“Shall I drive? Not being stubborn and chauvinistic here but I know the roads.”
She happily stopped the car and scooted across to the passenger seat as he dragged himself out the rear door and in the front.
“We’re close,” he said, after a few minutes of driving. “The loch’s just down there.” He pointed along one side of the road.
“How can you tell?”
“You can’t see the lights of the big old country house on the shoreline?”
“Is this a Scottish thing—some superhero power to see through fog?”
“No, I can’t see shit. There was an old mile marker back there—I used to look for them along here when I was a kid.”
The shadow on his jaw had darkened along with the night. It’d be deliciously rough against her skin.
She cleared her throat. “When were you last here?”
“Long time ago. Once I went to university I was far too cool to holiday with my family.”
Hiding behind humor again. But hiding what? Grief? Regret? He hadn’t seen his family for three years, so nostalgia was unlikely. Oh, to hack into his brain and crack the password to thatvault. Plenty of people showed a fraction of their true selves to the world—she knew that better than anyone—but the fraction Jamie showed was very different from the part he hid.
Latif wasn’t like that. Nothing inside was different from the outside. Even his final act—slipping away in the night—was in keeping with his nature. She’d been horrified to wake up and find him gone, of course, but that’d been her fear all along.
And there she was, comparing Latif and Jamie again. Why was it when she thought of one, the other immediately came to mind, like a word association? The ghost of Latif reminding her she’d never find anyone who understood her like he had? The specter of Jamie teasing her with a future that couldn’t be? It wasn’t as if Jamie were offering to fill the hole Latif had left. She could picture the kind of woman Jamie would date—fun-loving, confident, uncomplicated...
Great, now she was envious of a woman she’d just this minute conjured from her imagination.
She sighed. “Is it always this foggy here?”
“I don’t remember ever seeing fog here but I’ve only been in summer. Think of it as a security blanket.”
“Was it a nice place to come, as a kid?”
“Aye.”
“Do you miss those days?”
He glanced at her with narrowed eyes, like it was a trick question. “In some ways.”
She waited for him to expand but he didn’t. He was all chat-chat-chat when they were talking about her. Was this how people felt when they tried to extract information from her? Charlotte had once complained that speaking to Samira was like getting dirt from a stone.
Charlotte. Guilt stabbed Samira between the ribs. Here she was, kissing Jamie—and fantasizing about much, much more—when Charlotte was missing, Tess was in jail, her own life and freedom were at risk, and Latif was, well, still dead. Jamie was just her...bodyguard.
And what a body.
Shutup.
CHAPTER TWELVE
JAMIEMANEUVEREDTHEcar along a twisting lane so narrow Samira could reach out her window and pick ferns from the bank. She guessed the expanse of mist on the other side of the road marked the lake. Theloch. Only a vowel’s difference, the way she pronounced it, but it turned a body of fresh water into an ancient and mystic organism, somehow. Of course, in Jamie’s accent, thechcame out as a sexy, throaty growl, calling to mind his FrenchR.
Ugh, did she have to get turned on by everything the guy said or did?
Eventually he pulled into a rutted driveway, the headlights sweeping over a tiny stone cottage, blinds lowered in its two small front windows like it was sleeping—windows designed to keep out the cold rather than let in the sun. A skeletal tree leaned onto one side of it, branches clawing the stone. Jamie parked out back, next to a wooden shed and an overturned tin rowboat with a faded blue stripe circling its hull. If not for that sliver of color they could have driven into a black-and-white movie.
She shivered. “This doesn’t look like the picture.”
“No, it’s not quite how I remembered it.”
