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...
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For forty straight minutes, Cameron’s relentless yap had been vibrating my side glass like a blown-out sub-woofer. It was the kind of unbroken noise pollution that made me consider steering us into a ditch just for a taste of sweet silence.
"If this dirt trail is the main vein to the cabin, I am begging someone to absolve my sins right now," he garbled, his cheeks packed with Morag’s tooth-rotting, heart-stopping tablet. "Because I refuse to land in hell with a full bladder and an unconfessed body count."
I kept my mouth shut, mostly because keeping a two-ton metal box on a single-track road at five in the evening was a fucking nightmare. The Highlands in November didn't just get dark; it dropped a damp, suffocating curtain that erased the horizon entirely.
The plastic wrapper of another confection crinkled as Cameron ripped it open. "Oi, Aadam. You tapping the brakes every three feet because your eyesight is failing, or are you trying to bore us into a coma?"
I glanced in the rear-view mirror. His hair looked like he’d stuck his finger in an electrical socket, his jacket hanging off one shoulder while his face was ghastly lit by the faint neon green of his dying screen.
Isla snatched the paper bag out of his lap. "He's driving slow so your useless skull doesn't get painted across a tree trunk."
"Give it back!" Cameron squawked, lunging sideways. "Gran said those sweets were my emotional support sugar!"
"She said they were for the whole car, you greedy dickhead."
"Lies! Slander!"
He tackled her into the leather, shifting the car's balance. The whole backseat dissolved into a cacophony of rustling foil, blunt thuds, and Isla threatening to break his thumbs one by one.
Freya slammed her head back against her headrest from the far rear. "Shut the fuck up! Both of you! My head is pounding!"
George, sitting next to her with a wet rag pressed against his forehead, let out a dry laugh. "Bold of you to assume there's anything inside that head to pound, Freya."
The interior exploded into a six-way shouting match that was rapidly giving me a migraine. On the dashboard, the GPS was having a psychotic break. The blue position marker kept spinning in wild circles, convinced we were currently sitting at the bottom of a loch.
The road kinked left without warning, an abrupt, treacherous hook carved into the cliff side. I slammed my heel into the brake, dragging the tail back before the off-side tires could slide into the gully.
