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“How’s Rhiannon?” Colin asked, before Jamie could say anything.
“Rhiannon?” His grandfather’s face turned red. “What do you care about her for?” he snapped, stalking toward Colin’s position on the grass like a gnarled, stooped-over boxer.
“She was a good friend when I was a kid,” Colin said. “I’d really like to see her again.”
Maybe it was crazy, but he wanted to know why she hadn’t written him when she’d promised. He’d waited to hear from her, and nothing had come. Maybe if she had, things would have been different.
No, he couldn’t blame any of this on her. “I’ll look her up tomorrow,” he mused. He gave Jamie a smile. “Do you know if she still lives around here?”
His grandfather’s eyes narrowed. “You leave her alone. She’s not interested in seeing the likes of you.”
“How do you know that?”
Jamie seemed to be fighting to keep himself from blowing up. He hadn’t been all that warm and cuddly when Colin knew him, and the years had only seemed to make him crankier. He wagged his finger at Colin. “Because she’s married and has five wee bairns. Her...husband would right kill you. Or at least break your arms. Then how would you play your golf?”
Colin pushed his irritation away because he didn’t want to be angry anymore. He’d liked Rhiannon a lot. He remembered her as a skinny girl with pigtails and a soft, shy voice. What had made her special to him had been her spirit. Her fierce, sweet, independent spirit.
Maybe it was disappointing to hear that she was married, but he could still check in with her. Maybe she would go with him to the funeral. She’d known his father, too.
And then the sadness of it all hit him in a crushing wave. His whole body feeling shaky, he drew a ragged breath. “I’m here because my father is dead.” His voice sounded small and pained, like a boy’s.
Where had that come from?
His grandfather got even more furious. “Aye, you should feel bad about it!” he shouted.
Colin felt his mouth dropping open.
“Did you even think once about your grandmother?” Jamie said in a more hushed tone, making a guilty, backward glance at the closed cottage door. “About the pain this brings her? Despite everything, she sat up all night waiting to see you. Waiting, and crying. Now she’s asleep, tired of waiting for you lot.”
His grandfather waved a gnarled hand, and Colin felt ashamed. “Now you can wait for her to wake up and take you in. She asked me to drive her to the store yesterday, because she wants to cook your favorites for breakfast. And she will! But until she’s awake and in her kitchen, you’ll just find a hotel. I’ll not let you in to see her, smelling like a brewery. Sleep it off and get yourself clean. Maybe then you can think to yourself about what you’ve done tonight.”
Think to himself? That was all Colin had been doing. That was his problem.
But the ancient door to the cottage closed again, and Colin was left alone, in the elements, with a canvas bag containing funeral clothes, fast getting soggy, and his ever-present set of golf clubs.
Colin hadn’t really thought about why he’d brought his clubs. It was more a reflex or a habit. Something he always lugged around with him because he wanted to. He liked golf. He liked the feeling of competence it gave him, especially since he’d gained his tour card. Made him feel valued and accepted.
He tucked the golf clubs into a dry spot under the overhang to the roof. Behind the cottage was a long, rolling field. The Highlands. Paradise of his childhood summers.
The landscape looked the same, held all the promise that he’d remembered. He’d used to range over this land, racing with sticks aloft—pretend swords—in the company of Rhiannon MacDowall.
Shaking his head, smiling again—at last—he grabbed a fairway wood and a handful of practice balls from his golf bag. Traipsing through the squishy grass, he headed for the rolling field beyond. It smelled like rain and heather and fresh, wide-open air.
He remembered this place in his bones. This feeling of peace. The mist rose off the grass even as the rain came down. It was so quiet it seemed holy. Not another soul was awake with him.
He dropped the practice balls and lined up his stance so he was facing a copse in the distance. That way had been Rhiannon’s castle.
Winding up, he hit a ball with a solid whack. It reverberated through him, centering him.
Calming him.
* * *
THE FIRST THING Rhiannon MacDowall did every morning when she awoke was to visit her garden in an effort to center herself and reconnect with a feeling of peace.
Afterward, she climbed the stairs to her art studio with the view over her family’s property. This was the same terrain Rhiannon had been taking comfort from for most of her life. On an easel beside her was her latest landscape painting, done in oils and nearly completed. Her uncle was coming to collect it in a week; one of his wealthy friends had commissioned it.
Art was what she did with her life. She loved it. It calmed her.
She tilted her head and observed the large canvas.
I want to add a cottage to it.
The thought stunned her because it was so different from her usual style. But it felt right.
Her yellow tabby cat hopped off the window ledge. He landed gingerly, shaking his front paws. Poor Colin. She picked him up and hugged him. He was twenty-one, old for a cat.
Her whole world seemed to be changing of late.
Mum and Dad had been gone a week now—rare for them—with eight more weeks to go on their vacation. For the first time Rhiannon could remember, she was living alone in the castle. Just Paul, their longtime butler, Colin the aging cat and her.
