Page 4 of Fierce Highland Longing

I could catch the thief. Even wrecked, even three days without food, I could catch a person on a beach and put my hand inside their coat and take my own skin out of it, and taking it would finish me.

A skin taken by force stays bound to whoever held it. Steal it, and the fur is in my arms and the sea is still shut against me, forever, and there is no undoing it. Our oldest law, and the cruelest one. The skin has to be given. Freely. By a hand nobody twisted.

I gave mine away once, to a woman I loved, because giving is how you prove you mean it.

She sold it.

So I ran after a stranger in the dark with no plan at all.

The wave arrived out of rhythm.

I read water the way other men read a page, and I read that one wrong. The shelf went out from under my boots. The sea took my legs, spun me once against rock, and closed over my head.

Cold has never troubled me. I was born in it.

What came was worse.

The whole North Sea poured through me—in my ears, my mouth, the hollow under my ribs. The sea wanted me to change. It’s wanted that every day for nineteen years. I couldn’t. I was a man in the water. Nothing else.

I came up on the stones in a foot of surf, facedown.

Lifted my head. Set it down again. My body barely responded to the signals I sent it. All I had left was pain and the stubborn animal urge to breathe despite it.

I tried again. This time, my head came up an inch, and I saw the blurry arc of the sky, clouds streaked orange and gunmetal with the oncoming dawn. I didn’t know how long I’d been on the ground or how far I’d been dragged by the undertow. Maybe I’d been here a minute, maybe half the night. I let my head fall back, accepting the shudder of defeat but not the finality.

There it was—a sound. Not ocean or storm, but boots scraping across the beach, stones popping under a hard heel. I blinked away the sting, vision clearing just enough to catch a flash of motion through the haze.

Boots on shale. Stopping. Coming again, quicker.

Hands hooked under my arms.

She was nowhere near strong enough. She got me a yard and put me down.

“Okay. Okay.”

She wiped her face on her upper arm and got me another yard, and her grip slid. I went down on the stones.

“Sorry. God, sorry. You’re heavier than I thought.”

She braced a boot against a rock and hauled again. Her free hand never left the front of her coat. It stayed there, holding the wool shut, the whole time she worked.

My cheek came against it.

My skin lay under the wool an inch from my mouth. Still warm. Nineteen years and still warm. Two inches. I could raise my hand two inches and hold it.

I curled my fingers into the shale instead.

“Stay with me. Can you hear me? What’s your name?”

“Tavish.”

Nothing else. Not one word of the rest.

She got her grip and hauled me up the beach with my own skin inside her coat, and I let her.

Chapter Three

The Man on the Rocks — Mara