Page 39 of The Devil Wears Tartan

I try to keep myself from staring at her, but the sight of her in something I own, even something as simple as a plain white t-shirt, draws my eyes like she’s a magnet.

“Thanks for the shirt,” she says, striding up the hallway like she’s on a runway and coming to stand beside me where I’m setting up the camera.

On my knees.

If I turned, I’d be looking up at her. She could hook a finger under my chin and tilt my face up. She could run that finger over my lips.

I scramble to my feet.

“No problem. We’re, uh, good to go. I think we could just sit there.”

I motion at the two wicker chairs I’ve arranged with my steaming mug sitting on a rickety wooden table between them. Kenzie places her mug down beside it.

“Very thematic,” she says, pointing at the tartan cushions and the little Scottish unicorn emblems on the matching mugs, which I didn’t even notice until now.

I swear I’m so surrounded by Scottish things I’ve become blind to my own submergence.

“Oh, wait,” I say as she goes to sit down.”You don’t have your question list.”

She shrugs. “I think I remember most of them.”

I get my own list out of my room and hurry back to take the spot beside her.

“Should we start?” I ask.

She shrugs again, and I feel like there has to be some sort of scientific explanation for how one person could have me drooling over her tits in one moment, laughing with her in the next, and wanting to smack her with a ghillie right after. Currently, her powers seem borderline supernatural.

“I will take that as a yes,” I quip before leaning forward to press the record button.

A beat of silence passes.

“Who’s going first?” I ask.

“I guess I will.” She clears her throat and then turns to look right at me, speaking in that uncanny imitation of a news reporter voice I somehow find very sexy. “Tell us a bit about you, Moira.”

My first instinct is to complain about how boring and unspecific that question is, but we have an agreement, and we probably should start by introducing ourselves.

“I’m Moira Murray,” I hear myself saying, even though half my brain is still busy thinking about how satisfying it would feel to smack her in the arm with a shoe and the other half is trying to turn that into some kind of weird fantasy. “Highland dancer extraordinaire.”

Kenzie’s lips twitch.

“Most people know me as part of the local Murray clan,” I continue. “My family owns and operates the Murray School of Highland Dance, so as one would assume, highland dance has been a huge part of my life. My parents like to say I learned to pas de basque before I learned to walk.”

I chuckle at the joke I’ve heard a million times and reach for my tea, nodding for Kenzie to hit me with the next question.

Talking is good. Talking distracts me from thinking thoughts I shouldn’t.

“And why are you interested in this year’s scholarship?”

“Well...” I tap the side of my mug. “The student life ain’t cheap.”

I expect her to laugh along with me, or at least nod in agreement, but she just stares.

“It’s more than that, though,” I add. “I’m twenty now, and sometimes I feel sort of...caught between who I used to be and who I’m going to be, if that makes any sense. I want to be sure of myself. I want to wake up every day and feel confident about who I am and what I want. The highland community has always been a place where I feel that confidence, and as I step into whatever the next phase of my life will be, I’d love to show up for this community in new ways and continue earning the honor of representing it.”

All that is true, as cheesy as it may sound, but I hold back on the other reasons churning inside me.

I want to be interesting.

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