Page 100 of A Scot on the Rocks

“We can save it!”

“And lose yourselves? Move!”

Robertson seized Finlay’s coat as the lad tried to scramble aboard, but Finlay twisted free of the cloth, his boot sliding on the wet stone and he went down hard, one leg disappearing between the boat and the quay. Jamie saw Robertson reach for him again, intent upon his prisoner even with the boat swinging dangerously close to the masonry.

Jamie caught him beneath the arms before the skiff could swing back and crush him. The force of the man’s fall nearly took them both into the water. Tam hauled the tiller over and yelled that the tide was carrying him off, while Ewan lunged across the gap to take Finlay’s weight.

Robertson seized Jamie by the shoulder. “In the King’s name⁠—”

“Ye’ll have to catch me first.” Jamie drove an elbow back hard enough to make the man release him, then thrust Finlay toward Ewan. Robertson staggered against the wet wall, and for an instant their eyes met. Jamie had seen the officer angry before. He’d never seen him look quite so personally humiliated.

Boots pounded along the quay, and a voice shouted for more men. There was no prospect of fighting their way clear against half the harbor, and Jamie wasn’t about to leave Finlay to be taken for the price of a barrel of whisky.

“Go!” he told Tam.

Robertson shouted for a boat and pointed directly at Jamie, but Tam had already set the small sail to catch the wind, and the skiff moved past the last warehouses toward the black water beyond the harbor mouth.

Jamie looked back to see Olivia was still on the quay.

For the first time that night he understood what fear could do to a man’s stomach when it arrived all at once. She stood between the younger officer and Crawley, with Robertson hurrying back up the steps toward her. Jamie was already reaching for the tiller when Olivia did something so unexpected that everyone on the quay stopped to watch.

She slapped Lord Crawley, the sound carrying over the water.

“How dare you accuse a respectable widow of cheating because you cannot bear losing a game?” she shouted, loud enough to turn heads at the open inn windows.

“You insulted me once this afternoon, and now you’ve done it before these fine officers of the Crown!”

Crawley stood speechless. The younger officer hurried to take her arm, apparently intent on protecting her from a man who now seemed considerably less dignified than he’d hoped. Several women near the fish stall began offering opinions on gentlemen who gambled and then complained about losing. Jamie saw Olivia draw the growing crowd between herself and the steps.

She was buying them time. The realization made him both proud and furious with worry.

“We have to go back,” he told Tam.

“And put Finlay into their hands? His leg’s bad.”

The injured man sat against the mast, white-faced, with Ewan working a strip of linen around his calf where the stone had torn it. The blood soaking through was dark in the lantern light, but he was awake and cursing steadily, which Jamie counted as encouraging.

From the shore came a shout and another, then the clatter of a cart crossing the square. Olivia slipped behind it, ducked between two women carrying baskets, and ran along the alley toward the warehouses. Jamie knew the passage, they’d walked it earlier, when he’d shown her the safest way back to the inn.

“She’s away,” Ewan said. “I saw her.”

Jamie didn’t take his eyes from the quay until a figure appeared at the warehouse corner and gave their agreed signal of three quick taps on the wooden post. Olivia was safe enough to reach the inn. He had to trust that she would stay there until he came back for her.

They put in at a sheltered cove beyond the harbor and carried Finlay ashore while Tam hid the skiff among the rocks. The lad’s leg was deeply gashed, but the bleeding slowed beneath pressure, and he could move his foot and answer Jamie’s questions without difficulty. A fisherman Tam knew offered them a dry shed and sent his daughter to fetch someone experienced with wounds. Jamie stayed until Finlay had been properly tended, then left Ewan beside him and took a pony back toward the town by the inland road.

Olivia was waiting in the yard behind the inn with her shawl pulled tight and her hair half out of its pins. She rushed toward him as soon as he dismounted.

“Finlay?”

“Alive. Leg’s cut badly, but he’s been seen to. Ewan’s with him.”

Her shoulders eased. “Good. I thought they had him.”

“They nearly did.” Jamie took a breath and tried to temper what he wanted to say. “Ye were told to come back when the officers moved.”

“I did. He changed direction.”

“And then ye went directly to him.”