Tell her.“The kind of guy a woman like you should stay well away from.”Coward.Pain pulsed down his wounded arm.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said when their breath had settled, her voice leaden. “You make me want to forget what’s happened—what’s happening—and escape into something beautiful. Like in France. But I can’t forget. I mustn’t. And it’s wrong to escape.”
His chest pinged. “Was that one of the reasons you pushed me away, in France?”
“You didn’t seem unwilling to go.”
He screwed up his face. He still felt the sting of that morning like a slap on the face. But forcing himself to leave had been the right thing to do...hadn’t it? “It’s not wrong to move on, Samira.”
She looked up at him, hope lighting her expression.
“When you find the right guy,” he added, quickly. “You don’t need to forget your fiancé in order to do that. But first we need to finish this and give you the freedom to seek that happiness again.”
She nodded, twisting her ring around her finger. Her engagement ring. He shuffled over and pulled her close—an innocent hug this time. She rested her head on his chest and he buried his face in her crown. He wanted so much more of her—he wanted to dig into that bottomless mind, to explore that supple body, to draw out the passion that hummed inside her—but she wasn’t ready to give it and he wasn’t about to take it. Their lives were both in limbo. Her limbo would be over soon but he’d chosen his path and had no alternative. She deserved security and permanence, a stable place to rebuild her confidence and her faith in the world. The last thing she needed was to get involved with a screwup who’d lost his way, who would break her heart before it healed.
The computer dinged and lit up. Her hair brushed his face as she turned. “He’s sprung the trap.”
As she got busy on the computer, Jamie leaned back on the seat and closed his eyes. He cradled his arm to relieve it from the pull of gravity, which eased the burn a little.Je ne regrette rien.Was there ever a bigger load of bollocks? It’d be entirely fitting if the scar from his wound somehow wiped out theneand therien,leavingIregret. Five years ago the tattoo had seemed like a brilliant idea but now it only reminded him how many regrets he had. He should’ve followed Flynn’s lead and had the bloody thing scrawled across his back where he couldn’t see it.
Hell, now he was having regrets about his no-regrets tattoo. And he was clocking up more regrets with every minute he spent with Samira. He rubbed condensation from the windscreen and stared straight ahead at the rain-smudged lights. As he stared, they blurred even more...
Samira shut the laptop with a snap, jerking him from a sleep he didn’t know he was having.
“Well, that’s another crime to add to the list,” she said. “Several crimes. Would you believe he doesn’t keep a single email on his server? They get automatically archived somewhere and then deleted. Who does that?”
“Somebody with a lot to hide.” Jamie grabbed a bottle of water from the back seat and drank until his dry throat eased. “So now what?”
“We crack the password. But that could take days—well, it’ll take until eight o’clock tomorrow night. If it doesn’t work by then we’re screwed. Again. And once I set it to go, we can’t stop it, or we’ll have to start over. We need stable internet.”
“So we find a hotel or B and B?” Brother. Just the thought was giving his body the wrong idea.It’s not going to be a repeat of France.
She twisted, stretching her back. “I’d rather not run the risk of someone recognizing us. And we’d have to show ID, a passport, a credit card...”
“A private rental? Something we can book over the internet without anyone seeing?”
“It’s nine o’clock. They can take days to arrange. We’d be better off sleeping in the car—except no Wi-Fi.”
“We could break into a holiday cottage.”
“God, Jamie, we’ve already taken so many risks.”
“So what’s one more? I know a place. It shouldn’t be too much of a risk at this time of year—it’s not the most pleasant spot in November.” Well, it was no longer a pleasant spot for him year-round but if he wanted to keep her safe... “Does it matter if we’re no longer in Edinburgh?”
“No. I’ve disabled the location alert. Is this somewhere we won’t be seen by anyone?”
“Aye.” He picked up his phone and loaded a holiday rentals website. “It shouldn’t be hard to find. It’s a cottage beside a little loch—the only dwelling in miles.”
He found it on the third site he searched.Character charmer beside a loch. A hidden secret, owned by the same family for fifty years.The main photo, taken from the loch in spring, showed a stone cottage beside the water, shaded by a crab-apple tree fat with pink flowers. The next photo was of the loch under a domed blue sky, the forest and hills so perfectly reflected you could turn the photo upside down and not know it. “According to the calendar, it’s not booked until Christmas.”
“And the family won’t know?”
“They’re Londoners—well, they were, when I was a kid. My parents booked it almost every summer. They said they liked the isolation but I think it was mostly because it was the cheapest holiday accommodation in the Trossachs. It’s an hour and a half drive from here, maybe two hours if we have to skirt cameras, though there won’t be many along this route, not once we’re away from Edinburgh.”
“It says the mobile coverage is patchy. There’s internet?”
He swiped down. “Wi-Fi—there, see?”
“Let’s do it. I’ll drive. You need to rest.”
