“Och, ye can get that thing away from me, auld mon.” She held up her hands with a firm shake of her head. “I want nothing to do with any of that. I’ll no’ be another puppet for ye to jerk about.”
“Puppet? Nay.” Donell clicked his tongue mournfully. “’Tis adventure I offer, and since when are ye no’ up to adventure, Aila Marshall? Ye’ve spent yer entire life grasping life by the horns.”
“Aye, and look where that’s gotten me,” she retorted, without addressing how he knew anything about her. She’d learned enough from Brontë’s tales that the old man had a way of knowing more than he ought. No doubt, nothing in her twenty-seven years of life was a mystery to him. “Homeless and alone.”
“Aye, naught to keep ye from a noble quest a’tall,” he agreed. “Though I would argue that ye are neither homeless nor alone. Ye’ve got friends enough to envy and a home at the heart of them.”
She did.
A pang of love clenched at Aila’s chest at the truth of his statement. She slid onto one of the wooden barstools on her side of the long counter with a sigh. Rab settled himself, draped over her feet with a similar exhalation. His warm, heavy body pressed up against her shins, his presence comforting where Donell’s was disturbing. Despite the old man being right.
After a rough breakup with her longtime boyfriend six months earlier, Violet and Brontë had given her a place to live under the pretense of the elderly woman’s need for a caretaker. What they really provided was a home and a family. Support and friendship.
Things Aila had been missing most of her life.
Stability in the midst of a life that — contrary to Donell’s assessment — had been more packed with foolery and failure than adventure.
“Och,” Donell’s scornful dismissal tore through her sentimental thoughts, “I’ll no’ for one minute believe ye content in such passive muck, lass. Ye’ve more spirit in ye than to settle for that.”
“Ye ken nothing about me, auld mon,” she argued, though in truth, she was quite afraid he actually did. Brontë had said he had an almost mystical way of perceiving her thoughts and feelings before she had a chance to express them herself. And in some cases, even experience them.
“I ken ye love a mystery,” he contended. “That ye appreciate a challenge.”
Her boyfriend, Kyle, had been both of those in the beginning. Look where that had gotten her. She was stubborn, too. A trait that had kept her from seeing the truth until it was nearly too late.
“Tenacity isnae a bad thing,” Donell carried on, continuing to follow her thoughts. “In the right instances, it can be a powerful tool. The stubborn can be a force to contend wi’. Why, wi’ curiosity enough and a daring disposition, an obstinate lass could solve a centuries-old mystery.”
“Nice segue,” Aila said dryly. “Pour me something, would ye?”
Five minutes of conversation with him, she needed it.
Donell grunted and turned away to fetch a bottle from its velvet cradle in a polished wooden case at the center of his vast display. The contents sloshed up the inside of the bottle as he sat it before her. She ran a finger down the angular slope of the thick crystal container mentally comparing the shape to a genie’s bottle, pointedly ignoring the time travel device he’d left on the counter as he gathered up a pair of tasting glasses.
“Pretty bottle.”
“’Tis Lalique,” he said in his thick gruff brogue, popping the notched crystal stopper to fill the glasses with far more than a mere taste. Setting the bottle aside, he lifted his glass. “Slàinte.”
“Slàinte.” Aye, she had health if nothing else. Aila took her glass and sipped the amber libation, enjoying the smooth taste on her tongue and its warm descent down her throat.
“Macallan 72.” His burr thickened with appreciation. “Tastes like the Highlands in autumn, aye?”
She nodded in agreement. It really did. The aroma of peat greeting her nose as she recognized the flavors of green apples, vanilla, raisins, and ginger. “It’s good.”
“It ought to be,” he told her as she lifted the glass to her lips once more. “Only six hundred bottles were made. Cost upwards of a hundred thousand pounds a bottle.”
The whisky caught in her throat until it burned, and her eyes watered as she choked down the swallow. “A hundred bloodythousandpounds?” she coughed out once she could speak. “Why are ye drinking this? Ye should be saving it!”
“Saving it for what, lass?” he asked as he sipped more of his portion. “Whisky is like life. ’Tis no’ to be saved but to be savored. Each sip like a day of yer life, relishing the taste, the smell, the feel. Experiencing it in that moment for all it’s worth because ye never ken when the bottle will run dry or yer days will run out.”
How poignantly poetic. Aila grunted in a pseudo-agreement to his philosophical soliloquy and took another cautious sip of her drink, appreciating it more this time around. “Aye, but on the flip side, ye never ken when life will bite ye in the arse, either.”
Donell nodded. “True, ye never ken what ye’ll get served up wi’ if ye rashly pour out a bottle wi’out reading the label.”
“Life doesn’t come with warning labels unfortunately.”
“On the other hand, for good or bad, ’tis always an adventure to taste the unknown.” He held up his glass, swirling the amber liquid around the sides as light played off its depths. “Once ye’ve had a dram or two, does it no’ leave ye wanting more?”
Rocking her own glass to set the whisky swooshing from side to side, she met his gaze directly once more. “Ye ken, it takes talent to work such circular bullshit all the way around an argument without once addressing the core of what ye want from me.”
