Page 25 of Fierce Highland Longing

“You’ve come on well.”

Callum had a creel on his shoulder and a coil of line over his arm, and he set the creel down on the stones like a man with an hour to spare.

“Twelve days I’ve had you in the book. Since the night she pulled you off these rocks.” He got the line onto the creel. “Your sort’s easy enough to track if you’ve the patience. Storms while you’re bad, and flat calm when you’re content. I’ve the tides and the weather written since 1993 and there’s nothing in there like this last fortnight.”

I said nothing.

“I’m not here to be unpleasant.” He worked the line. “I paid for that skin. It was my money and it was Rory’s money beforeit was mine, and he’s nineteen years in the water at Ness and there’s no headstone because there was nothing to put under one.” He shook the coil straight. “So I’ll not be told I stole it. I bought it off a woman who wanted rid of it and I’ve kept it dry and safe for nineteen years, which is nineteen years more than you managed.”

The iron ring sat on the middle finger of his right hand. He had it on the night he carried me up that cliff.

“Then some woman with a camera walks past a loose board.” He shrugged. “That’s my own fault. I’d got careless with it.”

He looked out at the water.

“There’s a tide on this week I’ve waited nineteen years for. Lowest in the book. There’s a thing my brother went after that only comes up dry on a tide like it, and I’ll not get another.” He picked the creel up. “So I’d like it back before Friday.”

“No.”

“Aye, well.” No heat in it at all. He got the creel settled on his shoulder. “That’s what I thought you’d say. Isla’s put your lass in the wee dormer on the left as you come up from the road. I’ve mended that window twice. The catch on it never held.”

He was already moving off up the beach.

Nineteen years I had nothing worth taking.

“You’ll want to think about what you’re willing to trade, and I’d not take long about it.”

I stood on the stones and watched him go.

He knew where she was sleeping. He knew about the window. And he was giving me until Friday.

The tide was already turning.

Chapter Eleven

The Weight of Keeping — Mara

Theweathercamein on Wednesday night, fierce and unforgiving.

Not a squall. Squalls go through. This sat down on top of Kilmuir Cove and stayed—two days of rain going sideways, wind finding every gap in every frame, and the sea loud enough to hear from the front room, which I’d never once heard it do.

Isla had a bucket on the flagstones under the corner of the ceiling and towels rolled at the foot of the door.

“Boats have not been out since Tuesday.” She wrung a towel into the bucket. “Kenny’s lost slates off the gable, and the Websters have water in the back room.”

“Is it usually like this in October?”

She stopped with the towel in her hands.

“No, pet.” She went on wringing. “It is not.”

I went down to the shop on the Thursday for milk, and there were three men in there not buying anything. One of them was saying his father had seen a fortnight like it once, and the other two went quiet, and the woman at the cash register asked me if I was finding the village to my liking.

Tavish came down the stairs at nine on the Friday morning and stopped on the fourth step.

Not for long. Two seconds, a hand on the wall, and on he came. But I have watched that man take sixty-one wet stone steps in a wind without pausing to think about it, and he stopped on the fourth step of a staircase in a warm house.

So I made the list, because that is what I do.