Scotland for Christmas

But she didn’t move, either. She just waited patiently. Jacob carefully ran a French fry through the pool of ketchup he’d managed to coax onto his plate. Her question surprised him, but he didn’t feel so bad about answering. “I’m pretty sure Lee is the one who stayed and told everybody in the church to go home afterward.”

“That’s a good friend,” she said admiringly.

“Yeah. He is.” The details were kind of hazy at this point, though. “He did come back to my apartment later. I, ah, needed help with the bandages.”

“The bandages?”

“I’d punched a few walls. One of them turned out to be brick.”

She put her hand over her mouth. Her chest was moving up and down.

“Are you laughing at me?” he asked.

“Sorry.” She giggled once, and it made her seem young. She giggled again and it was...well, it was the most interesting sound he’d heard in a while. He even felt his face splitting into a grin.

“This is so inappropriate, I know,” she said between chortles. “But suddenly, I don’t feel as bad about losing my breakfast in a coffee shop in midtown Manhattan.”

“Are you going to eat that hamburger?” he asked, pointing at her plate. “Because if you don’t, I will.”

She broke into another fit of giggles, and then suddenly he was laughing, too.

Just...damn.

Back in the SUV, facing the road again, Jacob sobered. He couldn’t forget that he was walking a fine line, so many fine lines.

Maybe that part about Lee had slipped out because of where they were headed. He and Isabel each had damn good reasons not to be keen on wedding celebrations.

He just felt gentle with her. In a sense, she was a kindred spirit, phase two of his operation or not.

“Thank you for telling me that story,” she said softly as she buckled her seat belt. “And thank you for being kind today.”

“You think I’m kind?”

“You are kind,” she said. And then she went back to fiddling with the radio.

Jacob was more often accused of being insensitive. Or aloof. Intense was Eddie’s word. Jacob was pretty sure he got that from Rachel, who, now that he thought of it, had coined the term first. Eddie’s wife, Donna, was the one who’d really latched on to it of late, though.

She hadn’t been at Jacob’s wedding—almost wedding—but Jacob was pretty sure that Eddie had told her the lurid details. Hence her obsession with fixing Jacob up.

Isabel had seemed to respond to his intensity. Maybe she had some natural intensity of her own deep inside her, dying to come out. Maybe it had taken the shock of Alex dumping her for it to escape through that protective surface of hers.

And Rachel... Until today, he hadn’t thought of her in years. At this point, she was nothing to him. The thought of her stirred no feelings, one way or another. She’d been a drama queen—open and direct, the opposite of his mom. He’d mistaken that for intensity, and at the time, he’d craved it because it had been such a novelty to him—someone who wanted to pick everything apart and react expressively to it. After being brought up in a mostly silent home, where people tended to withdraw above all, it had been intensely appealing to find someone who thrived on emotion.

Jacob squinted to find the turnoff he needed. They were almost there.

Isabel stirred next to him. Stretched like a cat, totally not conscious of him. Comfortable in his presence.

And something about that just grabbed him and held on.

Don’t, he told himself. Let her be just a job.

He reminded himself of that over and over during the rest of the drive.

* * *

THERE WAS SOMETHING wonderfully freeing about sitting next to a man whom she didn’t need to give one fig about impressing. Isabel could put her head back on the seat. Let her hair down. Not worry that it was dark outside and the SUV’s engine was lulling her to sleep.

She’d forgotten how freeing it was to be on the road for a long drive. In her fantasies she could get in a car and drive all day, just get away from her life.

It felt like being in a fairy tale with him, nothing close to her everyday reality.

“Knowing Me, Knowing You” by Abba was playing on the radio. She found herself singing along about breaking up never being easy. She put her hand over her mouth and broke into laughter again. That had sounded terrible.

“I don’t care,” she said aloud. She felt tired of needing to put on a good front. Tired of living for tomorrow. She just wanted to laugh and sing and feel better now. “Do you mind if I turn up the volume?” she asked Jacob.