Page 19 of Fierce Highland Longing

My room was cold. I put the light on and hung my coat on the hook and sat on the end of the bed to unpin my hair.

The bottom drawer of the wardrobe was standing two inches out.

I got down on the floor and opened it. My spare jumper. Under it the oilcloth, folded the way I fold it, and the thing inside it warm through the cloth against my palm, with the slow beat still going under the surface.

Everything there.

I shut that drawer with my knee.

But something was different. The warmth was stronger. The pulse faster.

And for the first time, I wondered if the skin knew I was keeping it.

Chapter Eight

The Moon Pool — Tavish

Iaskedheratbreakfast if she wanted to see something, and she was in her boots before I’d finished asking.

The way in is a crack in the cliff, and it fills at every high tide. You can only walk it at the bottom of the ebb. Low water was twenty past six that morning, and this week is a spring tide, which means the sea drops farther than usual and comes up farther after. So we had forty minutes inside before the crack filled again and closed behind us.

I reminded her about the forty minutes twice on the way down. She said fine and kept walking.

The tug of my skin was present before we went under the cliff. It sat in the drawer at the top of the inn, and I could tell it was there, the way you can tell someone’s in the next room. Then the rock came between us, and I couldn’t tell anymore. Nine days, and that was the first hour I couldn’t find it.

It’s possible to stand thirty feet from that crack and not see it. It’s a black line in a black cliff.

I got my boots off at the mouth and carried them, because wet boots on that rock will put you down.

“Left hand on the wall. Don’t put your right hand in the crack—there’s a lip in there that’ll take your fingers off.”

Water to the knee. Colder in than out. She came behind me and never once asked whether it was safe, which I noticed and didn’t understand.

Twenty feet in, the dark went total. She stopped.

“Ten more steps and it opens.”

“You can see in this?”

“No. I can hear it widening.”

That’s true. She took the ten steps.

The water in that chamber makes its own light.

The pool glows. It’s green, and it isn’t bright—about the green you get holding a bottle up to a window. The light comes up off the water and onto the walls, and because the surface moves, the rock above your head moves with it.

Nobody knows why it does that. I don’t either. It has done it since before this village was here.

I’ve been inside four times in my life. Twice as a boy. Not once in the last nineteen years, and nothing was keeping me out. I couldn’t make myself walk in.

Mara came out of the passage behind me and made a sound in her throat.

She had the camera around her neck. She never touched it.

The other thing about this place is quiet. I’ve had wind in my ears for nine days and surf under it for nineteen years. In there it’s water on stone and nothing else.

“It only lights up like this in the spring. When the moon’s fat and the tide runs highest.” I sat down on the wet rock. “Three or four days a month. The rest of the time it’s a hole in a cliff.”