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Carys was drunk and she was rarely drunk. But the Four Crowns public house was right next to her hotel, and it had seemed like a good idea when she arrived back in town at three in the afternoon to start drinking to calm down.
Now she was calm.
Very, very calm.
“Can I get you another, dove?” The bartender was an intriguing dark-haired man with an angular face, a fine jaw, and brilliant blue eyes that looked at her like he could see into her soul. He had a line of fine gold rings climbing up his left ear, and his hair fell over the right side of his face like a golden-brown waterfall.
God, she was really drunk.
Carys squinted. “Is everyone in this country attractive?”
The barman flashed her a wicked smile. “I guarantee you, no.”
As if to prove his point, a group of three old men with raucous laughter and overgrown beards walked into the bar, shouting at the woman behind the bar to get them three pints.
“See?” The man’s eyebrows went up.
She smiled and raised her empty glass. “Point made.”
“You’re visiting from America.” He narrowed his eyes and looked at her, then he leaned down and stared into her eyes, his mouth falling open a little.
“What?” She looked down at her shirt. Had she spilled something? It was highly possible. “What are you—?”
“You aren’t American, are you?”
Carys frowned. “I think I know where I’m from.” What a strange man. The gorgeous cheekbones were not making up for the intrusive questions and the staring.
“But you were born on this side of the ocean, weren’t you?” The man kept his eyes on hers. “In Cymru.”
“Wales.” She blinked. “I was born in Wales. How did you know—?”
“Oh yes. Wales.” The man’s shock melted away and a glorious smile spread over his face. “So you’re visiting this side of the waters. Isn’t this delicious?”
“Visiting?” Carys sighed. “Kind of. It’s not exactly a vacation.”
The long-legged man slid into the booth across from her. “Do you mind? I love a good story.” He leaned forward. “In fact, I live for them.”
His cheekbones were high, and his jaw was dusted with black stubble. Blue eyes shone out from arching black eyebrows that reminded Carys of blackbird wings. His lips were full and red, as if he’d been eating blackberries in the summer. She tasted the sweetness just looking at his lips. The tart burst of blackberry juice—
Carys blinked. “I should probably get a coffee and not another whiskey.”
“Should you?” The dark man pulled a whiskey bottle seemingly out of nowhere and refilled her glass, then the glass that was suddenly in front of him. “Why did you come to Scone?”
That’s right, she was in Scone, Scotland. Lachlan’s hometown. The town where he’d run through the dense pine forest and hunted deer with his father. The town where he’d learned to ride horses and all the other idyllic things he’d told her.
She stared at the glass in front of her. It hadn’t been there before, had it? Or had there been a glass sitting on the table the whole time?
The room around her began to spin.
“My dove?” The man leaned in and spoke softly. “Why did you come to Scone?”
“I… I’m looking for someone.”
“Who?” The man took a drink and watched her.
She hadn’t seen the forests or deer that Lachlan had talked about. The trees she’d seen had been sparse and leafless from the cold. There were more sheep and cows than deer.
Maybe she was in the wrong place after all. The childhood Lachlan had described seemed like it came from one of the fairy tales she taught in her Intro to European Mythology class, not a rural village an hour outside of the Scottish capital.
“Who are you looking for?” he asked again.
“Lachlan Murray.” Carys blinked, looking up into the man’s blue eyes. “Do you know him?”
His mouth formed a small o, but he quickly hid his surprised expression behind a cocky grin. “Lachlan of Moray? Oh aye, I know that name. Tell me more.”
“It’s Murray, not…” She blinked when she heard his accent. “You’re not Scottish.”
His smile curved slowly. “No, I’m not. In your way of thinking, I’d be called Irish, I suppose.”
“So is this an Irish pub or a Scottish pub if the bartender is Irish?”
His smile got bigger. “It’s my pub. Do you want to know my name?”
She looked around the pub, but it was strangely quiet. She saw people on the other side of the room, but their voices were distant and muddled. The only one she could hear clearly was the man across the table from her.
She blinked, trying to clear her head. “Are you hitting on me?”
