Magic of Winter Read online

  Table of Contents

  Homecoming

  Blindness

  Dark House

  Dumbstruck

  Simple Words

  Cowardice

  Darkness

  Empty Spaces

  Challenge

  Mistakes

  Ambition

  Battles

  Escaping

  Hopes

  Changes

  Courting

  Respect

  Apologies

  Glass Houses

  Shards

  Falling

  Moments

  Fear

  Promises

  Sweetness

  Gifts

  Spring

  A Heartfelt Thank You

  Author’s Note

  Upcoming Books

  Free Book Offer

  Adult Fiction Available Now

  Young Adult Fiction Available Now

  Praise for Lake of Destiny

  Praise for Compulsion

  Acknowledgments

  About Martina Boone

  Copyright

  For Hailey, my beloved cheerleader.

  Homecoming

  “Lilting wildly up the glen;

  But aye to me he sings a song;

  Will ye no come back again?”

  Carolina Oliphant Nairne.

  aka Mrs. Bogan of Bogan

  Like the dusting of snowflakes falling around her, a sense of homecoming settled over Cait as she turned off the highway and drove into the glen. Fifteen months of exile swept away. The swelling snow-capped braes that rimmed the valley, the blue-ice sheen of the frozen lochs, the smoke curling from the handful of homes and businesses that lay along the one-lane main road passing through Balwhither village; Cait loved every inch so much it hurt. Beneath the holiday lights that were just beginning to shine in the gloaming and the last rays of winter sun that painted the clouds in scarlet, it all looked just as her heart remembered.

  It should have been different. She should have been different. The realization that nothing had changed, that she hadn’t changed, left her chilled.

  As if she sensed Cait’s distress, the cat in the carrier beside her gave a plaintive Siamese wail. Because there was no ignoring Mrs. Bogan of Bogan when she wasn’t pleased, Cait eased her finger through the grating before the protests could grow any louder.

  She stroked the velvet chocolate-colored nose. “Be patient a wee bit longer, love. We’ll be there soon enough.”

  Mrs. Bogan flattened her ears and sent her mistress an arctic, cross-eyed stare of abject misery.

  Cait smiled faintly, but she was fairly well sick of being trapped in the car herself. For miles now, she’d craved a hot shower and an early bedtime almost as much as she needed the reassurance of seeing her father face-to-face. After he’d rung to cancel his trip to London the night before, she had barely slept.

  She’d been in the mini-kitchen of her cupboard-sized bedsit above an Indian restaurant north of Croydon, doing her best to figure out her mother’s holiday shortbread recipe as a surprise for his arrival when she’d picked up the phone. “Are you nearly ready, then?” she’d asked. “What time are you leaving in the morning?”

  “I’m sorry,” he’d said, his voice quieter than the booming rumble that usually came from burly chest, “but I’ve bad news to deliver. Mairi’s off sick with flu and Kirsty is due to have her bairn soon. She can’t work more hours at the Tea Room, so I won’t be coming down.”

  Cait had gone stiff, not because of the news so much because of the tension she sensed. “Close up, then. Come down anyway. No one will notice much if you close between now and Hogmanay, and I’ve made a long list of all the out-of-the-way places I want to show you. Things we can do. I’ve hunted out some second-hand bookshops, too, where we can pick up new books for the lending library and send you home with your car fully packed.”

  “I can’t, Caitie.” Her father hesitated. “The glen is fair full of tourists now, what with one thing or another. I can’t afford to miss out on the income.”

  “Then I’ll come home and help,” Cait said, her stomach sinking at the thought.

  “You don’t want to do that. We’d have no real time to see each other.”

  “I won’t let you be alone for Christmas.”

  “And I won’t have you driving all the way up here, spending your hard-earned money, only to be miserable. Consider it. With events in the village nearly every night, you’ll not be able to avoid seeing Brice.”

