died the year before. The two men had enlisted together, served together, and had been friends all through their lives.
After two minutes of silence the National Anthem was sung, then the crowd began to disperse and Cam took Harmony over to meet John Harris and his son Martin.
From then on it was a round of introductions, which seemed to last forever, before they could break away and head back to the office.
“Oh, my…” Harmony said, almost as though she were apologizing. “Those ceremonies get to me. My father’s family are almost all military, so they always strike home, but I think Grandie would have approved of this one. He liked a nice simple observance rather than a lot of pomp and circumstance.”
“I’m glad to hear you think he’d have approved,” Cam replied. “Was your father in the military too?”
Her lips pursed as she shook her head. “No. He had a congenital heart defect which made him ineligible. He tried to sign up, to follow in his father’s, uncles’ and cousins’ footsteps, but the army turned him away.”
“That must have been hard on him.”
Cam wondered why the subject of her father had made those lines come and go between her brows. But they were at the side door of the surgery now, and he opened it so she could step through.
“I guess so,” she replied, with a touch of frost in her voice. “But he made up for his disappointment.”
Before he could figure out what to say to that, she turned toward the staircase leading to her apartment.
“I’ll see you at a quarter to one,” she continued. “I promised the CIs I’d meet up with them for lunch and I want to change before you and I go on our tour.”
“Don’t let them talk you into doing anything you don’t want to. The Winter Festival gets crazy, and they’ve already been trying to get me to recruit you to help. I’ve been valiantly staving them off.”
She paused, her hand on the railing, one foot on the lower step, and looked back at him over her shoulder. “Why?”
Self-conscious under her golden perusal, he shrugged. “You just didn’t seem too keen whenever I mentioned the festival or Christmas.”
Her lips twisted briefly to the side, then softened into a rueful little frown. “Sorry,” she muttered, and then cleared her throat. “It’s not that I don’t want to help, it’s just… I’m a little low on Christmas spirit this year.”
It shouldn’t matter to him why. In fact, he should be glad of it, as it meant she’d be disinclined to get too involved, giving him time to get over this unwanted attraction. Yet his curiosity was stronger than any sense of self-preservation. Harmony didn’t seem the type to open up very often, so her showing him even a little chink in that practical armor was enticing.
“How come? Just too far from home?”
“That doesn’t bother me,” she said, but he heard uncertainty in the stout declaration.
Then she sighed, and turned back to face him.
“The truth is my gran died earlier this year, and Christmas was always a special time for us to celebrate together. It just won’t be the same without her and Mum.”
“Well, you have space here. You could ask your mum to come up and spend the holidays with you.”
The cheerful note he’d tried to infuse into his voice seemed to have the opposite effect to what he’d intended as she slowly shook her head.
“Mum’s finally getting a life of her own. Her new gentleman friend has invited her to Yorkshire to meet his family, so that’s a non-starter.” Drawing herself up to her full height and tipping up her chin, she continued, “But it’s fine.”
That should have been the end of it, but he knew all too well what she was going through—the loneliness that cloaked the soul after the loss of someone pivotal in your life. The feeling that nothing would ever be the same without them, and the unsure sensation of the world being off-kilter, perhaps never to right itself.
“I get it. Really I do,” he found himself saying. “Those firsts are always the hardest. When my grand-da died I didn’t feel like facing the holidays either.”
Harmony’s lips came together in what he’d previously thought of as her disapproving expression. But now he was left wondering what it really meant, considering the pain lingering in her eyes.
“You were close to your grandfather?” she asked.
“Oh, yes. Closer to him than to my parents. I lived with him for a couple of years, and I used to come here every holiday I could to be with him. Even when I got older, if it was reading week at university, you name it, I’d be on Eilean Rurie. It was only after I started working with the aid agency that I didn’t get back as often as I’d have liked.”
“My gran had lived with us since my dad died, when I was six,” she replied. Then, as though suddenly aware of what she was saying, she added, “I’m sorry. I don’t usually have a pity party in front of my boss. I think the ceremony this morning has made me a little emotional.”
“Don’t apologize, please. I don’t mind.”
Those big golden eyes, slightly misty with tears, drew him in…had him fighting not to step forward. She was all he could see. The world had shrunk to just the woman in front of him, so valiantly battling for complete composure.
Normally he shied away from too much emotion, never trusting it to be genuine. His mother had been a master of using feigned sadness or disappointment to manipulate—until she’d realized it no longer worked on him and had turned it off like a tap.
Harmony Kinkaid was just his temporary employee—a woman he’d known for a couple of days. Why, then, was the urge to comfort her so overwhelming?
His heart was suddenly hammering, and alarm bells were going off in his head, but he paid the warning no mind. Instead he stepped closer and rested his hand on her shoulder, rather than on her cheek the way he wanted to. Her lips were soft now, full and inviting.
Begging to be kissed.
Cam exerted a Herculean effort and dragged his gaze away from her mouth to focus once more on her face.
“I’m sorry you won’t be with your family this year, and that you’ve lost someone so important to you that it doesn’t even feel worthwhile celebrating, but it’ll be okay. You just wait and see.”
And his chest grew suddenly tight as tears gathered at the corners of her eyes again. When the first one slipped free, before he could give in to the urge to wipe it away, she turned and started up the stairs, leaving him staring after her, confusion his only companion.
Cam had been right about the CIs trying to corral Harmony into helping with the festival, but she’d told them she’d only just got to Eilean Rurie and really needed more time to find her feet. While they’d grumbled about it, by the time they’d left the pub Harmony thought they’d given up on the idea.
Crossing