Even her brother, Malcolm, was newly married, and her cousin Isabel—now her closest female friend her age—had just sent her a “save the date” notice for an autumn wedding invitation. A wedding that Rhiannon would attend by video monitor, of course. Rhiannon wished Isabel well, but if she were honest, the invitation had set off a tinge of dissatisfaction within her. Maybe a wee bit of envy?
Perfectly natural. But, as always, she would control it until she was content again.
Rhiannon found her camera and grabbed a warm raincoat for her walk outside. The weather was misting a bit and alternating with rain, not atypical for Scotland in early June, so she laced up her waterproof boots and tucked the camera inside her front pocket.
She had the perfect picturesque cottage in mind, and it was on the edge of their two-hundred-acre estate. Usually, Rhiannon worked from memory, but the last time she’d seen the cottage was, well, before she’d become agoraphobic. Just the thought of approaching the boundary lines and the public road to see it was making her pulse race. Making this trip was daring for her. But she was ready for a change, however slight and controlled.
She went downstairs, then across the courtyard to the main castle and the breakfast room. Paul stood at the buffet table, arranging breakfast items as he had done every morning for years going back. He smiled to see her, and she relaxed somewhat.
“Good morning, miss. Would you like some coffee?”
“When I return, please, Paul. I’m going for my walk now.” By habit, she reached for the dog leash, but remembered that her mum’s golden retriever, Molly, was gone, too, boarded at the vet’s, recuperating from minor surgery on her leg.
Rhiannon sighed. She would be walking alone today.
“I’ll pick Molly up later in the day,” Paul remarked kindly.
“Thank you.” They’d been together so long that sometimes she thought Paul could read her mind.
He gestured to the window. “The starlings have left the nest.”
“Have they? They’re late this year.”
“Indeed.” Paul smiled mildly and wiped down their coffee machine. He was getting a bit stooped. She hadn’t noticed until now. He must have been about forty when he came to them after she’d returned home from the hospital. Now he would be in his sixties.
We’re all getting older.
And then what? What would Rhiannon do when Paul finally retired? Rhiannon was thirty. A spinster. An agoraphobic spinster, living alone in a modernized castle. Any supplies she needed, she ordered by phone or internet. But for actual contact with people, she relied on Paul. Or her parents. Even Molly.
Paul glanced at her standing there, holding the leash, and stopped tidying up. “Miss, would you like me to accompany you on your walk today?”
“No. That’s quite all right.” She smiled at Paul. She really did appreciate his presence in her life. “Sooner or later we all have to walk alone.”
Paul blinked. “That’s not necessarily true, miss.”
“You don’t think so?”
Paul politely gazed down at his hands. He was the help, after all, their perfect, English-trained butler. He was paid to be agreeable to her. “I wouldn’t presume to know,” he murmured.
“Well, for today at least, I walk alone.” She patted the camera in her pocket. “I’ll be back in a half hour. If I’m not, send out the hounds.”
The corner of Paul’s mouth twitched. They didn’t have any hounds. Just a playful golden retriever, currently injured.
Rhiannon headed outside, walking her customary path past the walled garden and circling the gravel drive. Up the hill was the guard shack, and from there, all along the boundaries, a stone wall, strengthened with concrete. Surveillance cameras were installed at regular intervals, monitored by the guard on duty.
I am safe, she told herself, breathing deeply. She headed for the path across the open moor. Nature, cruelly, was waking. In bloom everywhere.
The cottage—the guard’s cottage—was at the southern border of their large property—farther away from the castle than she’d dared to walk in years. She wasn’t sure how it would affect her. She concentrated on feeling in control: maintaining her regular breathing, visualizing the peace of her garden, humming to herself.
Still, the closer she came to the cottage, the shakier she felt. She paused, tightening her grip on the camera in her pocket. She wished Molly was with her. At the very least, she wished she’d thought of carrying a large stick.
She exhaled slowly. This was the natural fallout from the brutal kidnapping she’d survived as a young girl. Ever since then she had her safe place she felt protected by—her beautiful castle grounds—and she stayed within those boundaries. Walking to the cottage would test her limits.
But she could do it. She visualized the cottage in her mind. Jamie and Jessie lived there, and had since before she’d been born. Jamie was the longtime guardsman for their family. Five days a week, he kept watch from the shack at the top of the drive. He kept a phone with a direct line to Paul in the house. There were cameras all around the property, spaced every few dozen yards. Each year, her father commissioned a security expert to review and renew their protocols and procedures.
It didn’t bother Rhiannon. She was happy in her world, truly. She moved closer to the boundary, more curious than anything. How would her body react to this change in her daily walk?
She heard a roaring noise. The whoosh of a van passing close by on the roadway. Rhiannon froze. A white van had been the vehicle the kidnappers had used to snatch her and her brother. Her breath came in jagged spurts.
