Page 30 of A Scot in the Storm
Heat flooded her face despite the cold room.
“No,” she said softly when he nodded, as if asking whether he should continue. “That’s enough.”
“Mm.”
He stood with his weight subtly balanced to one side, adjusting unconsciously against movement that no longer existed beneath him. A sailor’s posture. Even on stone he carried the memory of shifting decks inside his body. She had read about those years at sea in his letters.
Read about storms and damaged hulls and nights spent taking measurements by lantern light while waves broke over the rails hard enough to crack ribs.
But knowing a thing from paper and seeing it standing six feet away from you were entirely different experiences.
Her pulse beat harder. She’d been speaking to an engineer since the moment she arrived, and engineers collected details the way archivists collected documents.
“It’s no’ an accusation,” Rory said at last. “I’m telling ye what I’ve heard. So ye understand what others may hear as well.”
“Okay.” She shut her eyes briefly. “I mean... thank you.”
The corner of his mouth shifted again.
“Ye can keep saying it if ye like. The men already think ye foreign.”
Right. Because apparently getting thrown backward through time by a supernatural Scottish winter goddess was not enough humiliation on its own.
He studied her another moment before speaking again.
“Last night I said we’d have words this morning.”
“You did.”
“I said ye’d tell me either the truth, or what ye could of it, or else a lie good enough I could live beside.”
There wasn’t a threat in his voice, and somehow that made the conversation worse.
“Which one am I getting?”
She had spent the entire night turning possibilities over inside her head while wind battered the tower walls and pain pulsed through her body. Every explanation sounded impossible. Every lie fragile.
So instead of answering immediately, she rose and crossed slowly toward the desk.
Rory watched her without interruption. The restraint in him felt dangerous in ways shouting never could.
On the desk lay a half-finished letter beside an open ledger. Abigail recognized the handwriting instantly before she even read the date.
10th October 1787, inked carefully atop the ledger, blurred briefly beneath a rush of dizziness.
Not concussion or hallucination or a coma, but1787.
Her hand tightened against the edge of the desk. Nearby, pinned beneath a brass weight, sat the corner of a broadsheet carrying the same year in faded print. The room tilted slightly around her.
No explanation arrived to rescue her from any of it. She turned back and sat down again before her knees gave way.
Rory hadn’t moved, but something in his attention sharpened almost imperceptibly as he watched her absorb what she’d seen.
“The one I can live with,” she said finally, her voice thinner than she intended. “Though I think it’s closer to a lie than the truth.”
Something shifted in his expression then. Not softness. More the subtle recalculation of a man adjusting weight against uncertain weather.
At last he pulled the second chair closer and sat opposite her.
