Page 8 of Fierce Highland Longing

I opened it.

He stood in the corridor with both hands flat against the frame, and he wasn’t touching the handle.

His eyes met mine. There was something in them I hadn’t seen before—awareness, focus, like he’d been waiting for this moment.

“I heard the rain,” he said. “On the slates.”

It was true. It explained nothing.

“That’s all.”

“That’s all.”

I held still. He didn’t step forward, and he didn’t step away, and I didn’t shout for Isla, and I took both of those as facts about him and put them somewhere I could reach later.

“Go back to bed.”

“Aye.”

He stepped away, and I shut the door. The latch didn’t catch the first time. It caught the second.

I stayed where I was, my hand still on the door, listening to his footsteps fade down the stairs.

Chapter Four

The Sound of a Held Breath — Tavish

Isteppedawayasshe shut the door, then hesitated.

My skin was in that room. Bottom of the wardrobe, under something soft, four feet in from the door and low to the floor. Nineteen years I couldn’t sense it through an inch of iron sheeting. Out of that box, in an ordinary room, it’s a lit window on a black hillside. You don’t need eyes for a light.

A hand’s width of pine does nothing.

I put my hand on the handle.

Brass. Not iron. Nothing in that building was in my way—not the door, not the latch, not the woman on the other side of it, who’d hauled a man up a beach four hours ago and had nothing left. I could have been out the front door with it inside three minutes.

There was nothing to prevent me.

Every muscle in my arm held like a wire, vibrating with the memory of water and the echo of her voice on the other side of the panel. Six steps would have put me to the wardrobe. One silent wrench could tip the hinges, creak the door, let me slip inside on a draft and out again with the bundle tucked close tothe heart. I imagined its exact weight, the way it would pull at my bones, the way the hairline scars on my wrists would flare and close like gills once the hide touched me, even wrapped in a blanket or coat.

I measured the temptation, slow and careful, the way a man measures the tautness of a rope before cutting, or a fisherman tests the certainty of a knot that will keep him from drowning. It would take less than a minute to ruin myself utterly and forever.

I stood with my hand on the brass and made myself say it in order.

A skin taken is a skin bound. Take it, and I hold my own hide for the rest of my life and never wear it. The sea stays shut. Every day after that one is this day.

That’s the reason a man can say out loud.

Here’s the other. A long while ago on this coast I gave my word about what I’d be. There was a thing I was for.

Nineteen winters I’ve failed at it. Nineteen winters this shore has taken weather no other stretch of coast has taken, and boats have gone off it, and men with them. I’ve never told anybody why.

Whatever I was for, it wasn’t robbing a woman who came back down a beach in the dark for a stranger.

I took my hand off the brass.

The print stayed on it. I watched the shape of my fingers go off the metal and then the metal was clean, and I went down the stairs.