  Cait’s stomach clenched at the sound of her ex-fiancé’s name. Even after fifteen months there was both pain and pleasure in it. But she could manage. “I’m over all that,” she said. “I can’t stay away forever.”

  “Come next year, then.” There was a note of something akin to desperation in her father’s voice, and Cait had the same niggling feeling she’d been harboring for a while in their daily conversations, that no matter how much he denied it, there was something not quite right.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong at home apart from Mairi’s flu?” she asked. “What are you trying not to tell me?”

  “What could be wrong? Och, you’re getting to be as much of a worrier as your mother, God rest her. Now I had better ring off—”

  “Fine, but I’ll see you two days from now, by dinnertime,” Cait had said, “and that’s the end of the argument. We can go to the tree lighting in the village together, the two of us.”

  She’d rung off before he could protest more, and she’d finished baking the cookies and done a round of nervous cleaning all around the flat. But after going to bed, she’d lain awake in the dark and realized she didn’t believe a single word he’d said.

  With school out for the break, surely there should have been someone who could come in to help at the Library and Tea Room? And outside of the high season in the warm months, business was never brisk. The village had been working to change that, but even so, there would be few enough visitors willing to brave the wilds of the Scottish Highlands at Christmastime. She’d known that at the time her father said it, and looking around now at the quiet glen, she confirmed it.

  Whatever was keeping her father in Balwhither had nothing to do with flu or tourists. Cait would wager a bottle of Donald Fletcher’s favorite Dalwhinnie single malt on that.

  Her hot shower would have to wait a little longer.

  “We are going to need to take a detour, you and I,” she said to Mrs. Bogan, pushing her antique Mini Copper a little faster. “I’ll make it up to you later with extra fish.”

  Accustomed to being waited on hand and paw, Mrs. Bogan was unimpressed. She averted her narrow face and cursed Cait with a string of expletives that required no translation.

  Cait’s half-smile didn’t last very long. The stretch of road she was traveling was too close to the turnoff toward the parish church and the ancient cemetery.

  In the fading light, snow dusted the tops of the gravestones like confectioner’s sugar and lay undisturbed along the track, giving silent testimony to the absence of any visitors coming to see the grave of Robert Roy MacGregor, whose already legendary status Liam Neeson had only elevated on the movie screen. But that wasn’t the grave that was on Cait’s mind. Her mum and her own Robbie and both lay buried in the newer cemetery behind the modern church, her brother dead these past three years. When Cait had last set foot in Balwhither, the heather had been in full bloom on the braes and her mother had been newly laid to rest. Cait had left the burial with her heart broken only to have it broken again by Brice MacLaren the very next afternoon.

  She let out a shaky breath. How was it possible to still feel so much after all this time? Pain and joy and grief and rage so thick they all blurred together? Shouldn’t she have a be
tter grasp on healing?

  Shaking her head, she sent another sidelong glance at Mrs. Bogan. “You see? This is why I’ve stayed away. Maybe Dad wasn’t wrong in thinking I wasn’t ready.”

  Well, she’d have to make the best of it. Come New Year’s Day, she and Mrs. Bogan would drive south again, back to London where no one would dissect her every misstep and mistake and speculate about why she’d left Brice a month before the wedding. And if, a small voice in Cait’s head protested, such freedom came at the price of a cramped bedsit with broken heating and sky-high rent and no one she trusted enough to so much as feed her cat, that was fine. Brilliant. In London, she didn’t run the risk of having to face Brice himself.

  Her father was right. At this time of year, there’d be no way to avoid the man.

  “Still, I am an adult,” she told the cat. “How hard can this be? I will be perfectly polite. I’ll smile and keep my composure. And I won’t waste a second feeling sorry for myself. Not one wee bit.”

