She stared at his back and let her gaze trail lower to his narrow waist and the outline of his muscular legs where the drape of the black cloth molded around them. Pure lust raged through her with such a vengeance that it shocked her. She raked both hands through her hair and redid the ponytail holder to get the heat of her tresses up off her neck. What was wrong with her? This was ridiculous and just…wrong.
His reflection in the glass stared back at her, his eyes glowing with an unholy light. While struggling to tamp down her entirely inappropriate physical response to him, she blinked hard and fast to dispel the silly illusion that he now possessed some strange sort of supernatural wolf eyes, but that didn’t work either. She cleared her throat and gave herself a hard mental shake.“Who are you, Mathison Shadowmist? Really.”
He turned and faced her. “A man who has been searching…”
“Searching for what?” She swallowed hard, bracing herself for whatever he might say. The candlelit room had taken on a strange eeriness that made the air seem to crackle.
Returning to his chair, he settled into it, then leaned forward and propped his forearms on his knees, eyeing her with a pensive yet smoldering look. “Answers. Peace. Healing. The completion of my soul.”
She’d searched for the same with no success. “Do you think either of us will ever find any of those things?”
“If we are brave enough—aye. But we must first find the courage to take hold of them when we find them, or all our efforts will be for naught.”
She pushed herself back into the pillows and hugged her knees to her chest. “I can bluff a good game, but I don’t know about ever finding that kind of courage ever again. Not when it could be nothing more than a false start or another stupid mistake.”
“Everything happens for a reason, lass. Yer daughter died, and a part of ye died with her. But look at the precious time the two of ye shared. Without that mistake ye think ye made, ye never would have known the joy of her wee life intertwined with yers.”
“I suppose that’s true,” she admitted. “But the pain of that last year with her makes the joy part hard to remember.”
“Joy can be elusive. Sometimes, ye have to hunt it down and hold fast to it so it canna escape ye.” He twitched a shrug as he idly laced his fingers together and stared down at his folded hands. “Joyous memories can be the slipperiest of them all. Yer mind is just as capable of drowning ye in darkness as it is in bringing ye into the light. It takes discipline and sheer stubbornness to train it to serve ye properly.”
The emotions in his tone touched her far more than his words, and it scared the living daylights out of her. “How did you get so wise?”
Still staring down at his hands, he smiled, but it seemed more sad than happy. “I have lived many years. Alone. With entirely too much time to think about life’s riddles.” Then he rose and came over to the couch and settled down beside her. “May I?”
Trying to ignore the shiver his nearness sent through her, she hugged her legs tighter to her chest. “Looks to me like you already have.”
“Shall I move back to the chair, then?”
“No.” She fixed her gaze on the flickering flame of one of the candles in front of her on the table and sank into it. With Otto on her left and Mathison on her right, an odd sense of safe contentment washed across her, giving her the strength to get her chaotic emotions in check. At the deepest level of her heart and soul, she knew Mathison would neither hurt her nor take advantage of her. What a strange thing to know about someone she had just met.
“I’m tired,” she said more to herself than him. And she didn’t just mean physically. She was tired of constantly having to battle all the crappiness life kept throwing at her. She relaxed her head back against the cushions and stretched out her legs, propping her feet on the coffee table. “Maybe it’s the jet lag or just…everything. It seems later than it really is.”
“Aye, it does at that.” Shoulder to shoulder, he propped his feet next to hers. The man radiated the warmth of a bonfire—both physically and emotionally.
She fell ever deeper into being helplessly mesmerized by the candlelit room, the storm outside, and the indescribable yearning for him to hold her as if she were the most precious thing in his world. No. I don’t do one-nighters. She fought to hang on to whatever shred of control she could find. Talk. She needed to talk. About something—anything. “Mairwen said the tarot cards helped her decide to sell the house to me.”
“Did she now?”
The slow, deep laziness of his voice, delivered in that sexy Scottish drawl, chipped away at her diminishing control even more. She folded her hands in her lap, tightly clenching them together. “And she read them again when I showed up to pick up the keys. Said they showed that my hopes were about to be realized.”
He didn’t speak for a long moment, then slowly nodded. “A good thing, aye?”
“If you believe in that sort of thing.”
“Ye dinna believe in the auld ways?”
“Auld ways?”
He reached over, took one of her hands, and laced his fingers through hers. “The magic of Scotland is a powerful thing.” Then he kissed the back of her hand before tracing the lines of her veins with his fingertip. “’Tis the land’s lifeblood, in fact. Mystical energy is strong here.”
She found it hard to form a coherent sentence. His touch repeatedly sent insistent jolts of what could only be described as pure, adrenaline-laced excitement through her. Static electricity couldn’t begin to explain the feeling. Her common sense finally kicked in, dousing her with a strong enough surge of fear to jerk her hand away and tuck it under her folded arms.
Mathison blew out a heavy sigh that made her wish she hadn’t reacted the way she had.
“I believe what I can see and touch,” she said, hating that she sounded like the biggest killjoy in existence.
“A sad state of affairs, lass. Sad indeed.”
