Page 55 of Desire of a Highlander
“Something like that.”
He looked unconvinced. “And this job? What is a job?”
She shrugged. “I suppose you would call it my craft.”
“Ye have a craft?” he said, surprised. “Ye are not a noblewoman then?”
She couldn’t help the laugh that burst out of her. “Me? Noble? Are you kidding? I grew up on a council estate!”
“But yer clothes. Yer jewelry—”
“Is just cheap tat, believe me. You can pick it up for next to nothing in the twenty-first...um...where I come from.”
He regarded her without speaking. There was an appraising look in his eyes as though he was filing this information away. “What sort of craft?”
“I was a project manager.”
The blank look he gave her made her laugh again.
“I organize people.”
Ronan snorted. “That explains a great deal.”
She smiled. “My life wasn’t dramatic. I worked too much. Saw too little of my family.”
A sudden twinge of homesickness went through her. What was going on right now at home? Was anyone missing her? Where they wondering where she was?
Ronan, she realized, was watching her intently.
“What?” she asked.
“Ye are unlike anyone I’ve ever met, ye know that?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” she said with a snort. And you would likely run a mile if you did.
She tried to change the subject. “So, when you found the Steading, did you find what you’d been looking for?”
He shrugged. “I dreamt of peace. Solitude. I got neither.”
Elodie nodded. “Reality very rarely lives up to the dream.”
“Ye sound like ye speak from experience, lass.”
“I do. Unfortunately.” Elodie snapped a dead twig off a branch and began shredding it. “I always thought I could make a difference. My whole life I’ve believed that if I fought hard enough, I could make things better. Now I realize I was just kidding myself.”
Ronan stopped walking and looked at her. “I think that’s the first stupid thing I’ve heard ye say.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Ye really dinna see it, do ye? The effect ye have on people. The way the world shifts around ye. Ye are like a river in flood that uproots everything and drags it with her. Ye have made a difference, Elodie MacNeil. To the Steading. To the people who live here.” His gaze sharpened. “To me.”
Elodie blinked in surprise. She didn’t know what to say. Was that really how he saw her?
She suddenly wanted to feel the way she had for that brief instant when she’d been in his arms. So warm. So...alive. She wanted him to kiss her again. She wanted it so badly she could almost taste it.
But Ronan stepped back, creating distance between them as though he had suddenly remembered all the reasons he shouldn’t be standing this close to her.
Elodie’s patience snapped. She reached out, grabbed the front of his shirt, and dragged him towards her. Going up on tiptoes, she pressed her lips against his.
