Page 127 of A Scot in the Storm
She looked across the crowded hall where Beth had finally produced a shrill whistle sharp enough to startle the chicken into flapping directly at Duncan’s face.
“He would’ve loved this,” Abigail said softly.
Rory waited quietly.
“He would’ve acted like he didn’t. Made jokes. Asked questions about the plumbing. Tried the whisky. Made a face, then tried it again just to confirm his findings.” Her mouth trembled faintly. “He would’ve liked Duncan.”
“That speaks poorly of him.”
Abigail laughed softly and wiped quickly beneath one eye.
“He was always the brave one.”
Rory’s thumb moved gently across the back of her hand.
“No,” he said quietly. “I think bravery runs in the family.”
She leaned into him until their shoulders touched. Across the room Mrs. Gable saw. Her expression softened for one brief bare second before she shouted at Duncan to remove the chicken from the table immediately, this was Christmas, not a barnyard parliament.
Later, when dusk gathered blue beyond the windows, Rory took Abigail upstairs to the lantern room.
The tower stairs curled cold and quiet after the warmth below while laughter faded softly beneath them.
At the top, the lantern room opened around them in gold.
Beyond the panes Christmas night settled over the North Sea. Snow drifted lightly through the beam. Each flake flashed bright for one brief instant before vanishing again into darkness.
Below them Fraserburgh glowed with scattered candlelight. Lanterns moved slowly along the harbor road. Farther out, a fishing boat held carefully beneath the beam before turning safely toward home.
He stepped behind her and wrapped his arms gently around her waist as she leaned into him.
Beyond the reach of the lantern beam, something dark moved briefly along the rocks beneath the Wine Tower. Abigail blinked and looked again, shivering, but nothing was there but snow and the sea.
Chapter 26
Abigail
Historians, Abigail had long ago discovered, were rarely sensible people.
Reasonable women did not cross oceans to crawl through damp archives chasing half-buried correspondence written by dead engineers, even if they’d been sent in disgrace, nor did they become emotionally attached to ruined towers perched above crashing waves simply because somebody in 1787 had once written heartbreakingly beautiful letters inside them.
Yet here she was, slipping out before dawn on the morning after Christmas while the rest of Kinnaird Head slept off whisky, exhaustion, and Duncan’s attempt to dance atop a storage crate sometime after midnight.
The crate had not survived. Neither, frankly, had Duncan’s dignity.
Snow creaked softly beneath Abigail’s boots as she crossed the headland wrapped tightly in her woolen shawl while the lighthouse beam swept slowly across the cliffs behind her before turning once more out toward open water. The world felt quieter somehow this morning, as though the sea itself were waiting.
Abigail could almost picture the kitchen belowstairs exactly as she’d left it an hour earlier, mugs abandoned beside the hearth, greenery drooping slightly near the windows, Mrs. Gable’s bread rising beneath linen while Tavish snored somewhere loud enough to alarm wildlife across three counties.
And Rory. The memory of his mouth against hers beneath the lantern light rose, warming her through.
This was exactly the sort of behavior historians warned students against, although they hadn’t been thinking about time travel. Emotional involvement with primary sources rarely ended well, though she hoped to be the exception.
The Wine Tower rose slowly ahead of her, black stone against the fading stars, and something deep inside Abigail tightened at the sight of it.
The tower had haunted her from the beginning, when Arthur and Sandra had told her stories about the Cailleach, and then when she’d heard about the ghostly piper.
History had stopped feeling abstract the moment she’d fallen into it.
