don’t need to worry about it anymore. “I’ve been asking them to put up at least a stone wall or something for years. They won’t listen. I end up having to defend the area a lot. I can see you’re not a poacher or someone intent on destroying our ecosystem here, so I’m sorry for scaring you.”
“People really do that?” I glance around, taking in the beauty of the area again.
We had moved further away from the loch, but the still waters were part of the backdrop, reflecting the sky in an eternal mirror across the horizon.
Yellow flowers dotted the green grass close by the banks, matching the tones of the rocks and stones that littered them, and green leaves, moss, and gorse seemed to be competing with one another to hold the brightest shades.
It was hard, in truth, to pull my eyes away from it.
“How could anyone want to destroy all of this?” I ask, perplexed.
“Sad, but true,” he says with a sigh. “That’s why I have the shotgun.”
I glance at it again. “Isn’t it kind of dangerous to leave that lying around where anyone can grab it?”
He chuckles.
“It’s not actually loaded,” he says. “But if I thought you were the type to try and shoot me, I probably would have held onto it just in case.”
“Oh,” I mutter, and then laugh too, seeing the funny side now. I had been afraid of a gun that wasn’t even loaded. That made the whole situation feel a little better.
“Look, I want to make up for it,” he says softly, bending his head a little to catch my gaze.
The motion makes me realize just how much taller he is than me, enough to make me think about how it would feel to rest my head on his shoulder and have his strong arms wrap around me and….
I give myself a mental shake.
“You don’t need to do that,” I say quickly, not even sure what he was going to offer.
“Please,” he says. “Come back to the house – I’ll get you a coffee. Maybe some cake to get your blood sugar up. On me. What do you say?”
I bite my lip and look up at him.
An incredibly handsome, tall, strong, older Scottish man was asking me, in the sexiest accent I’ve ever heard, if I wanted to have coffee and cake with him.
Why the hell not?
What else was I supposed to say?
“Sure.” I nod. My heart somersaults in my chest when he answers me with a grin.
CHAPTER FOUR
Finlay
I know there is no doubt about it now.
I want her.
I want her so badly that I’m making excuses just to stay in her presence for a little while longer.
It’s a fair distance back to the house, though, and it’s with regret that I realize it. She’s already hurting. But then again, a walk back to the house is shorter than a walk back to the hotel she came from.