Page 1 of Love Bomb

CHAPTER ONE

Invertary

The Highlands

Scotland

Rona Dalgliesh was back in Invertary for one reason, and one reason only—to blow up the town’s Victorian folly.

To be clear, she didn’t have anything against the folly itself. It was basically a large, conical, chimney-type structure, with a hole in the top for people to observe the stars.

Pretty it wasn’t.

Obvious, it was.

Mack Dalgliesh had built a monument to his penis.

Rona suspected that, if he’d been born in the twenty-first century, she’d have inherited a rocket ship instead of a crude observatory. It seemed some things never changed, and the male obsession with aiming their junk at the stars was one of them.

Anyway, it wasn’t the phallic folly that was the problem. When Mack Dalgliesh had built the folly in the eighteen hundreds, he’d unwittingly erected a coveted symbol of his family’s wealth and stature. There weren’t many buildings of its kind left in Scotland, and owning one brought a certain level of prestige that couldn’t otherwise be bought.

Which was why her relatives kept fighting over it.

And why Rona wanted it gone.

She had less than a week to blow it up before an impending court injunction stopped her, and all she needed to accomplish her plan was an explosives expert.

Hence the reason she found herself standing on the doorstep of her childhood crush, wishing she was anywhere else on the planet.

Anywhere at all.

Seriously…

“Suck it up. He probably won’t even remember you.” She winced. “Okay, maybe a little.”

The fact she’d followed Bain MacGregor everywhere for most of her early teens might have left an impression on the man.

“You’re a grown woman now,” she reminded herself. “You’re not the same girl he knew.”

She looked down at her purple padded parka and matching boots. Maybe she shouldn’t have dressed like a preteen if she didn’t want to bring up the past. But purple was her color. It went great with her curly red hair and made her feel happy. So what if her jacket was shiny and had sparkly buttons? If Bain couldn’t see past it to the woman underneath, that was his fault.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she muttered as thick flakes of snow fell in slow motion around her, turning the dark night into an ethereal landscape that reminded her of old-fashioned Christmas cards.

She glanced down the row of old miners’ cottages, seeing that one or two people still had their trees out, even though Christmas had happened a month ago. The sparkling lights made the scene even more surreal. Especially as she was there to blow something up. It made Rona feel like the Grinch. Others were spreading joy, but she was out for destruction.

She shook her head in an attempt to get herself back on track.

“Stop stalling and knock the door,” she muttered.

This was just wrong. You weren’t supposed to revisit your teen crushes. You were supposed to leave them in the past, so you didn’t have to face just how embarrassing you’d been back then.

And she’d been epically embarrassing.

Her world had revolved around Bain MacGregor.

Much to his disgust.

She sighed as she remembered the last time she’d seen him. He’d been leaning against his old motorbike by the loch’s edge while she’d ridden past in the back of her father’s Bentley. Tears had streamed down her fourteen-year-old face as she’d stared at Bain until he was only a tiny dot in the distance.