me over the years.
If I couldn’t hold my marriage together for even a year, what was to say I could hold a multi-billion-dollar international whiskey distillery together? Nothing. Not even the decades of learning at Margery’s side since I was a preteen.
There was no way in hell I was admitting it to her, though. Instead, I said, “Mitchell’s already on the shipment.”
“The shipment is not the real problem, is it?” she asked, her voice certain.
I scratched the back of my shoulder before I caught myself. She saw it, as she always did. I’d mostly broken myself of the habit, aiming for my grandmother’s expressionless stature, but damn if Edie didn’t bring out all my hidden flaws.
When I refused to rise to Margery’s bait, she continued, “The real problem is you not being here on a day-to-day basis. Instead, you’re in the States, trying to manage the company from a subsidiary. It can’t last that way, Garrett. You know it can’t.”
I did know it. But I’d promised Edie I’d try. I’d promised her the day she’d accepted my engagement ring, knowing full well her family, and her home, and the place she belonged was in Tennessee. Knowing full well I was needed in Scotland. But I’d been unable to walk away from her without doing everything I could to mold us together.
I’d kidded myself into thinking she needed me as well as her family, when it was clear she didn’t. Those thoughts pounded through my brain on a vicious replay of the scene we’d performed as I’d left for the airport.
All those thoughts and feelings had me growling a retort my grandmother was unaccustomed to hearing.
“You’re here. Couldn’t you have handled it?”
“That’s quite uncalled for,” Margery snipped back at me, putting me in my place. I deserved it, but it still rankled. It was rare moments like these I envied my dead father and my environmental activist of a mother who were free of the ties that bound me to this place.
She stared at me, and my frustration with her ebbed away. She was the one person who’d stood by me my whole life. She’d worked herself to the bone, managing the company single-handedly, and then still spent time with me when the day was done. She’d spent the majority of her life running this company, living and breathing it. She deserved to escape its bonds and just enjoy the rest of her life. It was why we’d agreed she’d step back from the company this winter.
I looked out the window and could just make out part of the beautiful old distillery that had been part of my family for almost two hundred years. It now housed the general store and tourist facilities. The stone building was covered in moss and ivy. Majestic against the mountains and the sky of the Scottish highlands. I loved it. I loved everything about it, and Margery was right. I needed to be here.
But I also needed to be with Edie, my very pregnant wife who couldn’t have gotten on the plane to come to Scotland at the moment even if she’d wanted to.
I stared at the picture of Edie and me from our wedding that sat on the desk. My gorgeous, ballerina-limbed wife in lace and tulle, looking even more beautiful than the first time I’d seen her, which seemed almost impossible. That first night, I’d been struck dumb, unable to look away. Her strawberry-blonde hair had been up in a pile of curls on her head, her graceful neck left bare over pale shoulders that shimmered as if someone had sprinkled pixie dust on them. She’d been in a black, strapless dress that hugged her curves above a pair of royal-blue stilettos that drew my eyes to the muscled shape of her calves.
I knew she’d been a dancer in some former life. You could tell it by the way she carried herself. I’d surprised my marketing manager by stalking across the ballroom, introducing myself, and then barely letting her out of my sight for the rest of the evening. Not quite a stalker. Not quite a ridiculous caveman behemoth. But something close. I’d been unable to restrain myself as a feeling that everything in my life had just changed washed over me in her presence. As if I’d walked through an invisible wall that divided my past from my future.
From that night forward, I’d courted her relentlessly, because I’d been unable to escape the feeling that she was mine. That our souls were