Page 123 of A Scot in the Storm
Rory’s face changed.
“Abigail—”
“You didn’t name me,” she said, softer now. “Not in the letters I found. But somehow I knew it was me.”
Snow moved quietly around them.
“You wrote that I came from the storm, that you couldn’t explain why I felt familiar.”
Her throat tightened, and the words came slower now, pulled from the deepest part of her. “You wrote that I had the finest mind and the kindest heart you’d met in any century.”
Rory went utterly still.
Abigail gave a small, broken laugh. “Do you know how horrifying it is to read love letters about yourself in a museum archive where anybody can read them?” She shook her head. “Well, they will be able to read them when they go on display.”
The words caught him somewhere between grief and astonishment, and for one heartbeat, a breath of laughter escaped him before his face folded inward with something much deeper.
“I wrote that?”
“Yes.”
His gaze searched hers.
“There was a note,” Abigail said. “Not yours. Mine. My handwriting, on old paper. A drawing of the bearing solution. Sam’s name at the bottom.”
The lighthouse beam swept over them again, turning the snow around them briefly to silver.
“That was why I knew that somehow I’d been here,” she whispered. “Before I understood what was happening. Some part of me had already reached this place, and some part of you had already answered.”
Rory closed his eyes briefly, as though the world had become a mechanism with too many pieces moving at once.
When he opened them again, his voice was rough.
“I have spent years building something against darkness. Stone by stone. Gear by gear. I thought if I made the light strong enough, loss would pass me by.”
The sea struck the rocks below with a hollow boom. Rory brushed his thumb once more beneath her eye.
“If ye truly came from the future, then ye have a life there. Yer brother, yer calling as a scholar.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Aye,” he said softly. “I ken.”
“No, you don’t.” The words came out sharper than she meant them to, but Rory didn’t flinch.
“If I stay, I abandon him. If I go back, I leave you, and I don’t even know if going back is possible. If it were, wouldn’t I have gone back by now?”
The last of her defenses left her in a whoosh of breath.
“I love him,” she whispered. “Sam. He’s all I had left of my family.”
She met his gaze as the words fell out before she could stop them.
“I love you. I think I fell in love with you when I read your letters.”
Rory went utterly still, and the snow seemed to hush around them while the sea below drew farther away for one suspended breath.
Abigail stared at him, horrified by herself and relieved all at once, because there it was. The truth. Not tidy, not sensible, not remotely convenient, but true.
