Highland Games

Her new life wasn’t supposed to include him.

Zoe’s spent her life playing it safe, but when she inherits a tiny cabin in the Scottish Highlands, she decides it’s time to shake things up. Goodbye, boring London life. Hello, adventure! What could possibly go wrong?

Only everything.

Her 'cozy' new home has no running water or electricity, the roof leaks like a sieve, and the front door is... missing. And then there’s her new neighbor – Rory. A scorchingly hot, grumpy man-bear who wants her gone. 

Rory has zero patience for distractions. If he can’t make Kinloch Castle profitable, he’s out of a job. All he wants is peace and quiet in the cabin he loved as a child. Instead, it’s been invaded by a one-woman chaos machine and turned into a DIY disaster zone. Worse? She’s infuriatingly attractive.

Rory needs Zoe out of Scotland, and out of his life. The trouble is, she has no intention of leaving.

Let the games begin…

This was it. She was going to die.

Die being mauled and eaten by a bear. Why had she left her flat, her job, her friends, her life for this wild fantasy, only to die on the first night?

And she wasn’t even wearing her best underwear.

Adrenaline shot up Zoe’s body, turbocharged by alcohol, straight to her frantic heart. Think! Can I barricade the door? She tore her gaze from the grimy window, fighting the darkness inside the deserted cabin. 

The chairs looked rotten and the table too heavy to move without making a noise. 

What happened to the rest of Willie’s furniture? And why did I neck half a bottle of Prosecco the minute I arrived? On an empty stomach?

She peered back at the large shape shuffling in the blackness outside. It was huge, bigger and broader than a man. 

But hang on, were there even bears in Scotland? 

She ran through her memories—a scrambled montage of wildlife documentaries—trying to pick the right country from ice caps, rainforests, and savannah. There’d been a film, years ago, about bringing native species back to the Highlands. Had they reintroduced bears? Or was it beavers? She went to google it, then remembered there was no phone signal.

God, this place really is the ends of the earth.

She tiptoed to the cabin door and peered through the crack. It didn’t lock or even close properly. Hopeless against a creature that big. It was by the outhouse. Maybe it was searching for food? Could she throw it something to eat? 

She locked her eyes on the figure and bent her knees, fingers fluttering into the shopping bags on the floor. They knocked against a can, and it tipped with a crash.

The figure’s head snapped up. Zoe heard a low growl: the sound of a creature preparing to kill.

Shit, shit, shit!

Her hand closed around a loaf of bread. She yanked it out, pushed the door open, and catapulted the loaf into the air. It arced overhead and landed with a soft thud at the bear’s feet. The growl changed to a frenzied bark, and a wolf stalked out from behind the outhouse.

Oh god, wolves and bears!

She was doomed. The bear put a paw out, silencing the wolf, bent down and picked up her weapon.

Zoe was cold with fear, but Prosecco made her bold. ‘Shoo! Shoo! Be off with you!’

The bear raised itself to its full height.

‘A loaf of bread? You threw a loaf of bread at me?’

Oh god, it was a man. A man-bear. Out of the frying pan into the fire. 

‘I’ve got a gun! Get off my land! Or… I’ll shoot you!’

The man-bear slouched back against the outhouse, tossing the loaf from paw to paw. ‘No, you don’t, and this isn’t your land.’

‘Yes, it bloody well is!’

Zoe was furious. She was thirty per cent cold, sixty per cent drunk, and one hundred per cent scared so stupid she’d thought bears roamed wild in Scotland. To top it off, some intruder was now saying this wasn’t her land? 

She reached back into the bag, grabbed a can, and threw it with pinpoint accuracy, hitting him on the shoulder.

It bounced off. 

He must be made of steel.

‘Let me guess,’ he drawled. ‘Baked beans?’

She pulled out another and threw it at him. 

‘Get! Off! My! Land!’ she yelled, each word punctuated by another grocery item sailing through the air. When the bag was empty, she balled it up and threw it after her food. It unravelled and fell to the floor by her feet.

‘Have you finished?’

Zoe was silent, thinking of what else she had left. Her boots? 

The man-bear walked towards her, holding the loaf at arm’s length. The wolf—okay, dog—at his heels, wagging its tail. They climbed the steps to the porch where she was standing.

‘Yours?’ If words were an eyebrow, this one was arched.

She snatched it, squinting up at him. His face was obscured by the darkness. 

‘I told you,’ she hissed, ‘get off my fucking land.’

He leaned in and she leaned back. ‘It’s not your fucking land,’ he whispered.

‘Yes, it bloody well is! My great-uncle gave it to me.’

He stepped back, as if surprised. ‘Mad Willie?’

‘It’s Great-Uncle Willie to you!’

He crossed his arms. ‘So then, niece of Great-Uncle Willie, is the land freehold or leasehold?’

She paused. How did he know? ‘I own the leasehold for the next thirty years.’

‘Ahh, so it’s not really yours then. It belongs to the Kinloch estate.’

Zoe was beyond anger, beyond fear. This massive oaf had nearly given her a heart attack and now he was telling her it wasn’t her land? She took a big breath, intending to let him have it, when he interrupted.

‘So, may I ask why you threw a loaf of bread at me?’

She stopped, set off course. ‘I thought you were a bear,’ she replied without thinking.

Silence.

Then the man-bear started laughing.

The sound was even bigger than him, splitting the darkness with unrepressed joy and echoing across the loch to the other side of the valley. Her toes tingled as the deck reverberated under her feet. 

He laughed as if he couldn’t stop, his huge frame doubled over as he gasped for breath. He was wheezing now, each howl punctuated by ‘A bear! A bear!’

‘I don’t see what’s so funny.’

The man tried to control himself. ‘It’s Scotland, not bloody Yellowstone! Have you come here looking for pixies? Maybe a little Nessie-spotting?’ He started laughing again at his own joke.

‘I’m here to live, you buffoon! And it’s not funny. You scared the shit out of me. Anyway, who the hell are you? And what are you doing sniffing around my house in the dead of night?’

The man-bear stopped laughing and straightened. ‘Okay. First, it’s not the dead of night—it gets darker quicker up here than in the home counties. Second, I work on this land and saw a piddly little sports car abandoned on the track. I came to see what was going on and got attacked by a lunatic armed with a loaf of bread. And third, you can’t live here; it’s not fit for human habitation. I’ll show you the way to the village. There’s a pub with rooms you can stay in, and tomorrow you can go home.’

Zoe clenched her jaw and spat out her words like bullets. ‘Listen here, Mr Know-It-All. Let me make one thing straight. This is my land and my home, and I intend to live here. I don’t need an overgrown yeti trespassing on my property and frightening the crap out of me. Now bugger off.’ She held up the loaf of bread. ‘I’m going to make myself some beans on toa—’ she remembered there was no electricity, ‘bread, and have a quiet night in.’

‘Maybe watch some telly?’ he replied. ‘Surf the web? Have a nice hot bubble bath? Good luck with that.’

He stepped off the porch and strode away, whistling for the dog to follow. 

Zoe stalked into the cabin and slammed the door as hard as she could. It rewarded her by falling off its hinges and landing with an almighty crash on the front deck.

The man didn’t look back.

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