“Hitting you?” He sat back, his eyebrow rising in shock. “What are you talking about?”
“Not hitting me. Hitting on me.” She wracked her brain for the Scottish term Lachlan had used once. “Chatting me up. Are you chatting me up?”
“Am I?” The man’s red lips curved into a smile again. “Do you want me to?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I’m looking for Lachlan. I love him. And he loves me. That’s why none of this makes sense.”
He let out a soft sigh. “Oh, it makes too much sense, doesn’t it?”
“What makes sense?”
His glittering eyes softened. “The distances we travel for love.”
“Yes.” She reached for the glass and realized that it was empty. Where had the whiskey gone? Had she drunk it already? She didn’t remember drinking it. “You understand then. I came here because I love him. And I need to know what happened.”
Do you? A teasing voice that sounded like her mother’s whispered in her mind. Curiosity, my Carys. You will follow the rabbit into the forest, never seeing the wolf that follows at your back.
She opened her eyes and saw the man more clearly. “How do you know Lachlan?”
He leaned back in the wooden booth and lifted the whiskey bottle. “How about another drink?”
She heard the door to the pub open again, and a gust of cold wind dusted her shoulder, making her shiver and pull her sweater up her neck. “I don’t want any more whiskey.”
“It warms the blood.” The man looked amused. “But I suppose it depends on what kind of blood you have.”
His dark hair fell past his shoulders in curling waves that reminded Carys of the whorls of grain in polished maple her father had loved.
“He made my mother a drawing table from that wood.” Carys’s head was spinning.
The man narrowed his eyes. “What wood? Who made a table?”
She was really drunk.
Her father had been a shop teacher at the local high school, and a carpenter in his spare time. He’d loved the redwood forests of California and had built a small house with his own hands after moving his wife and infant daughter from rural Wales to the American West Coast.
When she closed her eyes, she was back in Baywood, standing behind that house on the edge of the forest, looking into the trees and peering through the shadowed trunks where the light jumped and danced as branches moved in the breeze.
Her parents weren’t dead in this memory. They hadn’t perished on a hillside in the dead of night, lost to a car crash in the wilderness. Her mother was still painting in her studio and her father was still polishing wood in the barn.
She watched the faint lights in the forest, dancing like fireflies at twilight. Don’t be curious, my Carys, He mother’s voice whispered in her mind. Leave the rabbit to the wolf. Never follow the lights. They want to lead you away from me.
“Duncan Murray. Here to collect your American friend?”
The bartender’s voice roused her, and Carys opened her eyes.
Duncan was standing over the booth, his arms crossed over his chest. He nodded at the barman. “Dru.”
Carys looked up at him and squinted. “You.”
The bartender looked up and smiled. “I was just about to ask your friend her name. Perhaps you can tell me.”
“Out of the booth, Dru.” Duncan’s voice was gruff. “You don’t need her name.”
“But I’m fairly sure I know one of them.” The strange man’s eyes were twinkling. “Don’t you want to tell me the other, my dove?”
Carys looked at the man and tasted the sweet burst of berry juice on her tongue. “Nothing you say makes any sense.”
“Not now, but wait.” Dru winked at her. “Very well then.” He slid out of the booth. “Your seat, Duncan?”
“And a glass,” the brutish man said. “Leave the bottle unless it’s one of yours.”
Dru flipped the neck of the bottle with his fingertips, and it seemed to disappear. “I’ll bring you another.”
Duncan slid into the booth across from Carys as Dru walked away. “Of all the pubs you go to, it had to be this one.”
She pointed over her shoulder. “It’s right next to my hotel.”
“Of course it is.” He was folding his hands, then unfolding them. “Listen, I’m sorry I was rude today, but you surprised me and—”
“You shouldn’t have been surprised. I called you, like, a dozen times after Lachlan went missing.” She was far too drunk to be polite. “What did you think was going to happen when your brother up and left my house and five hours later, his phone was pinging in Scotland.” She leaned forward. “Five hours, Duncan. That’s not possible. At one thirty his phone was at Mad Creek bridge and four hours later it was in Edinburgh.”
