‘I want to come to your wedding, Scotty. If you truly feel that marrying Nina will make you happy, then I respect that. I want to be there to share that moment in your life.’
I can’t lose you again, she screamed inside her head.
He drew himself up to his full imposing height and squared his shoulders. ‘I’d better check in with Chris. I’ll let you finish up with Autumn,’ he said. ‘You drive my car home. I’ll crash here tonight.’
He turned and walked away. Claire watched him stride towards the house and wondered if she was witnessing Scotty Shannon vanishing from her life once again.
Scotty didn’t go into the main house. He knocked on the door, told his brother that Autumn was breathing well, and then, when he was sure Claire would be back in the stall tending to the horse, he doubled back to the stables.
He went to the far end of the building and, as quietly as possible, used a low-hanging eucalyptus branch to haul himself onto the sloping tin roof. During the day, the view from up here was spectacular, a vista that spanned the hills and the valley beyond, right down to Bindallarah and out across the Pacific to the horizon. When Scotty and Chris were kids, their parents had tried to forbid them from climbing onto the roof. It was steep and precarious in places, and in the searing summer sun the tin got lava hot – hot enough to burn their skinny bare legs.
But they’d sneaked up there anyway, especially Scotty and especially at night. In the dark he couldn’t see anything but the lights of the main house and the stars. He wrapped himself in the blackness like it was a warm quilt. He’d always loved his roof perch. He loved that it caught the mellow sea breezes, that it was silent but for the horses’ gentle music below. It was his thinking place.
And often, in the heady first incarnation of his relationship with Claire, they had done a lot more up there than think. He shivered as his brain uploaded a highlights reel. Memory was a funny thing. Sometimes he imagined his fingertips still tingled with the touch of her creamy skin.
Scotty could hear Claire now, speaking quietly to Autumn as she worked. ‘I’m so sorry, my love,’ she was saying. Apologising for the pain she was causing the mare. In his experience, it was unusual for a vet to talk to her patients, to seek to calm and reassure them. Most vets were all business, especially out here in the bush, focusing on the injury or illness rather than the patient as a sentient being. But then, there wasn’t much about Claire that could be described as ‘usual’.
He’d heard it said that the best veterinarians weren’t those who loved animals – they were often too emotional and got too attached. The best vets were those who loved science, loved puzzles, wouldn’t rest until they solved the mystery and fixed the problem, but could keep the animal itself at arm’s length. That was Scotty to a tee. Even when Nina had hit Tank with her car, the part of him that was racked with panic at the prospect of losing his beloved dog had shut down as the vet in him had taken over.
Scotty was all about getting to the bottom of things. And yet Claire was the better vet. She was emotional and unapologetic about her care for her patients. He remembered how broken up she’d been about losing a horse to laminitis on the night she first contacted him on social media. She loved animals and science in equal measure – and he could never get to the bottom of her. She was a puzzle he simply couldn’t solve, just as he couldn’t figure out how to shake her from his heart. Trying to do either only seemed to make things worse.
He couldn’t believe he’d kissed her. He hadn’t meant to. But she wasn’t meant to stand in front of him and tell him how lucky he was to be free of her. She wasn’t supposed to rush to reassure him that she had only platonic feelings for him. Scotty didn’t have the words to tell her that, despite everything, he didn’t think he wanted that freedom. He couldn’t articulate his confusion, so he had showed her instead.
He had felt Claire respond. She had kissed him back with every bit as much desire as he’d felt thundering through his veins. She wanted me too.
But then it had all gone to hell. Scotty groaned as he recalled how she’d pushed him away.
You’re engaged to be married, Scotty.
He’d let it go way too far. What must she think of him now? It’s just a kiss, he’d told himself as he pulled Claire to him. But of course it was so much more than that. It was an announcement. He might as well have shouted it through a megaphone: Scotty Shannon has no integrity.
How could he ever expect Claire to have faith in him when he’d just been unfaithful to his own fiancée – with her? Scotty had allowed his lingering attraction to Claire to overwhelm him, let himself give in to his still-simmering desire for her, and in the process had made her an unwilling participant in deceiving Nina. And why? Because Scotty was sure that Claire must feel the same magnetic pull towards him that he felt for her. He thought it was fear that had made Claire say she wanted nothing more from him than friendship. That kiss was carnal, wanton, unbelievably sexy – anything but platonic.
But that was his thing, wasn’t it? Deciding
