Page 46 of A Scot in the Storm
The sea moved steadily against the harbor wall beneath them.
Abigail thought suddenly of Sam surfing enormous California waves with IV scars hidden beneath his wetsuit sleeves. She thought of storms, of people being taken by the water. Of Rory standing on a ship years ago, watching the sea swallow his brother.
“Cheerful place,” she murmured.
That startled a laugh out of him.
“There’s a reason Scots drink heavily through the winter.”
The tune drifted across the harbor once more as Rory’s smile faded slightly.
“Old fishermen dislike hearing it played near the water.”
“Why?”
He looked toward the sea again before answering.
“They say Isobel walks before big storms.”
A chill moved down Abigail’s spine.
“The ghost story again.”
“Aye.” His tone suggested he did not entirely disbelieve it. “Sailors are a superstitious breed.”
“And you?”
His gaze shifted toward her then. The lantern light caught the sharp line of his cheekbone and the dark gold threaded through his hair.
“I believe,” Rory said carefully, “that there are more things in this world than we properly understand.”
He held her gaze a moment too long as the words rose in her throat.
I’m not from here. Not from this century. From the future.
The confession sat there between one heartbeat and the next while the fiddle played below the harbor and the tide crashed against the stones.
“Cold?” Rory asked quietly.
Abigail managed a small smile. “Freezing.”
Chapter 11
Rory
The clock had been broken for years. It sat on a shelf in the kitchen beside the hearth, made of dark walnut with a painted face gone soft with age, and brass hands frozen forever at twenty past three.
Mrs. Gable used it as a bookend, propping a Bible against it beside a crock of wooden spoons. Nobody in the household had ever bothered to mend it. Life at Kinnaird Head moved by weather, daylight, tides, and the ringing of the supper bell, not by the hour.
Rory had noticed Abigail looking at it before dawn that morning. Nearly three weeks had passed since the storm brought her ashore, though some part of him still expected the strange business of her arrival to resolve itself if he simply waited long enough.
The wind off the North Sea had come hard out of the northeast all afternoon, too fierce for the upper scaffolding, and by midday he’d sent the men below the lee of the castle wall to dress stone and sort timber rather than risk a broken neck sixty feet above the rocks.
“Winter’s coming early,” Ewan had muttered over breakfast.
By the time Rory came in through the kitchen door near dusk wanting tea and ten minutes of quiet before supper, the wind had risen hard enough to rattle the shutters. He stopped with one hand still on the latch.
Abigail sat at the kitchen table with the clock dismantled before her.
