A tattoo curved around his left ribs—something Celtic that probably meant something profound but right now just gave her eyes a path to follow down to where his jeans hung low enough to be criminal.
His hair was dark with silver threads that caught the light, wet like he'd just stepped out of a shower. It was just long enough to look like he forgot to get it cut rather than styled it that way. Water droplets dripped from his w and traced paths down his chest that Cassie absolutely did not follow with her eyes.
(She did. She absolutely did. Three times.)
His face was... annoyed. Spectacularly annoyed. The kind of annoyed that involved a jawline thatcould cut glass and cheekbones that belonged in a museum dedicated to making women stupid. He had crow's feet around his eyes that said he'd smiled once, maybe in 2002, but had since thought better of it.
He was holding a wrench.
Her wrench.
The one she'd just been using.
Which was still dripping sink water.
"What the bloody hell—" His accent hit her like a baseball bat made of sexual awakening. Scottish. Deep. The kind that made words like "bloody" sound like foreplay. Rough around the edges like he'd gargled gravel and washed it down with whiskey.
His voice rumbled from somewhere deeper than his chest, possibly from the earth's core, through a filter of frustration and what sounded like a truly impressive collection of swear words he was holding back.
He looked around her kitchen like it had personally offended him—taking in the floating tools, the sparkling air, the smoke dissipating, the spellbook still cheerfully open on the counter. His expression went through several stages of grief in rapid succession: denial, anger, bargaining with reality, depression that this was his life, and absolutely no acceptance whatsoever.
Then he locked eyes with her.
Blue. Of course they were blue. Not regular blue. Not sky blue or ocean blue or any of those cliché blues. These were Scottish loch blue, the kind that looked gray until the light hit them, then turned into storms with opinions. The kind of blue that made poets write terrible metaphors about drowning and not minding.
They were also furious.
"Who the hell are you?" they said in unison.
Then stared at each other, processing.
His eyes narrowed, taking her in—the wine glass at 11 a.m., the rage-cleaned kitchen, the period sweatpants, the tank top with its wine joke, the general aura of a woman one bad day away from arson.
She took him in—the everything about him that was making her brain static and her hormones throw a party she hadn't been invited to in years.
Cassie broke first. "I asked first."
"No, lass, I distinctly asked first."
"We asked at the same time."
"Which makes me first by default, as I'm the one who was just—" He gestured vaguely at the air, the movement making his chest do things that weren’t fair, “—yanked through bloody space while in my own damn bathroom!”
That explained the wet. And the shirtless. And the way water was dripping on her kitchen floor in a very attractivepuddle.
"I—you—there was a spell and the sink was leaking and—" Cassie's brain short-circuited as another drop of water traveled down his chest, taking the scenic route over his abs. "Why are you in my kitchen?"
That’s what I’d like to know.” He looked at the wrench in his hand—her wrench, the one she’d just been using—like it had materialized there without his consent. Which, she supposed, it had. “One minute I’m getting dressed, next minute there’s this pull, like someone’s grabbed my soul by the bollocks, and now I’m holding some stranger’s tools in her kitchen.
He tried to set the wrench down.
It didn't budge.
He frowned, shook his hand. The wrench remained firmly attached, like it had been superglued to his palm.
"The fuck?" He shook harder. The wrench stayed put.
"Oh God, I broke you." Cassie stepped forward, then immediately stepped back because he smelled like cedar and sin and something that should require a prescription. "I broke a Scottish man. Is that a crime? That feels like a crime. International incident? Do I call the embassy?"
