Fairytale Come Alive (2 page)

He went back to the boats in the summers because he needed the money.

The ring he’d given Elle wasn’t what he wanted to give her, neither was it what she deserved, it was what he could afford. He’d vowed to himself (although he hadn’t told her) that he’d eventually replace it with something that suited her, something bigger, shinier and worth the moon.

He’d been shocked when she’d loved the ring, tears filling her eyes as she examined it after they’d finished their horizontal celebration on the floor.

Her hand close to her face, her eyes glittering with tears, she’d whispered, “It’s absolutely
perfect
, Pren. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Now she was sliding it off her finger.

Prentice felt his gut twist as the alarm returned, sharp and vicious.

“Elle.”

“This was a mistake. I’m sorry,” she said, her voice still strong, controlled. “I got caught up in the whole…” she hesitated and, with his ring between her thumb and forefinger, she twirled her hand between them in a dismissive way, “Scotland thing.”

The gut twist tore upwards, slicing through his innards.

Who was this girl?

“The whole ‘Scotland thing’?” Prentice repeated, his eyes narrowing.

“Yes, American girls have a thing for boys with accents,” she replied calmly as if her words weren’t a verbal knife thrust to his heart.

“You have got to be fucking joking,” Prentice hissed.

And if she was, it wasn’t fucking funny.

“Mind your language around my daughter,” Austin warned but Prentice didn’t even look at him.

His eyes stayed locked on Elle.

“We need to talk,” he demanded. “Alone.”

“I see no reason to draw this out, Prentice. As I explained, I made a mistake.”

He took a step closer. She took a step back.

He stopped.

She’d never retreated from him.

Never.

Even when they were arguing, which happened often. Elle could be annoyingly if adorably stubborn.

“Don’t you see?” Elle asked. “This was a lark. Annie and me –”

Prentice’s body jerked. “Don’t you fucking tell me Annie and Dougal –”

Her best friend Annie had hooked up with his best friend Dougal the same night he and Elle met. They’d been just as inseparable and had fallen just as deeply in love.

Quickly, she shook her head in a frantic way that was far more Elle than anything he’d encountered that morning and he watched panic flash through her eyes before she hid it.

“No, no… Annie and Dougal are something else,” she said swiftly and firmly.

“But you and I are a lark?” Prentice asked, his voice ugly and dangerous in a way it had never sounded before and it surprised even him.

“Well… yes,” she replied then continued. “I took it too far. Got caught up in it. I’m so sorry, Prentice.”

She rarely called him Prentice and he didn’t like it, especially not now.

She called him Pren. She was the only one in his life that did so and he liked it when she did.

And furthermore, she didn’t look sorry.

She didn’t look anything.

She didn’t look even a little bit like the girl who tore into town with her crazy antics, her abandoned laughter, her outgoing, fun-loving American cheerfulness, stealing his, and everyone’s, hearts.

She looked like a girl he wouldn’t glance at twice.

And she acted like a girl he’d detest.

He couldn’t believe he’d been so deceived.

“We need to talk,” he repeated.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” she replied.

He got close and she stood her ground. He tipped his chin down and stared in her eyes.

They were cold.

“Something’s happened.”

“Yes, my father arrived and gave me a wakeup call,” she threw her hands out to her sides. “This isn’t my life. I wouldn’t be happy here. Honestly, Prentice, the idea is ridiculous. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Prentice felt like shaking her.

He also felt like picking her up and carrying her away from Fergus McFadden’s posh house and Elle’s despicable father and doing everything in his power to bring back his Elle.

He didn’t do either.

“I don’t know what he said to you –” Prentice started.

She interrupted, “He gave me a few home truths.”

“And they were?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Prentice lost control of his temper and shouted, “It fucking well does!”

Austin materialized at their side. “Calm down, son.”

Prentice turned only his head to Austin. “Don’t call me son.”

“Prentice, really, don’t make a scene,” Elle put in sounding, if he could believe his ears,
bored
.

Prentice turned back to Elle. “We weren’t a lark.”

“Prentice –”

It was his turn to interrupt and his voice held an edge of steel coated with a sheen of deep emotion which, as much as he hated showing the weakness, he couldn’t quite control. “At least for me it wasn’t a lark.”

He wasn’t sure but he could have sworn Elle flinched.

He decided he was wrong when she calmly held his ring up between them.

Prentice didn’t take it.

Instead, he said, “When you’re away from him and you realize this is madness, you find me, you call me, you write me, I don’t give a fuck what you do.” He leaned into her and took her head in both hands feeling her body go solid when he moved an inch away from her face. His voice dipped low when he continued, “I’ll be pissed off, baby, and I’ll make you work for it. But I love you enough to get over it and take you back. I promise you that.”

“Prentice –” she said softly but he cut her off in the way he always stopped her from chattering.

He touched his mouth to hers.

Without a choice, as usual, Elle went quiet.

Prentice pulled away and looked into her eyes.

“I’ve had a good life; you know that,” he whispered, “Even so, you’re the best thing that’s been in it.”

