Page 5 of Twilight Tides
However, it wasn’t exactly going to plan.
I hadn’t had one single second date because there had been no spark with anyone. Zero. Zip. Nada.
Honestly, I wondered if it was my fault. Maybe I still had a guard up, notallowingmyself to feel anything. Maybe it was still too soon. Maybe I’d forced myself to do this as if to prove that Nick hadn’t completely derailed my life.
“I canceled it.”
“Why?” Nee stepped farther into the kitchen, her wedding and engagement rings sparkling as she crossed her arms over her chest. Tierney and her husband Ramsay had gotten married a month ago. It was a very small affair on Ramsay’s island, Stòr, which could be accessed by a causeway between it and Glenvulin, but only when the tide was out. Ramsay had been one of the main contractors who renovated Nee’s guest house. They’d started a casual affair until Halston Cole came after mybest friend and Ramsay felt more than a little compelled to protect her. I had my suspicions about his background. Nee said he was ex-military. I think it went a little deeper than that, considering he’d come all the way to New York to find Nee and immediately stepped in to help get me away from Nick. He’d threatened Nick, and whatever he’d said, it worked. The next thing I knew, it was in the paper that the FBI had arrested my ex for insider trading.
It would seem Ramsay had friends in high places too.
Anyway, I thought the big, gruff Scot was wonderful and exactly what my best friend needed. And vice versa. I was over the moon for them.
“London?”
Nee’s inquisitive tone about me canceling my upcoming date made me wrinkle my nose. “I wasn’t feeling it. I … the last few dates have been a waste of time and the thought of getting a ferry over there in this weather only for the date to stink … I’m just not into it.”
“But what if the date didn’t stink?”
It would. It absolutely would. The guy I was supposed to be meeting seemed nice enough. He was a high school teacher, divorced, very polite, had a nice face. But I knew before I even met him that I’d spend the whole date looking for signs that beneath his gentlemanly facade there was a narcissistic sociopath just waiting to come out and destroy my life. I knew that because it’s what I’d done on all my dates so far.
Whatever my friend saw in my expression had her reaching out to squeeze my arm. “Hey, if you’re still not ready to put yourself out there, you know that’s okay, right?”
Was it, though?
I gave her a tired smile. “I’m just … it’s this dreary winter weather. It’s exhausting. Isn’t it supposed to be spring?”
Nee didn’t look convinced, but she let it go. “Ramsay said the weather forecast predicts sun next week. I’m keeping all my fingers crossed. I love this place, but the wind and rain can get you down after a while.”
Not enough to send either of us packing, though.
We both felt safe here.
But only one of us never had to worry about being booted back to the US.
2.London
Ten minutes later, Nee was dealing with a guest, and I was giving the kitchen a once-over. Nee had worked with Cammie, the local interior designer, to restore the Victorian coastal look while bringing the place into the twenty-first century. The kitchen was like something out of a magazine and nothing like the commercial kitchens I’d worked in for most of my career as a sous chef. It had pale blue shaker-style cabinets and Victorian wallpaper with the same pale blues mixed with greens. The countertops were white and gold quartz, and the island took up most of the floor space, giving me an extra farmhouse sink, storage, and prep space.
My favorite thing was the eight-zone induction range cooker. It came with two ovens and a proving drawer, but Nee had foreseen the need for multiple ovens and added two more on the wall.
It was plenty for a small guest house where the kitchen was only used in the mornings and the few evenings a week—Nee gave me free run of the kitchen and I used the facilities to bake my pastries and cakes.
After calling goodbye to Nee, I ducked out of the elegant entrance that led to the guest parking. The guest house sat on ahill above Main Street and had amazing views toward the water, but not on the parking lot side. My feet crunched across the wet gravel as drizzle drifted down over my hair and clothes. I tugged my rain jacket closed against a chilly breeze as I walked down the hill.
A fork in the road at the bottom greeted me. Left led to Main Street and right led to an uphill climb past residential streets and the A-road that led around the island. Directly opposite me was another hill where streets branched off into commercial and residential, away from the village hub. A few streets back from the harbor in a quiet cul-de-sac was a modest, ordinary bungalow I rented from my friend Taran Macbeth.
When I’d first arrived on the island, Taran, a stranger to me and a new friend to Nee, had offered me a room in her home. She’d inherited the house from her mom who had sadly passed away only a few months before my arrival. Her mom’s passing had brought Taran back to the island after an eighteen-year estrangement from her then ex (now fiancé), Quinn. I’d moved in with her, and I guess you could say we trauma-bonded. There were times in the last eighteen months I felt closer to Taran than I did even to Nee.
It took over a year, but Quinn and Taran finally found their way back to each other, and they’d moved into his house together. Taran had given me the bungalow, but I insisted on paying rent.
Truthfully, it took me weeks to sleep after she left.
I feel lonely here… I let the thought loose.
I immediately chastised myself because it was that sort of thinking that had led me to allowing Nick’s suffocating control.
Back in New York, pre-Nick, I’d lived by myself, no problem. I’d enjoyed the alone time. So I refused to believe I was lonely now.
