Scotland
Eight years later

It was a beautiful day to find a new home. And a new roommate.

I stepped out of the damp, old stairwell of my Georgian apartment building into a stunningly hot day in Edinburgh. I glanced down at the cute white-and-green-striped denim shorts I’d purchased a few weeks ago from Topshop. It had been raining nonstop since then, and I’d despaired of ever getting to wear them. But the sun was out, peeking over the top of the cornered tower of the Bruntsfield Evangelical Church, burning away my melancholy and giving me back a little bit of hope. For someone who had packed up her entire life in the US and taken off for her motherland when she was only eighteen years old, I wasn’t really good with change. Not anymore, anyway. I’d gotten used to my huge apartment with its never-ending mice problem. I missed my best friend, Rhian, whom I’d lived with since freshman year at the University of Edinburgh. We’d met in the dorms and hit it off. We were both very private people and were comfortable around each other for the mere fact that we never pushed each other to talk about the past. We’d stuck pretty close freshman year and decided to get an apartment (or “flat” as Rhian called it) in second year. Now that we were graduates, Rhian had left for London to start her PhD and I was left roommateless. The icing on the cake was the loss of my other closest friend, James, Rhian’s boyfriend. He’d run off to London (a place he detested, I might add) to be with her. And the cherry on top? My landlord was getting a divorce and needed the apartment back.

I’d spent the last two weeks answering ads from young women looking for a female roommate. It had been a bust so far. One girl didn’t want to room with an American. Cue my What the fuck? face. Three of the apartments were just . . . nasty. I’m pretty sure one girl was a crack dealer, and the last girl’s apartment sounded like it got more use than a brothel. I was really hoping my appointment today with Ellie Carmichael was going to go my way. It was the most expensive apartment I’d scheduled to see, and it was on the other side of the city center.

I was frugal when it came to my inheritance, as if as if spending as little of it as possible would somehow lessen the bitterness of my “good” fortune. But I was getting desperate.

If I wanted to be a writer, I needed the right apartment and the right roommate.

Living alone was an option, of course. I could afford it. However, the God’s honest truth was that I didn’t like the idea of complete solitude. Despite my tendency to keep eighty percent of myself to myself, I liked being surrounded by people. When they talked to me about things I didn’t understand personally, it allowed me to see things from their point of view, and I believed all the best writers needed a wide-open scope of perspective. Despite not needing to, I worked at a bar on George Street on Thursday and Friday nights. The old cliché was true: Bartenders overhear all the best stories.

I was friends with two of my colleagues, Jo and Craig, but we only really hung out when we were working. If I wanted a little life around me, I needed to get a roommate. On the plus side, this apartment was mere streets away from my job.

As I tried to shove down the anxiety of finding a new place, I kept my eye open for a cab with its light on. I eyed the ice cream parlor, wishing I had time to stop in and indulge, and almost missed the cab coming toward me on the opposite side of the street. Throwing my hand out and checking my side for traffic, I was gratified that the driver had seen me and pulled up to the curb. I tore across the wide road, managing not to get squashed like a green and white bug against some poor person’s windshield, and rushed toward the cab with a single-minded determination to grab the door handle.

Instead of the door handle, I grabbed a hand.

Bemused, I followed the tan masculine hand up a long arm to broad shoulders and a face obscured by the sun beaming down behind his head. Tall, over six feet, the guy towered above me. I was a smallish five foot five.

Wondering why this guy had his hand on my cab, I took in his expensive suit, wondering why this guy had his hand on my cab.

A sigh escaped from his shadowed face. “Which way are you headed?” he asked me in a rumbling, gravelly voice. Four years I’d been living here and still a smooth Scots accent could send a shiver down my spine. And his definitely did, despite the terse question.

“Dublin Street,” I answered automatically, hoping I had a longer distance to travel so that he’d give me the cab.

“Good.” He pulled the door open. “I’m heading in that direction, and since I’m already running late, might I suggest we share the taxi instead of wasting ten minutes deciding who needs it more.”

A warm hand touched my lower back and pressed me gently forward. Dazed, I somehow let myself be manhandled into the cab, sliding across the seat and buckling up as I silently questioned whether I’d nodded my agreement to this. I didn’t think I had.

Hearing the Suit clip out Dublin Street as the destination to the cab driver, I frowned and muttered, “Thanks. I guess.”

“You’re an American?”

At the soft question, I finally looked over at the passenger beside me. Oh, okay.

Wow.