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...
"I love you in a way that would worry a therapist and thrill a poet."
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Late November in the Highlands was unadulterated masochism. It wasn't just freezing; the climate was hostile, dropping a relentless mist that didn't even have the decency to be actual rain. It just soaked through thermal layers, clung to the skin, and left hair plastered to your forehead.
The air smelled heavy, a pungent combination of burning peat, damp wool, and pine sap frozen solid by the sub-zero draft. Above the jagged peaks, the sky was a slate-gray monolith, threatening enough to make you feel claustrophobic in the middle of nowhere.
Inside my gut, a literal war was being waged. Morag had gone full medieval warlord in the kitchen, testing how much fat and carbs a human being could ingest before their organs shut down. The Cullen skink was thick enough to fill potholes. The haggis sat on the platter looking ready to sprout legs, surrounded by tattie scones, venison pies, leek broth, black pudding, stovies, and a beef stew rich enough to keep a small nation alive through an ice age.
The wildest part?
The old woman actually remembered my parve rules. Sbe went out of her way to keep the meat and dairy from crossing paths during the prep. Even though running a truly kosher operation requires a level of tactical precision she definitely didn't have the certification for, the amount of energy she wasted trying not to violate my conscience meant that refusing even a single spoonful would make me the biggest prick on the planet. So I kept my mouth shut and choked down every single calorie.
Now, the whole circus had migrated out into the freezing mud under the guise of "getting some movement." In reality, we were just half a dozen people waddling around the yard, trying their best not to pass out from a fatal food coma.
A few yards down the fence line, a cluster of black-faced sheep with curled horns watched us with complete apathy. They didn't give a solitary shit about the abysmal weather, just chewing on dead weeds like the world wasn't ending around them.
"Look at these dumb bastards," Freya scoffed, leaning her entire upper body over the rusted wire. Right beside her, Isla was trying to tie a decorative ribbon around one of the horns, oblivious to the fact that the alpha ram was tracking her movements, looking heavily inclined to break her face if she took another step.
Near the main gate, a few stray ducks were paddling through chocolate-colored puddles. Out by the barn, Morag's Border Collie was fixed in place, its gaze locked onto the livestock with the exact same razor-sharp focus it had when I first came over here years ago.
The whole valley felt deadened, the quiet only broken by the distant grunt of a ewe, a lone raven cawing overhead, and the distant rumble of the river cutting through the gorge miles away. Every few seconds, the brutal gust would slam the galvanized yard gate shut with an echoing clang that made the girls flinch and erupt into high-pitched laughter that bounced off the stone walls.
