Renna Rose Lancaster never searched for love.
She stumbled into it long before she was old enough to know what to call it.
It lived inside flower crowns that barely survived a minute on his head. Pebbles he slipped into her pockets because every tre...
"In your breath I found entire winters that never froze me."
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The Scottish sky was putting on a whole existential crisis-a bruised, chaotic masterpiece of violent violets and decaying blues that looked like an angsty artist had aggressively smeared across the horizon after one too many drinks. Beneath the drama, the Bentley offered a low, obedient purr, its tires crunching sharply against the rogue pebbles scattered over the twisting coastal asphalt.
The briny sting of the sea slipped through a microscopic crack in my window, flooding the car. It was that aggressive, hyper-concentrated salt air that stung the back of your throat and reminded you that the Atlantic was right there, fully capable of swallowing you whole if it felt like it.
Leaning my cheek against the freezing glass, I tracked the jagged, merciless outline of the coast. Seriously, the landscape looked like it had been sculpted by someone with an excess of rage and zero fucking patience. Cliffs sliced clean down to the water, where waves were throwing hands with the rocks below.
Scotland still felt like a foreign planet to me. Stunning? Obviously. It had this raw, ancient energy that my home country could never dream of replicating. But it didn't belong to me. Not yet, anyway.
And tonight? Tonight felt like standing on the precipice of something enormous. Like the universe had me suspended by my ankles over those exact cliffs, whispering: do it, jump.
I twisted my fingers into the chiffon of my dress, gripping it so hard the fabric literally squeaked in protest. My pulse was doing Olympic sprints, and my thighs were clamped together so tightly I could have probably pressurized coal into a flawless diamond.
"Breathe, angel. Tighten up any more and you're going to snap a pelvic bone before we even park."
Mama's voice cut through the dark interior of the car, drenched in that signature, zero-fucks-given amusement that she weaponized on the daily.
My neck whipped in her direction so fast my joints gave an audible crack. "Mama, wrap it up. Seriously."
"Oh, don't 'Mama' me." She leaned across the console, a suffocating cloud of her designer perfume invading my personal space. "That poor dress is fighting a losing battle. And your legs? Jesus, sweetie. If Aadam doesn't wreck your world tonight, you're going to give yourself a stroke in the backseat."
I choked on air, my face bursting into flames. "Keep your fucking voice down."
"As if your dad's listening," she scoffed, waving a hand adorned with diamonds that caught the glow of the dashboard. "He is currently rehearsing his pretentious Oxford vowels in his head. The man is fully locked in on out-snobbing Raphael the second we cross the threshold."
A laugh slipped past my guard before I could strangle it. "You are so fucking toxic."
"And you think it's a work of art." A knowing smirk spread across her face. "Now cut the virgin martyr act. You've been a vibrating mess of horny energy since exact second I told you where we were heading. You think I don't see it? You practically start salivating the minute his name even breathes into a room."
