Page 21 of Bonetide

He’s still looking at me through the window. I look at the sunset, because looking at his face has started to feel like a thing I’ll pay for later, but I can’t keep my eyes off him for long. Most people, in my experience, fidget when they’re holding a stranger’s eye too long. They shift. They glance. They fill the silence. He doesn’t do any of that. He stands at my window and just stares at me and lets me look right back at him.

And honestly, it’s easy to do.

What a beautiful, beautiful man.

I scratch my neck and his gaze goes to my hand. The look lingers a beat longer than it should.

“You’re bleeding.”

His voice has changed. Lower. Quieter.

I look down and see that the blood from the angry thistle has seeped down into my sleeve. At least it matches my sweater.

“Yeah, it’s the dangerous part of my job,” I say, gesturing to the table strewn with paper and flowers. I briefly put my thumb in my mouth, sucking back the iron. “I should get hazard pay.”

A dark, perfectly arched brow raises. “Hazard pay?”

“I suppose you might not have that in Scotland,” I muse.

“You aren’t truly Scottish if the landscape hasn’t tried to maim you in some way,” he jokes, but his eyes haven’t quite left my mouth from when my thumb was in it, and the noticing of that is a small drop straight down the inside of me, the warmth spreading at my core.

Oh hell no. What is my body doing?

He shifts his weight, his chin lifting so that his gaze can settle for a moment on the sketchbook on the kitchen table behind me.

“So that’s your job? Drawing?”

“Mostly.”

“Drawing what?” His eyes come back to mine. They have a quality, in this light, of being slightly too aware. “Just flowers?”

“This and that.”

He doesn’t follow up. He doesn’t have to. There was a certain tone to that question. How he could possibly know I’ve drawn him I don’t know, but I suppose if I was a man with the body of a god and I walked around naked, I’d assume someone was drawing me too.

I should ask him to leave. I mean, we’re talking through the window. The sensible move at this point is well nice to meet you, thank you, goodnight, I’m going to lock my back door and go and be unsettled in private.

The other sensible move is to ask him if he wants to come in. Out of politeness. Out of the social pressure any American woman of my class and upbringing has been raised to feel, that says the man at the door has come over in the rapidly cooling air, and is being civil, and the least you could do is offer him a cup of tea. The man swam the way here, did he not?

But I don’t say that. Because the police were here today. Because Effie wrote don’t let him in, and whether or not she meant this particular man, I’m not going to ignore the woman who lived here for sixty years and warded her windows with salt. I don’t know this man from Adam, and that matters more than the fact that I want to invite him in.

Because, oh, I do. I want to invite him in.

The wanting is the thing that decides it for me. I know what I’d do if I had this man on the inside of my windows. I haven’t slept with anyone in a year—and this is not a man in any of the categories I have for men—and I’m not, at least not tonight, going to find out what happens if I let him past the salt.

“And what do you do over there, in the castle?” I ask, feeling the need to keep talking, to break the strange silence that’s befallen us.

“I could ask you the same about this cottage.”

“But I’m asking you.”

A hint of a smile. “I read. I walk. I swim, as you know.”

“That’s it?”

“Mostly, I wait.”

He says it hesitantly, like he wasn’t sure he should say it out loud. It’s enough that I don’t ask him to clarify, because part of me knows when to leave a thing alone. It’s not a big part of me, but it’s there. Sometimes.