Page 5 of Hiding Nessie
‘But the sun will still rise,’ Lachlan said with a wry smile. ‘Even if The Lucky Teapot isn’t there.’
The smile faded from his lips. Heavy snowflakes settled on his lashes. Suddenly, in the muffled silence of newly falling snow, Cam sensed some chasm between them. It was an elusive feeling, and he couldn’t tell if it was his own intangible fear of losing Lachlan, or if it was some other barrier he wasn’t being allowed across. As though Lachlan was withholding something from him.
Cam swooped in to kiss him, unable to bear the weird distance. Lachlan opened his mouth willingly, his tongue gliding freely against Cam’s while he sank deeply into the kiss. Cam relaxed a little, twining his gloved fingers through Lachlan’s hair where it poked out from under his hat.
He knew he was falling too fast and too hard. Already terrified of losing this fragile connection between them.
It had occurred to him—usually at 3 A.M. when he couldn’t sleep, alone in his bed in Glencoe—that Lachlan might have had many lovers. That in three hundred years of existence, Cam’s presence might be only a fleeting distraction, a short blip of attachment soon to be forgotten alongside the rest.
Was that what Lachlan meant, when he said he took things for granted? That people were only passing through?
Lachlan was smiling again when he pulled back from the kiss, looking warmed through with pink cheeks and the familiar sparkle in his blue eyes that set Cam’s churning thoughts briefly to rest.
They continued walking, taking in the wide view of distant snow-capped peaks beyond Loch Ness.
‘No luck yet on my end, by the way,’ Cam remarked offhandedly. ‘On figuring out your curse.’
Lachlan patted his arm. ‘You don’t need to update me every time you see me. I trust that you’re looking into it.’
‘Sorry. I just feel like I should have something by now.’
Cam’s efforts to identify the original monster (or witch, as Lachlan believed) of Loch Ness who’d traded places with Lachlan were proving futile. He’d been researching curses and found the topic to be horrendously broad. Most curses seemed to be broken by either killing the person who had inflicted it, or by somehow turning the magic back on them. Or, in rare cases, by finding a loophole in the language the curse was built on.
‘I don’t suppose the monster said any magic words to you, when you traded places?’ Cam suggested, only half joking.
‘It told me I had to go willingly,’ Lachlan replied, picking a path through the heather. ‘And that I had to say the words. I don’t know if that counts.’
‘What words?’
Lachlan rested a second, remembering. ‘Just that I would take his place. I had to swear it.’ He snapped out of introspection, and Cam regretted making him dwell on that memory during this moment.
‘Shall we get back to the café?’ Lachlan said brightly. ‘I’m dying for a hot drink.’
‘Sure,’ Cam replied, folding his arms around Lachlan and pressing a kiss to the tip of his cold nose. He lifted his gaze for a last look at the rolling horizon, but movement in the treeline dragged it down again.
Amber eyes peered out of the woods. The faint outline of a muzzle protruded from the shadows, surrounded by a mass of shaggy fur. Cam stiffened, arms locking against Lachlan’s sides.
‘What’s wrong?’ Lachlan twisted nimbly in his embrace, but the creature was gone when he found the point Cam was staring at.
‘It’s nothing,’ Cam said, hoping Lachlan couldn’t hear his thudding heartbeat. He swallowed, chastising himself for lying—for creating that same distance he was afraid of a few moments ago.
‘I think I saw something,’ he admitted, lowering his voice. ‘Last night, there was… a creature that ran me off the road. I don’t know what it was, but it was big.’
Lachlan’s face screwed up in incomprehension at first. ‘Ran you off the road… ?’ His eyes widened. ‘Ran youoff the road,Cam? Are you okay? What happened?’
‘Kind of crashed my bike.’ Cam held up both hands immediately to stem the tide of distress about to pour from Lachlan’s mouth. ‘I’m fine! See? No harm done. The bike took all the damage.’
Lachlan’s brows remained tightly knitted together. ‘This happened last night? Where?’
Cam pointed south. ‘Along the road east of Fort Augustus.’ He frowned as a painfully obvious thought occurred to him. Where he’d run into the creature was more than five hours away on foot. If it was the same beast he’d just seen here… then had it followed him?
‘That’s miles away!’ Lachlan exclaimed. He followed as Cam started down the slope towards the trees. ‘How did you get here if you crashed your bike?’
‘I walked it.’ Cam tried to sound indifferent, hoping Lachlan would remain ignorant of the blisters on his feet. ‘No big deal.’
‘Why didn’t youcallme?’
‘I did.’
