Magic of Winter Read online

  “I didn’t.”

  “Aye, you did. It took the both of us to make a mistake that big.”

  “Was it a mistake? Truly?” Cait asked, watching him, wanting him to deny it. Wanting, deep down, for him to say something to make it—make them—all right all right again.

  He searched her expression and found her vulnerability. Cait’s every nerve ending tingled, anticipating him reaching for her. Hoping he would.

  Because this time, if he did, it wouldn’t be recklessness or impulse that brought them together again. He was thinking about it. She was thinking.

  Only he didn’t reach for her. He backed away another step instead and picked the sander up from the floor. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t a mistake. Not entirely. We both needed the time away. We both needed to grow up.”

  Ambition

  “A woman has to live her life,

  or live to repent not having lived it.”

  D.H. Lawrence

  Lady Chatterley's Lover

  Stepping away from Cait at that moment was one of the hardest things Brice had ever done, but the physical side of their relationship had never been the problem. He needed her to see that he had changed. He needed her to see him differently. And he needed to know that she had grown past their adolescent baggage, too. She needed to know that she had grown into herself.

  He stepped back and watched her pride wrestle with doubt, with rejection. He regretted that. She jumped down from her perch on the shelf that he’d been sanding, and in typical Cait fashion, she burned off energy pacing as she changed the subject. But as she told him what the doctor had said about her father, his attention refocused. When he held her again, it was about comfort, about sharing pain. He would have taken all of it from her if he could have. He wished there was a way to do that—Cait had lived through too much pain already.

  “So you’ve apparently been taking care of him when no one else in the village would—”

  “They would have, if he’d let them,” Brice corrected.

  “Fine. But now how do I convince him to have the surgery? I can’t accept that he’s just throwing the rest of his life away.”

  “You can’t force him to want to live.” Brice stroked the familiar silk of her hair. “All you can do is love him enough to let him have dignity in the choice he makes.”

  She rested her cheek against his chest. “I’d like to slap sense into his stubborn head.”

  Brice couldn’t help laughing at that. “You tend to want to do that a lot.”

  “Only when someone deserves it.”

  “Only when you think someone deserves it.” He hadn’t planned on denying it anymore—she had to trust him or a relationship between them was worthless anyway—but he couldn’t help himself. He needed her to know. “I never slept with Rhona,” he said. “I know what you think you saw, but she only came to see what I could do with the car. I made the mistake of drinking with her when I told her it was beyond saving. She’d brought the bottle because she was afraid of that and wanted to say goodbye—”

  “She’d have brought it to celebrate if you’d told her you could save it.”

  “Probably, but I wasn’t thinking. She raised a glass to the car, and then to me trying to save it, then to me helping her find a new one because she’d only just bought that one a few months back. One toast slid into another, and then she noticed she’d gotten grease on her blouse and insisted on washing it out before it set. The shirt you’d given me was hanging on the back of the chair in my bedroom, and she came out wearing it, and while she’d been gone I realized I’d had too much to drink so I told her to leave and I went in to sober up in the shower the second I’d closed the door behind her. That’s all that happened. So maybe you’re right about me not thinking when I take people up on what they offer. I was stupid to drink with her—I don’t drink to get drunk these days. Not anymore. That’s one of the things I’ve learned.”

  “One of the things?” Cait asked, watching him. Her face gave nothing away.

  “The rest I’ll have to show you back at the garage if you’re willing to consider staying.”

  “Oh, I’m staying. For my father’s sake.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.” He brushed her hair back from her face and rubbed the pads of his thumbs across her temples. “I haven’t stopped loving you. I couldn’t. You’re as much a part of me as my memories, as every dream I ever had, as the fingers on my hands. But what we had together, the old relationship, that had to change because we aren’t children anymore. We can’t love the way children do. Will you let me court you now, mo leannan? Court you properly? Let me give you time to get to know me, to know the two of us as we are right now?”

  Her breath hitched, then brushed against his skin as she let it all out in one deep exhale. “I’d like that,” she said, “but my father—”

  “If your father needs anything to make him want to live, it’s to see life going on around him. The last thing you want to do is hang around the house waiting on him hand and foot. That will only make the both of you want to hurry the end along.”

  “That’s an awful thing to say,” Cait said, but she couldn’t help laughing.

  Brice had missed the sound of her laughter more than anything.

  It made him want to spend a lifetime making her laugh.

  Letting her go, he went back to the shelf and ran his hand across the edge of it, feeling for any rough spots that still needed to be smoothed away. “You know why Donald didn’t tell you he was sick, don’t you?” he asked. “Why he told you to stay in London?”

  “Elspeth claims it’s because he feels guilty about Robbie dying.”

  “He feels like he stole Robbie’s life as well as your mum’s. Like the glen stole away the lives those two could have had and forced them to settle for something smaller. It’s why he’s determined you won’t end up stuck here. With me. Why he doesn’t want you taking up with me again.”

  “You know an awful lot about him these days.” Cait came to stand beside Brice again and slanted a look up at him.

