I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
William Wordsworth
“The Solitary Reaper”
Anna wore her warmest coat and sturdiest shoes, as Connal had requested. The climb wasn’t long, but it was steep and required scrambling over sodden ground made more difficult by the half-dormant heather and the low bushes of clustered blaeberries that grew beneath it.
“People confuse them with blueberries,” Connal explained, “but they’re different. Bilberries, I think, is the proper English term for them.”
“And I always thought Gregor Mark was English, but listen to you now.”
“Aye.” Connal laughed. “My father took us away from the glen when I was twelve and moved us to London. The accent’s been creeping back on me bit by bit. Here, mind your step.” He caught Anna’s elbow when her feet skidded on a wet clump of grass.
Elsewhere in the glen, there were trampled-down paths that would have made for easier walking. Between the museum and Inverlochlarig, there was even a small carpark, deserted now, that gave access to Beinn a’ Chroin and Ben More at the far end of the glen and Beinn Tulaichean and Cruach Ardrain, the nearest four of the high Munros that rose above the smaller hills. Connal had no interest in any of those more traveled paths. Hiking trails too often came with hikers, and though he laughed it off by saying he wanted to have Anna to himself if they were going to have a date, even now he wore a cap and sunglasses to screen his face.
Still, the climb wasn’t bad. On the worst of it, he was careful to walk beside Anna, steadying her anytime she missed her footing. Otherwise, he twined his hand with hers. Which wasn’t steadying at all.
His touch was unnerving. Every aspect of the day and the climb conspired to make Anna feel ready to burst out of her skin.
For once, the Highland drizzle had given way to a brilliant sky. Rain and grass and wildness perfumed the wind, and already on the slope behind Inverlochlarig House here and there a jonquil or a violet bloomed, providing a sharp burst of joyous color that struck Anna like an unexpected gift.
Halfway up the slope, they reached a gully sheltered from the wind. Connal stopped behind her and put his hands across her eyes. “Don’t look yet,” he said, and then he spun her around, her back brushing his chest and her skin warming beneath his fingers. He took his hands away. “Now open your eyes. What do you think? Was it worth the hike?”
“Oh yes,” Anna breathed.
The glen spread out below her: the two lochs, the scattered farmhouses and the harled white stone buildings clustered in the village, the turquoise hotel and, just beneath them, the two gray mansions, Inverlochlarig and Breagh House, though the first dwarfed the latter. Low to the ground, the temperature was dropping instead of rising, a cold front sweeping in. Wraiths of fog had formed on the lakes, giving the whole picture an enchanted appearance, as if any moment a hand with a sword might emerge from the water, or Oberon and Titania might step out from the woods with their fairy hosts, laughing at something that Robin Goodfellow might have done.
“It’s magical.” She turned back to Connal and found him watching her instead of looking out at the glen.
“I believe it is,” he said, his breath hitching just a little. He dipped his head and caught her lips with his own.
Heat and sweetness were instantaneous. Delicious. But Connal drew back after too brief a moment and swung the dark backpack off his shoulders. From it, he removed a red wool tartan blanket, which he shook out onto the ground, and a lighter cashmere one, which he tucked around Anna’s shoulders as he urged her to sit. When she’d complied, he produced a bottle of wine, two crystal glasses carefully wrapped, a loaf of crusty bread, several boxes of food, plates, cutlery, and a pair of crisp linen napkins.
“I’ll admit, this is a little more elaborate than I was expecting when you offered up a picnic,” she said, helping him pop the lids from containers of smoked salmon pâté, Scotch eggs, individual cold beef pies, and golden-brown Empire biscuits with gleaming candied cherries set atop perfect dollops of creamy icing.
The wine gurgled into her glass as he poured, ruby red shot through with sunlight. “This should be champagne, since I told you it was a date. But I have to confess”—he smiled at her—“I didn’t make the food. That was Agnes. I’m a little afraid of her, so we’ll have to eat every bite, or I won’t hear the end of it.”
Anna’s stomach growled as if on cue. She and Connal both laughed, and they watched each other while they filled their plates and ate amid easy conversation and occasional comfortable silences.
“So do you bring all your dates up here?” Anna asked, lightly but also seriously.
“I don’t know if I should admit this, but I’ve never had a date here in the glen before.”
“Never?” Anna let her lashes screen her eyes. “Then what do you do for company?”
“Moira’s usually all the companionship I need, though I still have friends to visit. Julian Ashford, for one. I meet up with them in different places. Women, too, occasionally—if that’s what you’re asking. But I’m discreet. I can’t afford to stir up tabloid interest.”
“Don’t you miss it, though?”
“Miss what?”
“The excitement of acting. Of being a star. Being able to go out in the world—to own the world.”
Connal stretched out on the blanket and propped himself on one elbow. “I had the fame long enough to realize that celebrity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I loved being an actor, don’t get me wrong. Sometimes I miss that part of it, the chance to put on someone else’s skin and see how and why they are who they are, what makes them shift and change and settle into patterns of behavior. I miss the challenge of becoming someone else, and the brief release of not being myself. But honestly? No, I don’t miss being Gregor Mark.”
“So you’ll never go back to it? Not even when Moira is grown and has her own life?”
“Whatever Moira wants, I’ll support her with every inch of my being. I’m not an ogre, and I won’t try to keep her here a minute longer than she wants to stay, but the world is cruel. I’ll protect her from it as long as I can. We like to pretend that we can remake it with speeches of inclusiveness or do-good campaigns. Maybe in a decade or two or three, those ideas will have truly taken root. Realistically, I doubt it. Beauty is still prized too highly, and the lack of it is penalized. Moira’s palsy would be less noticeable if the other half of her face was less beautiful than Isobel’s. If she weren’t Isobel’s daughter. And mine.”
“Have you decided what you’ll do about letting her go to the festival? Can’t she go without you? I could hear in her voice how much she wanted to go the Lochearnhead Games and hear the pipers. And you said yourself it would be cruel to have all the activities here when she can’t go.”
“People will stare even if they don’t know who she is. There’s at least one more surgery when she’s ready for it—when she makes the choice herself—but she’ll never be as perfect in the eyes of the world as she is to me. All I can do for her is keep her away from the attention and tabloids saying cruel things long enough to let her grow into the person she is meant to be. Long enough for her to see who she is instead of what she looks like.”
Anna studied him. He was staring down into the wine in his glass as though he could see Moira’s future written there. But there was no such thing as a crystal ball. Anna couldn’t help thinking how similar Connal’s speech was to the things her own mother had so often said to her. With one significant difference: Connal was fighting to protect Moira from the world of superficial judgments until she was comfortable enough in herself to meet it. Anna’s mother had tried to mold Anna to fit into that world.
Anna took Connal’s hand and brought it to her lips. If she’d tried to speak right then, her voice would have given her away. Connal sat up and shifted beside her. Her legs were folded beneath her, which made her tilt against him. Which wasn’t a bad thing.
Not that it was a good thing either. At some point, there was going to be a reckoning for the time she spent with him, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that the bill might be too high for her heart to pay.
Still, she decided to worry about that later. For three years, she had let herself settle for Mike and a nice, safe romance, and where had that gotten her?
Right here, her inner voice answered. Right now.
She was here with Connal, and for once, she was going to fight to stay firmly in the moment. As long as she was here, as long as Connal remained interested, she was going to enjoy every second they had together.