Duncan stared at her. “You didn’t tell me that part.”
“You didn’t really give me a chance.”
“Fine. Tell me what happened.”
Carys sighed, trying not to think of how many times she’d told this story in the past month. To Laura and Kiersten. To the police. To her dean. “He went for a hike in the forest behind my house.”
Duncan scratched his beard. “You two liked to hike. He told me that.”
“Yeah, and we know how to be safe in the woods. We don’t hike after dark. We take water and protein bars with us. We take a compass because cell phone service is shit back in the hills.”
“What’s in the woods?”
She frowned. “What do you mean ‘what’s in the woods?’ Trees. Bears. Too much poison oak. He knew all that stuff. He’d been around long enough.”
“Four months.” He stared at the table. “When he was in Baywood, did anyone come around looking for him? Did he mention anything strange?”
“No. I would have told the police. Search and Rescue went out to Mad Creek looking for him and they looked for like four hours, but by then I’d come back to the house and some of his stuff was gone, so then I checked where his phone was and… poof! Scotland. Which…? ” Her head was swimming. “How? But there were his boots so….”
Duncan frowned. “What about his boots?”
How was he so dense? “Someone took some of his clothes and his boots. Then they left his old muddy ones by my back door. So the police think he took off.”
“But you don’t.”
“Of course I don’t.” She waited for him to speak more, but he didn’t. “He left his passport, his stuff. He left his car, Duncan. That is not a normal ‘hey, this isn’t working out.’”
“No,” Duncan muttered. ‘I can see why you were confused.”
“You’ve talked to him, right? You said you’d talked to him since he’s been back.”
“Uh…” He frowned. “Not exactly.”
“So how do you know he’s okay?”
“Because I know.” Duncan sighed. “What can I do to convince you to leave this alone and go back to your life?”
“Nothing. The man I love is missing.” She finished the whiskey Dru had poured for her. “I shouldn’t drink any more, but this is better than any whiskey I’ve ever tasted.”
“Oh, I bet it is.” He snatched the glass from her hand. “Don’t drink that. If you insist on more, wait for the next bottle.”
“Why not?” She tried to grab it, but his hand moved too fast.
His hands were pocked with small scars and burns, callused from work, though his nails were neatly trimmed. While the rest of Duncan looked just like Lachlan, his hands were very different.
Carys blinked at him through bleary eyes. “Maybe I should just go to the police. I can give them all the information I have from the police in Baywood.” Her voice rose a little bit. “I got a copy of the report there. I can give them your name. Lachlan’s passport. The screenshots of his phone pinging in Edinburgh. All his paperwork and the name of his lawyer in California and—”
“Stop.” Duncan put his hand over Carys’s and lowered his voice. “Carys Morgan, you need to stop. Leave this be. Leave Lachlan be.”
Don’t follow the rabbit into the woods.
Carys was going to disappoint her mother so much. She probably already had. “I don’t believe you that he’s fine.” She glared at Duncan. “I think someone forced him to come back here, so until you let me see him, I am going to stay here and raise so much noise that nothing about your life is going to be peaceful. Ever again.”
The first hint of panic touched his brilliant green eyes. “Please.”
“I’m persistent and I’m pissed off. At you. At Lachlan. At… the stupid police back home. I’ll call the police here. I’ll call the newspapers. I’ll call—”
“Okay, stop.” He swallowed. “Carys, stop.”
“Take me to see Lachlan.”
Dru walked over and thunked a bottle of whiskey on the table before he walked away again.
Duncan watched him until he was back behind the bar, then he turned to Carys. “You want to see Lachlan?” He cracked the bottle open and poured two fingers of scotch in his glass and then in hers. “You really want me to take you to Lachlan?”
“Yes. I do.” Wait, was he really going to do it?
He downed the whiskey with one gulp. “Fine.”
“Fine? Does fine mean yes?” Was he really going to take her to see Lachlan?
“Yes. I’ll take you. And if anyone complains about it, I’m blaming my fucking brother.”
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