Page 29 of Fierce Highland Longing

She was quiet a while. I didn’t push her.

“The dog?” She lifted her chin.

“What?”

“The dog in 1971. Sitting outside a boathouse for two winters with a dog that wasn’t yours.” She stared at the floor. “Was that on the list?”

That one was real. That was the night I started feeling. If she asked me anything about that night, I should tell her what it did to me.

Every word of that would have been true.

And every word of it would have been the next move.

“I wanted to be worth something to you that night. The dog is real.”

She took a breath and let it out.

“Right.”

“Mara—”

“No, it’s fine. I understand.” She was steady. That was the terrible part. “You needed something, and you worked out what I’d need to give it to you.” She looked up. “That’s six years of my life. Done again in a fortnight, by something that isn’t even a man.”

I had nothing to put against that. There was nothing. She was right in every detail.

She stood there a while longer with her hand on the door and did not go, and did not say anything else either, and I understood she was waiting to see whether I’d get up.

Callum gave me until Friday, and he told me which window was hers.

I did not mention that. Saying it would have been a hand on her arm, and I’d have been using a man with a creel to do the thing I was not allowed to do myself.

The rain stopped, between one breath and the next. I turned my head to the window without meaning to. Out past the harbor wall, the water lay gray and flat with nothing running on it at all. No swell. No break. Nineteen years that sea had answered me every day of my life whether I wanted it to or not.

Now it had gone quiet.

She went up the stairs. I heard the drawer.

When she came down, she had her coat buttoned to the throat and the shape of the bundle under the wool. Her hand was holding the front of it shut, the way it was on the beach the first night.

She stopped at the door.

I stayed where I was. Anything I did now was a move, and I was done making them.

The door opened and closed.

I got myself up and over to the window, which took longer than it should have.

She was out on the road going down toward the water with her head bent, but not due to the weather, because there was no wind left.

I stared after Mara for as long as I could make out the shape of her, a dark stitch unraveling down the lane. The window rattled once in its frame, as if the world itself had taken a sharp breath.

I put my hand on the window glass.

I wondered, truly, whether she would come back at all, whether she might vanish among the dark bungalows and the brined air, become a tale or a warning. I wondered what Callum would say to her, and what price would be named. I wondered if she’d ever forgive me for what I’d done, or if she’d spend the rest of her life nursing the old injury of trust, the new one of having been played by something not even a man.

And at the far end of the harbor wall, out where the stone runs into the flat sea, Callum Brodie was standing with his hands at his sides, waiting for her.

She walked straight for him, as if there were nowhere else in the world to go.