  She drove on, and at the intersection of the only two roads in the village, she kept her foot on the brake barely long enough to scan the cars parked in front of the Last Stand Inn and Tavern, the whitewashed inn that had been expanding room by room since before the first of the Jacobite Risings. Brice’s old Toyota truck was nowhere in sight, so either he was still working at the garage, or he’d driven down to the pub with someone else. With luck, that meant Cait could dart into the Tea Room, find her father, and get back home for the hot shower she’d been craving without seeing so much as a whisker of the cheating snake.

  Facing him in person wasn’t the only obstacle, though. The memories were impossible to escape now that she was here. The high rock wall at the back of the Inn’s courtyard was where Brice had kissed her for the first time when she was ten. A few yards later, an empty stretch of snow-covered grass led down to the side of Loch Fàil, the long thin lake that ran through most of the glen until it met the smaller, plumper Loch Daoine. Between the two, a narrow peninsula held the stone where the legend of the Beltane “Sighting” had been inscribed so many centuries ago that no one remembered who had etched it there. Cait was one of the few girls in the glen who had never lined up on the banks of the loch on Beltane morning, hoping to glimpse the face of the man she was meant to love. Not because she didn’t believe, but because she didn’t need help from beyond to tell her what she’d been certain she knew already.

  Jaw set, she turned into the carpark for the Library and Tea Room across the road and pulled to a stop in front of the building that had been so much a part of her life, her mother’s life. Of their life together. It seemed impossible to think her mum wasn’t still there, waiting to dispense, as if by magic, the perfect book to anyone who drifted through the door for a cuppa and a scone or a bit of cake. And Cait couldn’t helping remembering a moment, not long after her mother had fallen ill, one of those rare times when the Tea Room was empty of both villagers and tourists. Like now, the snow and the sun had both been coming down, and her mum had stood with a pencil behind her ear and her favorite blue apron tied over her slacks, steam from the cup cradled between her hands rising in curls to fog the pane of glass.

  “We could close early,” Cait had said, coming to stand beside her. “The snow will keep everyone away.”

  “Don’t ever forget to appreciate this—all of it.” Her mum had gestured across at the view of the glittering lochs, and she’d set down the cup and turned to Cait. “Winter’s a gift in the Highlands. The big cities change, the whole world changes, in the wink of an eye. But here in the glen, the winters are a reminder that, as bleak and dark as life can seem, we’ll get through it. There’s beauty in the worst of things.”

  That could have summed up Morag Fletcher’s entire life. She’d always looked for the best in every situation, in every person, and her curiosity was insatiable. She’d dreamed of traveling, of seeing all the places she’d read about in the books she loved, but Cait’s father had never had any interest in leaving the Glen. When his own father died and they inherited the old Fletcher house together, instead of living here and keeping the views to herself, Morag had talked him into converting the house into a tea room and private lending library full of cozy rooms where all the people of the glen could read about the places she herself would never visit.

  The structure hadn’t changed much since Cait had seen it last. Apart from the wooden trim that her mum had painted shocking pink to attract the tourists, it still looked like a grand old home with pale gray stone walls, mullioned windows, and a high gabled roof. That pink color was peeling and a little faded, but the LIBRARY AND TEA ROOM sign above the door still looked fresh in the gold and silver paint that had been one of the last projects Cait and her mum had done together.

  There should have been cars in the lot at this time of day, and customers. Not a single light shone in any of the rooms, though, and through the windows in the main dining area, Cait could see that someone had stacked the tables and chairs in the middle of the room. Clearly, the place hadn’t been used in quite some time.

  A painful knot settled in her midsection.

  She had known, deep down, that the Tea Room wouldn’t—couldn’t—be the same without her mum. Her father didn’t have the same gift for books, nor the same passion or anything approaching Morag’s knowledge. But he’d always worked harder than anyone Cait had ever known, and on the rare occasions when he chose to keep his opinions to himself, he could charm the knickers off an elephant. The idea that, after all his protests of keeping it open, the place would be closed when it should have been full of people had never occurred to Cait.

