Page 52 of Kilt Trip

She shoved her hair out of her eyes and stuck a finger in his face. “You put me in the ghost room.”

Laughter danced in Logan’s eyes. “Turnabout’s fair play.”

Understanding dawned, slow like a winter morning. The haunted room was payback for the Edinburgh ghost tour she’d forced him on. He’d probably been planning this since that night. A burning sensation flared through her chest. “You have got to be kidding me.”

Logan grinned in the face of her fury. “I was about to wake you. Come on. Let’s go.”

“As if I’d trust you now.”

“I’ll tattle to my dad if you don’t.”

The last thing she needed was for Neil to think she wasn’t taking this seriously.

She marched up the stairs and as she dressed in warmer clothes, her brain came fully back online. Before the ghosts had started up the night before, the Towel Incident had played on a relentless loop in her mind.

Logan’s eyes refusing to peruse her body felt more intimate than if they’d raked over her curves. He wasn’t immune to her, but the confirmation only fanned flames that would surely burn her.

She considered hiding out in her room until the official tour started just so she wouldn’t have to face him, but the truth was she couldn’t resist a chance to be alone with him.

When she met Logan in the lobby, bundled into her yellow raincoat that was no match for a Highland morning, he stood with hands clasped behind his back, rocking on his heels. He cleared his throat, not meeting her eye, like he’d been having the same thoughts. A high-strung awkwardness descended on the room. “This way.”

She followed him through the stone-floor lobby, twisting the ends of her scarf around her hands.

Outside, daylight broke in purples and blues, and Addie followed him into the trees, boughs woven together over their heads. Their breath came out in puffs, the tang of peat sharp in her nose.

She grabbed the branch Logan held back for her. “Gosh, if I’d known we’d be bushwhacking on this trip...”

“Then what, you’d have worn your purple wellies?”

She snorted in amusement, thankful he’d followed her lead, allowing them back to familiar ground.

They fumbled through the frosted grasses until the forest deposited them on the banks of a sleepy river.

“This is the Kyle of Sutherland.” The sun rose above the horizon, turning the rolling hills in front of them to a golden pink casting deeper with each passing moment. The flat gray of the water waited to catch the dusty rays and reflect the mirror of the sky. “When I tell you of the magic in Scotland that you scoff at, this is what I mean. You have to know the right places to look for color.”

Logan pulled her in front of him, resting his hands on her shoulders a beat too long. She told herself to move, but she didn’t, and he didn’t, either. Her breathing turned shallow, as if the slightest movement might make him step away. If she leaned back against him, rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder, would he let her? Would he wrap his arms around her waist and tug her close?

She imagined turning in his arms, running her thumb along his full bottom lip, dragging her fingers across his stubble. A moment where they stopped backing away, where they gave in to this pull between them.

But she could sense the danger in this attraction, the impulsiveness, the desire to let him in and make it count, no matter the risk.

She wanted him in her bed, but she knew in her bones that giving her body would require giving some piece of her heart. And she’d seen what love could do to someone. How much power it had to destroy a person. She wasn’t going anywhere near that.

But when he broke away to stand beside her, a strand of her hair caught in his stubble just to make a liar out of her, like she couldn’t stop reaching for his heat and his touch.

“The people that’ve come before us have walked through these glens and touched these trees and witnessed the sun greeting the mountains. Others will do the same after we’re gone. This place matters to me. It’s a site of my people. They walked here a hundred years ago, sure...”

Addie turned at the echo of her earlier protests.

“But even though no one lives here anymore, I feel an old and deep connection. Sometimes we find a place we’ve never been before, but it feels like coming home. That’s what I hope people experience on my tours.” His eyes, sincere and unguarded, urged her to understand what he described, that anchor to the land, to the past.

Her heart fluttered underneath her breastbone, remembering the red dirt of New Mexico, the way it got on everything, laying claim.

The untamed bend of the river and the swaying grasses on the bank called to her in the same way. She hadn’t felt that tug of possession since she left behind the name that bound her to a man who no longer cared and took the name of a woman who was no longer there.

“There’s a peace in the permanence of the hills. A reminder that all will go on with the world. To appreciate the beauty of the moment we’re in, no matter how long we get to enjoy it.”

Addie’s heart swelled. Her mom used to say the same thing. That life was a collection of small moments. That she should never stop searching for the ones that took her breath away.

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