All the world is made of faith,
and trust, and pixie dust.
J. M. Barrie
Peter Pan
Little more than an hour—and seven squabbling committee meetings—later, Connal stopped in front of Breagh House and turned toward the backseat of the Audi where Anna sat. He placed a staying hand on her forearm before she could get out.
“Are you too tired to come back for a nightcap?” he asked.
In the passenger seat beside him, Elspeth said a discreet good night and hurried out of the car. Fingers of ground fog curled around her feet as she walked toward the house, and thanks to the fatigue of the long day and too much time putting strain on her knee, her limp was more pronounced.
“I can’t,” Anna said, watching her. “I should make sure Elspeth gets some rest. If I leave her alone, she’ll stay up going over schedules and trying to get the committees back on track. She’s trying to do too much.”
Connal’s profile was shadowed, the only light cast by the glow of the lamps that trickled in from along the front of the house. “So are you. Don’t let the village make you crazy. You’ll end up twisting yourself into knots trying to please them all, and the truth is, you never will.”
“I want to be fair. Right now, I don’t understand the politics yet, and I’m afraid of upsetting people, but overall, I’m having fun. It’s like a puzzle, and I’m turning the different pieces this way and that and trying to make them fit. I forgot how much I loved planning events.”
“As much as you liked being a lawyer?” Connal turned to search her face, though Anna wasn’t sure how much he could see written there amid the shadowed darkness.
It was another question she hadn’t stopped to ask herself. There’d been too many changes too fast, too many realizations flying at her—and more kept coming every day.
Was she going to miss the law? The money, living in D.C., having something meaningful to do? Her work had become her identity, but what she’d loved about being a lawyer—the aspects that had drawn her to it in the first place—were the very things she loved about putting an event together. Defining a problem. Chasing research. Framing a story into something that persuaded people. Finding creative solutions. Making people happier.
When it came down to it, though, very little of her time since law school’d had anything to do with happiness. How had she lost sight of that? She’d been determined to succeed, to climb out of the humiliation of Henry. She’d graduated at the top of her class and gotten good job offers, and she’d taken the best of the best of those—because that was what one did, wasn’t it? What was expected. Somewhere in there, had she forgotten to ask herself what she actually wanted to do? Her work as a lawyer had become about winning and losing and billing hours.
Was that what she wanted?
No.
She clasped her hands together tightly. “Brando said something yesterday about the loch finding a way to make things happen for us no matter how we work against it. In spite of ourselves. I don’t know about the loch, but it seems like something is pushing me to examine my life lately. To make changes.”
Half-turned in his seat, Connal had gone still. “Lately, I feel like that every day,” he said, sounding bemused. Then he unclipped his seat belt, got out of the car, and came around to open her door before he spoke again. “I’m trying to come to terms with the realization that all the plans and choices I have ever made have led me to somewhere I was meant to be, as if I never had any choice at all.”
“What do you mean?” Anna peered up at him in the yellow glow of the carriage lamps.
He took her elbow and shook his head. “Someday, I’ll explain. But it’s an humbling feeling. We get puffed up with self-importance, wrapped up in our place in the world, and forget that there are much bigger things out there, things we can’t begin to fathom. Things that simply require faith. That’s all I’m saying.”
Taking Anna’s hand, he pulled her to her feet and stood looking down at her, his eyes shining in the light. The moon emerging from behind a bank of clouds cast a silver glow behind him. “You asked me a while ago whether I would ever go back to acting, and I didn’t fully answer you. The truth is, I always loved losing myself in becoming someone else. Things were pretty miserable at home when I started acting, and that became a form of escape, I guess. Once I became a celebrity, being an actor was overshadowed. I lost the sense of myself and where I was going. Of what was important to me.” He paused and swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “When I lost Isobel, I thought coming back here would be what was best for Moira. It never occurred to me that this was where I was supposed to be. But it is. I’m supposed to be right here—”
Something in his voice, in the way he watched Anna, said that he wasn’t quite finished speaking. She waited for him to go on. His eyes flickered, and a muscle twitched in his cheek, but then he only lowered his head with exquisite slowness until his lips settled over hers. His hands cupped her cheeks, tilted her head up to meet him, drew her closer.
Kissing Connal MacGregor set Anna’s every nerve ending on fire, burned away doubt and her ability to think, made every pore of her skin crackle with heat and life. She lost herself in his kiss and the wide-openness of the glen at night, where the silence was broken only by their own labored breathing, the call of the night birds, and the lap of the water curling up against the shore.
“Come to lunch again tomorrow,” Connal said as he pulled away.
“I will.” She hugged the indefinable scent of him to herself, musk and spice and promise, as she returned to Elspeth’s house. Still smiling, she made her way back to the warm light trickling from the kitchen.