Fairytale Come Alive (Ghosts and Reincarnation #4)(3)
Author: Kristen Ashley

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 f**king 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 f**k 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.

Chapter One

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.