He watched, up close, as she slowly closed her eyes, emotion washing over her face making her radiant.

That
was his Elle.

Whatever this was, he’d made it through.

Thank Christ.

He kissed her forehead, let her go and, without a backward glance at her, or her father, Prentice walked away.

Romantic Fairytale Come Alive

Isabella

Twenty Years Later…

“This is so
exciting,
” Mikey cried from beside her in the limousine, practically jumping up and down in his seat.

Isabella looked out the windows thinking that this was absolutely, positively
not
exciting in the
slightest
.

She watched Prentice’s village slide by, happy the windows were tinted and no one could see in. The limousine, undoubtedly not a common vehicle to glide down the cobbled streets, was causing quite a stir and everyone was stopping to look.

She recognized more than one face.

Each recognized face caused her heart to contract and her breathing to go erratic.

She curled her fingers into her palms, tight, feeling her nails dig into the flesh painfully.

And familiarly.

The pain, as it often did, calmed her breathing, if not her heart.

“Isn’t this
quaint!
” Mikey declared also staring out the window and Isabella bit back the desire to explain that the British didn’t like it overly much when Americans described their homes as “quaint”.

She bit back the desire because he was very excited and she loved him.

There were two people she loved on the entire earth, Mikey Bruce and Annie McFadden. Therefore, she’d rather slit her own wrists than do one, single thing that might quell his incalculable glee.

And, for Isabella Austin Evangelista, that was saying something.

“Picnics and dinner parties and log throwing,” Mikey kept talking, “I can’t
wait!
”

Isabella struggled with her earlier thought because Mikey could be stubborn and so could Annie (to say the least, about
both
of them) and she wanted to try to curb his disappointment and Annie’s annoyance because they’d had, Isabella knew, about five hundred conversations about the Highlands Games demands Mikey was making on the upcoming festivities.

Therefore, she said softly, “There isn’t going to be log throwing, Mikey. Annie explained that.”

Mikey turned his gaze to Isabella and waved his hand. “I’ll talk her around.”

“Please, she has everything planned as she wants it. It isn’t like you can throw together an event like that on the spur of the moment.”

Mikey’s eyes narrowed and Isabella pulled in a breath.

“I’m sorry but this is a romantic fairytale
come alive
. A
Scottish
romantic fairytale
come alive
. When that happens, you can do anything you want! And a
Scottish
romantic fairytale
come alive
means
log throwing!
” Mikey declared.

He was not wrong. Well, he was about the log throwing, but not about the other stuff.

Annie and Dougal getting married, after twenty years and all that had happened in between, was most definitely a romantic fairytale come alive.

Even though she was happy for her friend, very happy, staggeringly happy, Isabella’s fingers tensed and the nails embedded deeper into the flesh of her palms.

Mikey looked back out the window and so did Isabella.

* * * * *

Twenty years ago, as her father had told Prentice, they’d gone back to Chicago the very day Prentice walked out of Fergus’s house.

So confident in their love, so confident in
Isabella
, he didn’t even look back.

The next week had been the worst in her life (until the week after, of course).

And this was also saying something.

One could say Isabella’s life had been filled with “worst weeks”.

That was just the worst of them.

Her father had been furious at her “tryst” with “the fisherman” and also about her keeping it from him for over a year. He took every opportunity (and when there weren’t opportunities, he made them) to describe to Isabella his extreme displeasure.

And when he did, he did this
at length
.

Sometimes
for hours
.

Isabella had been heartbroken.

So heartbroken, for the first time in her life, her father’s verbal tirades barely affected her.

All she could think of was Prentice and that awful, awful,
awful
meeting in Fergus’s living room. The way he looked, his anger, his disbelief, his frustration, all of it pouring off him in waves and crashing against her.

And there was not one thing she could do about it.

Not that first thing.

Not that she would have.

She knew better.

And, it must be said, Prentice deserved better.

However, in an unusual moment of courage, three days after their return, she approached her father and told him he’d been wrong. It wasn’t a “tryst” and Prentice wasn’t just “a fisherman” and even if he
was
, she didn’t care. She loved him, she wanted to marry him and she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him in his village and that was that.

Her father struck her.

Open-handed and brutal.

When her head swung back he did it again.

He had struck her before in her life, not often, seventeen times to be exact (she’d counted, adding those two, it made it nineteen).

But he’d never done it twice in a row.

She’d been stunned and her courage fled as quickly as it came.

She’d been weak. Such a coward.

Always, all her life, a coward.

Just like her mother.

Prentice deserved better than
that
. She knew that to the depths of her very soul.

“I’ll not listen to you speak of him again,” her father had told her.

She didn’t speak of Prentice again.

Never again.

Her father’s blows had left a bruise and Isabella had learned her lesson.

And she knew whatever happened in his life, Prentice would have a better one without the likes of her in it.

Two days after that, she got the call that Dougal and Annie had been in a car accident.

By some miracle, Dougal had come away unscathed except for a few cuts and bruises.