“Aye. We did.”

“Were your feelings romantic then?”

“I definitely noticed her as a woman. I lied to myself for a long time about it, but Arro …” I smiled. “She’s innately confident and sexy. She could walk into a room wearing a bin bag and you’d notice her.”

“But you tried not to …”

“Aye. Then the New Year’s Eve we opened the club, I was having a bad night about Robyn. It had hit me I was back in Scotland permanently, and she was farther away than ever. I just wanted to be alone, but Arro found me and … I’d known for months how she felt about me. She couldn’t hide it. I wanted to ignore her, but that night, seeing that look in her eyes, I told her about Robyn. To make her see that I was actually a piece of shit, and she could do better.”

“But Arro didn’t see it that way?”

“No. She refused to think badly of me even knowing the truth, and I wanted to believe her. And when she kissed me, I wanted to drown in the way she saw me, so I kissed her back. And then I did my usual and pushed her away.”

“Did you know you loved her then?”

“Not then. A few months later. She avoided me after that, and I hated it. I missed her. We bumped into each other on the beach one night, and she brought it up, and even after I lied and told her I didn’t feel that way about her, Arro was kind and understanding, even in her disappointment. So different from Stacey. That’s when I knew I was in love with her. That I would never love anyone the way I love her.”

I looked up to meet Iona’s gaze. “Which makes it so unbelievably fucked up that I could hurt her like I did. I led her on and then I punished her for coming on to me. The things that came out of my mouth … She’s right. I treated her like she was a strange bloody woman who’d broken into my house. I humiliated her. How do I come back from that, Iona?”

“First, as always, we look at causality. Most of us say and do hurtful things we don’t mean because of something else that’s going on underneath. For you, we’ve already concluded, it’s the negative thoughts wherein you’ve decided you’re unworthy, that you don’t deserve, that you hurt the people you love. These were the reasons you rejected Arro the way you did. It wasn’t out of cruelty, it wasn’t deliberate. Can we agree on that?”

I nodded. “But I tried to explain that to Arro, and she said it doesn’t absolve me of what I made her feel.”

“She’s right. It doesn’t. But I need you to know where your actions stemmed from in order to prevent it from happening again. You can’t use that night to build a case against yourself anytime you feel overwhelmed by negative thoughts or the belief that you don’t deserve Arro. Because you will have those moments, Mac. This, what we’re doing here, is ongoing. You will have to be self-aware and redirect negative thoughts into positive thoughts. Just like with Robyn, anytime you and Arro have an argument or one of you hurts the other’s feelings—which happens in even the healthiest relationships—you can’t dredge up the night in your house to prove you shouldn’t even be with her. You hold on to the good—how you were there for her when her father died, how you’ve upended your entire life to protect her against this current threat, how you’ve been there any time she’s called upon you to be there for her. Can you think of a time when Arro asked you a favor and you didn’t come through for her?”

Searching my memory, I realized I couldn’t. “No.”

“Actions speak louder than words.” Iona smirked. “Yes, a cliché. But there’s such truth in it, Mac. The good you’ve brought to Arro’s life can outweigh the bad. Now, going forward, it is up to Arro to forgive you for that night, and she may or may not. However, I suggest you give her the entire picture. She needs to know you came to me, even though it was one of the hardest things you’ve ever done. She needs to know this because she needs to know that you’re willing to do the work, Mac.”

18

Mac

Jock pulled up in front of my car outside Arro’s. The days were longer now as we entered the first week of summer, though it remained cold this far up the coast. It felt like early spring, except for the light. It was eight in the evening and still light out and would be for another hour.

I got out to greet Jock and update him on the quiet day. Arro had been working from home for the last few weeks on a new project, and when we did venture out, she was good at ignoring me. It stung, but it didn’t feel as hopeless as it once did. I’d been going to therapy every week and could not believe how much better, how much more optimistic, I felt.

Which was why I’d decided tonight was the night I needed to talk to Lachlan.

Jock looked grim as he got out of the car.

“Everything all right?” I asked, approaching him.

He shook his head. “Sorry, Mac, but I don’t know how much longer I can do these night shifts. Will understands and wants to help Arro”—Will was Jock’s fiancé—“but raising my boy has been left to him for over a month now, and it’s not fair to him or to Adam.” Adam was Jock’s son from a previous relationship, and he had full custody now.

Knowing what it was like to raise a small child when you were doing night shifts, I sympathized fully. “I know.”

“Nothing has happened in weeks. I’m starting to think this was a prank, that having seen how much police involvement there is and the protection we’ve put on Arro has scared the shit out of whoever it was.”

There had been no new notes. The police returned Arro’s Defender and unsurprisingly told us they had no leads. Unsurprising because we were probably following the same information as they were during our private investigation, and until today, we’d had no leads either. My PI had tracked Arro’s scum of an ex-boyfriend Guy Lewis down, and he was living his life, working as a chef in a wee café near the Lake District in England. I’d had someone watch Guy, but there was nothing about his daily routine that suggested he was remotely interested in Arro. Good for him, because I’d like any excuse to scare the shit out of him for what he did to her.

For now, he was not a suspect, though I wanted to monitor his movements. I’d hired the ethical hacker we kept on retainer for the club to register Guy’s vehicle so she’d get any hits on the license plate if he entered Scotland. As an ethical hacker, Nylah regularly attempted to hack our security systems and pointed out any issues or flaws. That was her primary job. But she also moonlighted as our unethical hacker because we never asked her to do anything illegal that might harm an innocent. Morally ambiguous, aye, but weren’t we all?

The PI had also provided information on Lucy’s loudest and most active fans, who believed her incarceration part of some conspiracy. However, a few lived in the States and the other in mainland Europe, and not one of them had traveled to Scotland or seemed to have any immediate connections here.

But today, I’d received information that changed everything and more than likely proved there was a threat.

“I hope you’re right,” I hedged, not willing to share outside the family for now. “I’ve been so focused on Arro that it hasn’t been fair to put all these shifts on you—”

Tags: Samantha Young Adair Family Romance
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