Blanching, Arran stumbled back away from her.
Oh God. Breaking apart inside, Lucy covered her face with her hands.
When she let her arms fall to her side, her stare collided with an immobile, ashen-faced Arran. He stood formidable and proud amidst the wind battering his frame.
Selfish once more.
“Let us go inside,” she urged. Her plea threaded through her voice and her eyes. “Let us talk in there.”
She turned sharply and hurried in.
Coward.
The word echoed with every step she took.
Such a coward that, for a fleeting, reckless moment, Lucy almost kept going—straight past the room. Arran. Past everything she didn’t have the strength to face.
When the door clicked shut behind them, Lucy’s unsteady fingers went to his jacket. She attempted to shrug herself free.
“No,” he murmured, soft but so steady she dared not challenge him.
Unlike before, when he’d insisted on going first, now he simply stood there, waiting. Waiting for her.
Strange. Moments ago, she’d had words; clumsy, frantic things, but at least they’d existed. Now, her tongue refused to shape even a single sound.
Lucy’s gaze skittered desperately about, hunting for a beginning. But how did one begin when every path led to the same cold, agonizing ending?
Her eyes snagged on the thick, dark mahogany table.
Her legs moved of their own volition, carrying her toward the boughs of holly and evergreen and ivy.
Lucy skimmed her fingers along the crafts. They felt abandoned, left mid-joy, mid-celebration, cut short by some calamity.
She sank her teeth hard into her lower lip. Me.
She’d been the calamity.
Knowing them as she now did, they would have been laughing and at peace before Lucy came in and ruined everything.
Her fingers quaked harder. Lucy forced herself to set the mistletoe down before she dropped it.
She drifted then, aimless, hollow; trailing her fingertips along petals, ribbons, decorations. All the while aware of Arran behind her. His breath, his heat, hisunwaveringstare tracked her every movement.
Where to start?
Lucy froze.
Her fingers came to rest beside…white heather.
Emotion threatened to overwhelm her.
It was a sign. From her mom and da. A sign that maybe Arran could—and would—understand, and that whatever feelings he’d developed for her were strong enough to withstand a tangled web of misunderstandings.
The only place to begin, the only place she could think to begin, was the beginning.
Theverybeginning.
Chapter 14
