Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
I close the app and decide that I need to do something.
Back in the kitchen, I eye the gauzy light that glows against the drawn curtains. Seems a shame to hide from golden hour.
I open them, expecting to see Alasdair across the bay, but there’s no one. A light breeze has picked up, shaking the herb garden and roses and causing ripples across the loch that looks like it’s been layered with metallic amber paint. Above, the clouds clear fast and the sun heads down toward the horizon behind the castle tower.
I let the light fill the kitchen, then sit at the table and look through the flowers I sorted earlier, picking out which ones to use for my sketches and which ones to use for my flower pressings. Back in the States, I’d use the pressings for resin art and bookmarks and the kind of artsy things I can supplement my income with on Etsy, but I haven’t figured out if I’ll continue my shop here. But the good thing about flower pressings is that they don’t go bad.
I’ve taken out a strand of thistle, the mauve petals bruised from this morning, ready to start sketching it, wilting and all, when I grasp it wrong, and one of the spikes drives into my thumb.
“You fucker,” I swear. You’d think I would be used to getting pricked and poked by flowers, but I’m not, and I swear they’re always out to get me. Sure, this morning I said flowers don’t care if you haven’t slept, but maybe they care a little about being cut, and this is their last form of revenge.
I also said I don’t anthropomorphize vegetation, but here we are.
I head to the sink to wash the blood off my thumb when I get that feeling again. My skin on my spine tickles, the hairs on my arm raising even under my sweater.
I’m being watched again.
You’re being paranoid, I tell myself.
I quickly rinse off my thumb, the blood splashing brightly in the sink, then whirl around.
There’s a motherfucking face at the window.
I open my mouth to scream but the sound catches and kind of gurgles. It’s enough that the face moves back and morphs from what looked like some evil sort of leering to one that’s sincerely apologetic.
And incredibly, ridiculously handsome.
“I’m so sorry,” he says through the window. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Okay, so how about not appearing at people’s windows then?” I cry out, my heart still in my throat.
“I tried knocking but there was no answer.”
“So you decided to snoop around the back?”
“I was going to swim back home and…” he trails off and shrugs. Gives me a sheepish look that borders on a smile.
And that’s when I find myself pushing past all the ludicrous, creepy nonsense, and actually take in the man’s face for once.
As I said: incredibly, ridiculously handsome. So much so that had I known this was what he looked like from the start, maybe I would have actually answered the door. And yet, there is still part of me that knows the good-looking ones are often the most dangerous.
Don’t let him in, don’t let him in.
He’s tall, which I’d already guessed from across the bay, but I hadn’t quite reckoned with what tall looks like from three-feet away through a windowpane. He has to be six-two at least. His hair is black and damp, falling almost to his shoulders, pushed back from his face the way a man pushes hair back when he’s just come up from water. There’s a few days of stubble on his jaw, the kind that suggests he doesn’t bother either way. His features are too symmetrical for someone’s country neighbor, unless one lives near Milan or Manhattan, the cheekbones a little high, the mouth a little full, the bone structure of him so clean it has the quality of something carved from stone.
But it’s the eyes that get me. They’re a pale ice-blue and they have a directness that doesn’t quite match the rest of his polite restraint. They aren’t the eyes of a man in his late thirties or forties, though that’s the age I’d peg him at. I don’t know whose eyes they are, exactly. But they’re looking at me like they have been waiting a long time to do so.
I swallow hard and glance past him at the golden light lighting up the loch in glimmering patches.
“I realize we’ve never seen each other face-to-face,” he says smoothly. “So, I’d like to formally introduce myself now. I’m your neighbor, Alasdair, from across the way.”
And you’re also the most gorgeous man I have ever seen, and I want to climb you like a monkey at a jungle gym.
“Iris Galloway,” I announce, feeling my tongue-tied a little now. Normally I’d ramble on and say something awkward and stupid, but I feel I can’t even find the words in his presence, even with the window pane between us.