She heard a voice; someone was singing. Her pulse racing, she retreated to the edge of a copse. Then there was whistling. A man’s tone. Something else was going on, too, because she heard a whacking noise. She backed away slowly, her breathing heavy. Despite the coolness of the morning, she felt heated. Her heart rate elevated. Her palms perspiring...
This was how a panic attack began. And there was nothing worse to Rhiannon than a panic attack. It was the one thing she had set her life up to avoid. She couldn’t lose control of herself. She couldn’t go back to those days in the hospital.
A cry sputtered out of her, and she turned to flee. But the toe of her rubber boot caught on a root, and she tripped. Her hands splayed on the wet, boggy earth beneath an oak tree.
Get up. Run.
But it was just like when she’d been a girl. Walking along happy, full of plans for the day, so mundane she couldn’t even remember them at this point—much like painting a cottage on a landscape. She’d been caught up in herself, not paying attention to the world and skipping ahead of her older brother.
She’d seen the men—the kidnappers—before Malcolm had. There had been a split second when she could have screamed. Could have warned Malcolm. Could have grabbed his hand and made both of them run away.
But she’d done none of those things. She’d frozen instead.
Because of that, Malcolm had been taken with her, shoved into a white van parked on a busy Edinburgh street, and while she sat still, mute, Malcolm had screamed and fought.
They had beaten him, so badly that he’d lost consciousness. And even then, seeing her brother’s limp, battered body, blood all about his mouth and his nose, made her feel guilty.
She could have prevented it, and she hadn’t. And now it was happening again. No sound would come out of her mouth. Her body was locked in terror. The shaking started. Next came the sweating. At some point, she would pass out.
Wham! Something hard smashed into the ground in front of her, then ricocheted and hit her right hip bone. A muffled squeak came out of her mouth, an “umph!” rather than anything intelligible or powerful.
Is this an attack? Scream. Why can’t you scream? Run!
But instead of yelling or fleeing, Rhiannon groaned and pitched forward. Her elbows slammed into the boggy earth; the camera at her hip hit the ground and she heard something break—the lens perhaps. The camera dug into her freshly bruised hip, sending a dull shooting pain through her. “Oh!” she moaned.
She rolled over and pulled the camera from the flap pocket. It rattled when she moved it. The camera was obviously broken.
“Hello!” a male voice called. “Is anybody there?”
Trembling, Rhiannon pushed to her knees. Run!
“Oh, no, I’m so sorry!” A man came into the clearing, sprinting toward her, waving. He carried a golf club in the other hand. Blinking, she glanced down and saw a golf ball on the ground beside her.
She put her hand to the sore spot. There would be a bruise. But that wasn’t her immediate concern. This man was. Run!
Too late. He was there already. “Are you okay? Wow, let me help you up.”
He reached for her hand, but she shrank back. He wore a gray sweatshirt—her kidnappers had worn hoodie sweatshirts—and his eyes were a pale gray blue beneath his navy blue golf cap. He also wore cargo pants and trainers. She had the impression of confident masculinity.
He pushed back the cap back from his face. Wavy, light brown hair with blond streaks. The scruffy beginnings of a beard. He gave her a boyishly charming, lopsided smile. “I’m really sorry about this.”
He held out a hand to her, but she, embarrassingly, scurried backward like a crab.
“I’m a professional golfer,” he said. “My name’s Colin Walker.”
Colin Walker! She almost laughed hysterically. The boy—now a man—she’d named her cat after, all those years ago.
Of course it would be Colin Walker she’d bumped into. Now, when she looked her worst—wet, muddy and bedraggled. She must have summoned him, she thought—maybe she’d conjured him up. All these thoughts about weddings and wishes for what could never be.
And he was so good-looking it was criminal. Of course she’d watched Colin on the telly; they all had. He’d strolled along the fairways as if he owned them, while his grandmother Jessie sat beside her on the couch in front of the big screen in the castle, near to bursting her buttons with pride.
Shaking, Rhiannon wiped her muddy hands on her trousers. Her right palm had nicked a sharp stone when she fell, and it stung. It was her dominant hand, and now painting might be difficult for a few days.
“At least let me take you into the house and get you a bandage for that cut.” Colin reached for her other hand, but she jerked away. People knew better than to touch her. It made her panic, and she couldn’t let that happen.
“No. Please. I’m fine.” She stood on her own. Likely, the only reason she hadn’t gone into a full-blown panic attack was that she knew who he was. Her heart was pounding with the knowledge.
His head tilted. He noticed her broken camera and picked it up from the ground. “I want to replace this for you.” He tucked it into his pocket. “Do you live around here? I’m only here for a few days, but I’ll order one for you and have it delivered.”
She hugged herself and stepped back. “No, I’d rather you didn’t do that.”
“I need to. I want to, I mean...” His gaze went up and down the length of her. She looked a fright! Her worst clothes, her scraggly, rain-wet hair, muddy boots...
“What’s your name?” he asked.
Jamie would tell him even if she didn’t. She had no choice. “I’m Rhiannon,” she said softly. “You know me.”
