Page 115 of A Scot in the Storm
Wind brushed snow lightly across the yard between them. Then somewhere downhill came a tremendous crash followed immediately by children screaming with delighted triumph.
Duncan closed his eyes. “They’ve found the barrel.”
Chapter 24
Rory
The sound of Abigail’s laughter reached Rory through the thick oak door before he’d even lifted the latch.
Somewhere over the past weeks he’d begun turning toward that sound without meaning to, the way men along this coast turned instinctively toward a light in the fog.
He pushed into the kitchen carrying an armful of split wood and half the storm with him, while Elrick stumbled in behind under a load twice as large and considerably less stable.
“I maintain,” Elrick announced to the room at large, “that this winter intends murder.”
Mrs. Gable pointed her rolling pin toward the woodbox without looking up from the bread dough. “Less prophecy. More stacking.”
Elrick obeyed immediately.
Heat rolled against Rory’s face as he crossed toward the hearth, thawing the cold from his skin in slow painful increments. His gloves were soaked through. Duncan had nearly broken his neck sliding into the oil shed half an hour earlier. The western latch had frozen solid again. Snow had drifted nearly waist-high against the lower yard wall. A fairly ordinary morning.
Abigail sat at the kitchen table peeling apples with the grave concentration of someone attempting surgery under battlefield conditions.
Mrs. Gable glanced toward the growing pile beside her. “Well now. Look at that.”
Abigail looked up warily. “What?”
“Ye’ve managed without slicing your own hand open.”
“I’m improving.”
“Terrifying thought.”
Rory’s mouth twitched despite himself.
Saints preserve him, she fit here too easily.
The realization unsettled him more each day. When Abigail had first appeared at Kinnaird Head she’d been all sharp intelligence and strange words, her hands too soft.
Now she sat wrapped in wool beside Mrs. Gable’s hearth with flour dusting one sleeve while snow whispered against the shutters and apples waited beside her elbow for baking. As if she’d belonged here all along.
Mrs. Gable shoved a mug of tea into Rory’s hands. “Drink that before ye freeze solid and become decorative.”
“I’d make a handsome ornament.”
“No’ with that beard ye wouldna.”
Tavish folded nearly in half laughing.
Rory accepted the insult with the weary resignation of a man long accustomed to defeat inside this kitchen and settled near the hearth while Abigail watched him quietly over the rim of her cup.
That had started happening lately. He felt it every time now, that strange tightening low beneath his ribs whenever her eyes settled on him.
“You survived the great wood expedition then?” she asked.
“Barely. Tavish attempted diplomacy with a frozen gate.”
“It was stuck,” Tavish protested.
