Page 147 of Moonlit Nights & Northern Lights
“But as soon as they processed you and put you in the holding cell, I was a mess with guilt.” Maxwell’s hands were clenched in his lap. “Did Kit tell you how many times I tried to call him that night?”
“Thirty-three,” I said smoothly. “He brings it up all the time. Obviously, Kit couldn’t answer the phone, though, because you know, shifter… full moon…”
“Right, but I wasn’t thinking straight, and Seb wasn’t answering either. But Ididdo all I could. I made sure that you and Dev were given cells away from everyone else. And then I just sat there on the floor. All night.”
“What?”
“I sat there, outside your cell, listening to you all night.”
The memories hit me with a slap. The crying. The begging. The moaning in pain as my body tried to shift and couldn’t. The desperate, animalistic sounds I’d made for hours on end.
I fought to speak around my tightening throat. “But why did you sit there?”
He looked at me like it was the simplest thing in the world. “In case you needed me.”
The old Rory would have said,I needed to get out of that cell.But sitting here now, looking at this lovely man who’d spent an entire night on a cold police station floor because he was worried about me, I felt tears prick my eyes. Actual tears.
“And then, morning came, and you were shaking so badly I couldn’t take it anymore, and I called the nurse. Kit still hadn’t answered, and I was in a state by then.”
“I don’t remember you there that morning.”
Maxwell’s tiny smile was heartbreaking. “I thought you wouldn’t want to see me.”
The world tilted sideways, and I had to grip the heather beneath me to keep from toppling over. A horrible rushing sound buzzed through my ears, like standing too close to a waterfall.
This couldn’t be real. This lovely, brilliant man couldn’t possibly want someone like me. Someone who’d spent eighteen months being an absolute bastard to him. Someone who apparently made cruel jokes about him at Christmas parties behind his back. Someone so desperate for approval that he’d throw away everything good in his life for a pretty face and a reckless plan.
How could someone so decent, so genuinely wonderful, ever want to be with a horrible, selfish, impulsive prick like me?
Maxwell’s sharp intake of breath cut through the rushing in my ears.
Fuck,he’d heard! “Maxwell—” I started, then clamped my mouth shut so hard my teeth clicked together. It wasn’t his fault he heard it when I was probably practically shouting athim.
The satellite transceiver suddenly erupted with static so violent it made us both jump. The crackling was wrong—not the usual white noise of poor reception, but something alive, like the air itself was sparking. Maxwell frowned and reached for the device, twisting the frequency dial, but instead of clearing, the interference grew worse, a symphony of pops and hisses that seemed to pulse with its own rhythm.
“What the hell—” Maxwell started, but his words died as we both looked up.
The sky was bleeding colour.
The aurora borealis unfurled across the Scottish sky like spilled paint on black canvas. Ribbons of electric green danced overhead, twisting and curling in impossible spirals. The lights pulsed with their own heartbeat, shifting from emerald to jade to the palest mint, all threaded through with veins of violet that flickered like lightning trapped in silk.
“You told me seeing the Northern Lights in May was impossible,” Maxwell said in a rush, his voice filled with wonder.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the spectacle above us. The aurora rippled like water, tendrils of light stretching down to touch the mountains.
“I used to think lots of things were impossible,” I whispered.
The lights above us flared brighter, as if the universe itself was listening. Pink blossomed through the green, soft as rose petals, while golden threads wove through the display like embroidery on the night sky.
“Impossible things seem to be our specialty,” he said softly. The colours reflected in Maxwell’s glasses, turning his dark eyes into prisms.
His hand found mine in the heather, fingers sliding between mine with the same gentle certainty he’d shown all evening. His thumb traced across my knuckles as we watched the sky dance above us.
The aurora pulsed again, a symphony of light that painted the ruins silver-green and made the dark lake below us shimmer like molten metal.
In that moment, surrounded by impossible beauty with this impossible man’s hand in mine, I felt something fundamental shift inside me.
Something that felt dangerously like hope.
