Page 5 of Fierce Highland Longing

Igothimsixteenfeet up the beach and my legs quit.

Here’s something they don’t put in the guidebooks about the Scottish coast: the stones are the size and shape of grapefruit and they roll, and a grown man is heavier than anything you have ever picked up when he isn’t helping.

He wasn’t helping. His broad chest went up and down under the wet wool, his eyes stayed shut, and his boots dragged two furrows through the shingle behind us.

I dropped him above the weed line and sat down in the rain.

“Hey.” I patted his cheek. “Hey. Come on.”

Nothing.

“Tavish. Right? You said Tavish.”

His mouth moved. No sound came out of it.

I put two fingers under his jaw for a pulse and found one, slow and steady, and I kept my fingers there longer than a pulse takes to count.

He’d been in the North Sea in October. His skin wasn’t cold. Not warm either. The temperature of a hand, in a storm, in the dark, after the sea had rolled him across a rock shelf.

I wiped my fingers on my jeans and drew the phone from my pocket.

It showed one bar in the corner. I pressed the phone to my ear, huddled over the screen, and thumbed the emergency call. The screen pulsed black and died. I stared at my hand as if the network might resurrect itself under the pressure of my will. I tried the power button, once, twice, but the glass stayed dark and unresponsive. A breath left me in a low, stupid sob—familiar, but useless.

I eyed the landscape for another crazy soul nearby. No one.

Which meant the cliff path, and going up the cliff path meant leaving him on the stones.

My left hand was still holding the front of my coat shut. It had been holding my coat shut since the boathouse, through the running and the dragging and the sitting down. My camera hung under the wool on its strap, knocking against my ribs every time I moved, and I hadn’t thought about it once.

I could have opened the coat. I could have taken the thing out and set it on the stones beside him and gone up the path with both hands free.

I made myself let go of the wool instead. My fingers came off it stiff.

“I’m coming straight down,” I told him. “Straight down. Don’t die.”

I met the torch halfway up the steps.

“Somebody down there?”

“On the beach. Past the tideline. He’s breathing.”

The light swung off me and down the path. The man behind it was already moving.

“Cold?”

“No. That’s the strange part.”

He didn’t stop for the strange part. Late fifties. Waxed jacket. Wide through the shoulders and moving like he’d done thisbefore. He went down those wet steps at a pace I couldn’t hold, and he never once put a hand on the rock.

“Callum Brodie,” he threw over his shoulder. “You’ll take his feet.”

I didn’t ask what he was doing out in this weather. I was too glad he was.

We got him up in eleven stages. I counted them, which is what I do when the counting is the only part I can control. Callum took the head and the weight, hooking his arms under and lifting from the knees every time, and I had the boots, and the boots were two sizes too big and kept coming off in my hands.

“Grip changes at the turn,” he said. “Say when.”

“When.”