Fairytale Come Alive (Ghosts and Reincarnation #4)(4)

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.