  “He needed someone—and I don’t mean anything by that. Nothing against you. I’m just saying that, for a time, he needed someone who wouldn’t challenge him, who would listen and do what needed to be done.”

  “So you became Robbie for him?”

  “I became whatever he needed me to be, aye, but the reason he allowed it was because he doesn’t care what I think of him. He only cares about the people he respects.”

  “Then why do it? Why help him?”

  He was looking down at the board, and Cait suddenly reached down and put her hand on his to keep it still. He felt the warmth of her skin, the softness of it. It was so small and pale compared to his calloused, sun-browned paws.

  Turning his palm over, he caught her fingers in his own and brought them to his lips. “For your sake,” he said. “I suppose it started with me wanting to earn his acceptance. A step toward winning you back. That was the first part of realizing I wanted to change myself for you. Then I discovered I wanted to change for my own sake. Somewhere along the way, I went from nearly hating Donald to feeling sorry for him to liking him more than I’d expected.”

  “He’s never been particularly likable,” Cait said. “Even Mum admitted that.”

  Brice pulled her closer. “You remember Haggis, don’t you?” he asked, thinking of the old black and white mongrel who had so often been the only company he’d had in the house as he grew up. “He died this year while you were gone. I used to get angry when people couldn’t see that no matter how much he snarled and barked, all he wanted to do was be your friend. He just didn’t know how to go about it. Not everyone is brave enough to show that they’re afraid.”

  She paused and studied him, a look on her face that made him feel, for once, as though he’d done something right. But then, Cait had always made him feel like that.

  Even when he’d done nothing right at all.

  “I’m sorry about Haggis,” she said, and her
voice thick with tears. “I know how much you loved him.” Squeezing her eyes shut suddenly, she folded her hands across the back of her head and tilted up her chin. “God, we’re a mess, aren’t we? All of us. So much loss, and I’m sorry about so many things. I don’t know what I believe about Dad feeling guilty over Robbie. I’m going to have to spend time thinking about that. Maybe there’s no right answer. The army never was part of Robbie’s original plan, that much is true. All he wanted to do was travel, see the places Mum talked about: Greece, Italy, America. But once he was in the army, he loved it. Loved having mates, being part of a unit, something bigger. He gave his life to save his friends from dying. I think he’d have said he was happy to die that way, that he was happy his death had meaning. He probably wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for Dad, but I don’t know that he’d consider that a bad thing. And Mum? She may have had other dreams originally, but she loved the glen and her life here. I hate that Dad feels she wasted herself. He’s diminishing her by thinking that.”

  Brice had forgotten how much he loved the way Cait’s mind worked, the passion and the fairness and the fierce, determined loyalty of it.

  “So show your father that he’s wrong,” he said.

  Cait blinked. Refocused. “How do I do that?”

  He blew a bit of dust off the curved edge of the board and rubbed his palms together to brush them off. “That’s what you’ll need to figure out. But you know him. Telling him what to do won’t do a bloody bit of good. You’ll have to find a way to make him see it for himself.”

  Cait shook her head and stared hard at the floor, thinking. “None of this is what I was expecting to find when I got here. None of it,” she said. “Which reminds me. Do you happen to know what he did with all mum’s things?”

  “From the house, you mean? I stowed them away in the attic. He couldn’t bear to see them, but I knew you’d hate it if he sold them or put them in the bin.”

  “Thank you. For that and everything else. For helping here.” She turned away as if she couldn’t bear to have him see the moisture that had crept into her eyes. After a moment, she walked over to the two shelves he’d already mounted on the wall behind her and, making a show of examining them, she ran her fingers along the beveled edges. “I know you have other things to do besides putting up bookshelves. Elspeth told me you’ve been busy. But I’ll need to reopen as soon as I can now that Rhona’s started serving teas. I don’t want her efforts hitting the online review sites and getting listed anywhere while the Tea Room drops out of sight. Anyway, it feels disloyal to Mum, somehow, letting the teas for the glen be served in Rhona’s market.”

  “Not to mention it would drive you crazy,” he said, knowing her too well to let that slide. “But you know she isn’t likely to let that go anytime soon. Not now that she’s spent money on the tables and the screens. Her shop’s on the main road, too, in easy sight of the graveyard, which gives her better traffic.”

  “I’m trying to think of a way to get the tourists here, don’t you worry about that. I’ll make up claims as wild as Elspeth’s if I have to.”

  Brice laughed, picturing the Tea Room full of illustrated signs with made up history like the ones Elspeth had in her museum. “I can see it now. You could put a sign on every table: ‘Rob Roy MacGregor ate here’ or ‘Robert the Bruce sat here and drank a cuppa.’ But go ahead. If the tourists want to believe Elspeth’s got Bonnie Prince Charlie’s dagger on display in the back room at Breagh House, they’ll eat up just about any story you want to tell them.”

  “I don’t have to tell them made up stories, though, do I?” Cait’s face had taken on an odd, thoughtful expression.

  A dangerous expression.

  “What are you up to now, Cait Fletcher?”

