Page 31 of Fierce Highland Longing

The place we came to was low and wet and ordinary. I had expected something more.

Sand floor, running with water. A wall at the end that was not rock—smooth, dark, and set into the stone the way a door is set into a house, with a lip of it standing proud.

“There it is.” He held the lamp up. “Nineteen years and I’ve never got it open, because it doesn’t open for the likes of me. It needs one of them to walk up and put a hand on it.”

“And he won’t.”

“He’ll not do it for asking. No.” He set the lamp on a rock. “But there’s a thing he wants more than his own skin now, and you’re standing in this cave, and that’s a new position for me.”

Tavish came down that passage more falling than walking.

He was soaked to the neck and one side of his face was bleeding where the rock had cut him. He got to the bottom and had to put a hand on the wall to stay upright. He came here from the inn, on foot, at that speed, in the state he was in.

“Isla told me which way you went.”

He did not turn his head to Callum at all.

“Go up. The water’s coming.”

“Not without you.”

Callum had the iron out of his jacket before Tavish had finished the sentence. Not a weapon. A flat black bar the length of a forearm, and he put it against Tavish’s chest and Tavish went down onto the sand on his knees and stayed there.

He could not get up. He could not get his head up either. He knelt there with his hands open on his thighs and the water coming round his knees, and he could do nothing at all about any of it.

There was no fight in it. That is the part I could not have imagined beforehand. Callum stood over him with the bar held to him. There was no pleasure in his face and no apology in it either.

“Now.” He put his free hand out. “The skin, if you please.”

The water came over the lip at the passage mouth while he was saying it.

Not a wave. It came in flat across the sand, and swished around my boots and then over them, and the sound in that place changed. I knew we had minutes.

And standing there, I understood. All of it, at once, cold and complete.

Callum had held that skin for nineteen years because letting go of it would mean his brother drowned for nothing.

I held it for fifteen days because letting go of it meant losing the only good thing that had happened to me since I was twenty-eight.

He did it for money, and I did it for love, and we did exactly the same thing.

Both misguided.

The sea had no way of telling us apart. Neither did the law they lived under. A thing held was a thing held, and it did not matter one bit what was in your heart while holding it.

Love does not survive being held.

Tavish was down on his knees in six inches of water in front of a man with a bar of iron. He had come here for me. He had lied to me for nine days. Both of those were true at once, and neither of them canceled the other, and I understood him.

I got my hand inside my coat.

The water was rising fast. We had maybe three minutes before the passage flooded.

I had to choose.

Chapter Fourteen

Freely Given — Tavish