  Easing herself out of the car, she tried to keep from panicking. A bitter wind off the lochs raised goosebumps on her flesh, and she fought to suck in a lungful of air so cold it burned.

  That was good, though. She needed to clear her head before she went and faced him. Turning her back on the empty building, she strode across the street.

  Hadn’t she known for months something was wrong? Why had she let herself believe his assurances? He’d always been as stubborn as that old orange bull of Davy Grigg’s that Brice and his cousin Brando had tried to tip in the pasture one night when they were ten. And though she’d wanted to hope that things had improved between them since she’d walked away from Brice, maybe she’d only been fooling herself.

  In a way, that night of bull-tipping had been the root of all the problems. Amid the disaster that prank of Brice’s had set in motion, a nine-year-old Cait, half bookworm and half wild, untamable tomboy, had fallen head-over-heels in love with him and never fallen out again. She’d loved the way he didn’t back down even when everybody blamed him, the way he’d tried to protect his cousin Brando. The courage and defiance of him. But everything she admired in him all those years, her father had seen as unsteadiness. A lack of moral fiber. The way she’d championed Brice, defended him, had driven a wedge between her dad and herself.

  And, of course, Brice had eventually proven her father right. What she’d taken for courage had turned out to be nothing more than selfishness and lack of responsibility.

  She refused—refused—to put any more distance in their relationship because of Brice MacLaren.

  If her father was afraid she would fall right back into Brice’s arms, he couldn’t be more mistaken.

  How dare he lie to her? What he’d told her wasn’t a simple fib. He’d told her an out-and-out porker about needing to keep the Library and Tea Room open, and to cover up for that, he’d done his best to convince her not to bother coming home.

  The man had explaining to do.

  And the explanation had better be a good one.

  Blindness

  “Had we never lov’d sae blindly,

  Never met—or never parted—

  we had ne’er been broken-hearted.”

  Robert Burns

  Brice MacLaren had spent months refurbishing an original 1980 Marv IV Mini for Cait the year she’d finished at university. After finding the car in
a junk lot in Liverpool, he’d towed it back to Balwhither, rebuilt the engine, scavenged interior parts from eleven different cars, and banged out and painted the exterior himself in racing green with stripes. Every nook and cranny of the Mini was familiar to him, and there was no mistaking it when he spotted the car parked in front of the Library and Tea Room.

  She wasn’t due home for another day, though, according to her father.

  Gripping the wheel of his Land Rover Discovery, Brice cursed himself and scanned the windows of the building as he drove toward it, looking for a telltale light inside.

  He hated to think how Cait would feel if she saw the mess and the FOR SALE sign in the window before anyone had explained the situation. He’d meant to get out here first thing this morning to keep that that very thing from happening, but his client had stopped by the garage wanting to check progress on the 1964 Aston Martin DB5 that Brice had promised to finish for Christmas delivery. The visit should have taken an hour at most, but he’d had to spend so long going over every fine point of the restoration work that it had eaten most of the day. Then the man had pulled out a bottle of twenty-four-year-old Bruichladdich single malt along with an order for an even more expensive car, and that had taken still more time. Brice’d had to ring Donald to promise he’d work through the night to get the Tea Room looking a bit more like it was open for business, if that was what it took, and he had intended to keep that promise.

  Not that he agreed with Donald trying to lie to Cait. He didn’t. If he’d had any idea that Donald hadn’t told Cait he meant to sell the business, that the daft man hadn’t told Cait anything, Brice would never have agreed to help with the renovation in the first place. Which, of course, the old goat had known well enough when he’d bullied Brice into pulling out all the old bookshelves and everything that had given the place its character. Everything Cait’s mother had done.

  Cait would murder both Brice and her father in slow and painful inches when she found out.

  Thinking of seeing her, the old anger and emptiness suddenly flooded back after long months where there’d been only determination. Cait had been a part of him for so long, he still didn’t know how to be without her.