  Cait’s schemes had often been far wilder than any good-natured lies Elspeth Murray spun about odd bits of Highland history to go with her so-called “artifacts.”

  “Why would I need made-up stories about Rob Roy MacGregor or Robert the Bruce when I’ve got something better and absolutely real. I’ve got Mum’s Scottish shortbread recipe that came down in her family from Mary Queen of Scots, if I can find it. The tourists love stories about Mary, don’t they? Anyway, there’s more than enough places in the Highlands dedicated to glorifying men in kilts. I’ll make the Library and Tea Room a monument to Scottish women. It’s about time someone remembered who it was did the real hard work while the men were off raiding cattle or playing war.”

  Brice might have pointed out, gently, that there was no such thing as “playing war,” but when Cait had that look in her eye, there was no sense in arguing with her. Anyway, once he thought on it, was she really that far off the mark? Not the first time a boy marched off to battle anyway. If he survived the first battle, he wasn’t a boy any longer, and war stopped being a game of any kind, stopped being about ideas or lines on a map for the survivors. It became all too personal, then, about brothers like her Robbie and friends and loved ones lost.

  “Make it personal, then,” he said. “Not only about the famous women the tourists know already, the Mary MacGregors and Flora MacDonalds and Mary Stewarts. Make it about women like your mum and Elspeth and the others in the glen.”

  A deep rose color unfurled like a banner across Cait’s cheekbones, the way it did when she’d caught hold of an idea that warmed her from inside out. That was another thing Brice had missed about her. In another life, Cait Fletcher would have been a Flora or a Mary, a woman who changed the course of history. And watching her take fire as she was thinking, he could understand why Donald wanted her out of the glen, wanted her to reach for something bigger than she’d find in a tiny village in a tiny glen. Brice had planned to go with her once. He still would. He’d follow her anywhere, if that was the only choice left to him. But these days, whenever he imagined the two of them growing old together, they were always here, in the house he’d been building for Cait this past year in the hope that she’d come home to him. He could see the two of them sitting there on the porch together, looking out across the lochs toward the high, steep Munros that guarded the far end of the narrow glen.

  Was it selfish to hope that life here, with him, could be enough for her? That he could be enough?

  Battles

  “A love for tradition has never

  weakened a nation,

  indeed it has strengthened nations

  in their hour of peril.”

  Winston S. Churchill

  They worked together, discussing possibilities, for about an hour before Brice excused himself, pleading something about a car he had to finish. Cait stood beside the window with her arms wrapped around herself, cold and a little lonely as she watched his Land Rover pull away. Only now that he was gone did she allow herself to reflect on the sharp stab of rejection that had pierced her chest when he’d pulled away from her—and the relief when he’d explained.

  Neither of which were emotions she could—should—allow herself.

  Was he right, though? Was there some other way forward in their relationship? Something beyond the rocky single-mindedness of adolescent love? Or maybe all first loves were single-minded. Self-indulgent. Looking back, she could see how they’d been wrapped up in the idea of loving each other almost as much as they’d been entangled in the feelings.

  Brice had changed, she had to give him that. Far more than she had changed. The Brice she had known would never have left a vase of greens, not without a note that expected credit. He wouldn’t have put up with her father all these months without exploding. Most of all, he wouldn’t have advocated caution.

  Neither of them had ever advocated caution.

  She turned from the window and looked around the room. Brice had mounted six shelves on the bare white wall before he left, the unstained wood contributing to the emptiness of the place now that he was gone. Funny how he had filled it up. But eyeing the effect of the shelves, she had to admit that they were much nicer that the heavy dark oak bookcases had been. Even the white paint
might not be entirely bad once the books were back in place, letting the walls recede in a way that the old burgundy and hunter green walls never had. What the place needed was something in between. Wallpaper, maybe. Something Victorian and charming. Or no. Going back to the idea of honoring the women of the glen, each of the rooms should have a different Highland theme, one room in tartan plaid with tartan curtains and tartan ribbon edging around the bookshelves, and another in the soft purple hues of Highland heather stenciled on the walls. She’d hang dozens of old photos and prints of women, some famous, but most of them just the everyday, ordinary heroes who fed and clothed their men and bairns, kept the homes, and raised future generations to hope for better than they had themselves, all while achieving small miracles in their communities without asking for accolades or rewards.

  This room, Cait’s old favorite, she would dedicate to her mother. And she would dedicate the main seating area to all the women of the glen together. She only needed to find the photographs, and she knew just where to get them.

  She stopped by Elspeth Murray’s before going home, because Elspeth was better at spreading news than a BBC emergency alert. And Elspeth pulled the front door open the moment that Cait rang the bell at Breagh House almost as if Cait had been expected.

  “Well, you look happier than you did the last time I saw you, I must say,” Elspeth announced, stepping back to let Cait in.

  Cait grinned, acknowledging to herself that for the first time since she’d arrived, maybe for the first time since her mother’s death, she felt something that was beginning to resemble—not joy, not that. Hope, anticipation. A sense that she was in the right place, taking the right steps forward.