Page 26 of A Scot on the Rocks

“Do you smell that?”

Calum inhaled deeply. “Wet rock.”

“Under that.”

He took another exaggerated sniff. “Older wet rock?”

She looked at him.

He shrugged. “I’m trying.”

She stepped closer to the wall and followed the scent another few feet, moving slowly now. Damp stone remained the strongest, but beneath it was something warmer, old wood perhaps, and then the faintest suggestion of sweetness.

Her pulse quickened. The passage narrowed ahead, forcing Calum to duck while Olivia, for once in her life, found being five-foot-four unexpectedly convenient. Her light passed over a loose stone at shoulder height before she stopped and brought the beam back.

“What is it?” Calum asked.

“I’m not sure.”

The block sat slightly forward from the stones around it, and beneath it a shallow depression had filled with dirt and fragments of blackened cloth. Olivia set her flashlight between her knees, then carefully brushed away the debris with a gloved hand.

There was something solid underneath the cloth that disintegrated beneath her fingertips.

“Can you shine the light over here?”

Calum moved beside her, bracing one hand on the opposite wall as he angled his flashlight over her shoulder, giving her more light.

Olivia worked the block loose, rocking it gently until it shifted and sent a thin stream of soil spilling down the wall. Behind it was a shallow niche cut into the stone. It was wood that she’d felt beneath the cloth.

Everything outside the tunnel, the rain, the thunder, the five-minute limit, all faded from her mind as she reached in, removed the wood panel, and carefully eased the object free.

It was a quaich. Small and dark with age, its shallow wooden bowl had been worn smooth along the rim by years of use, while the two handles were scarred with tiny cuts and chips that no museum restoration would have ever polished away. One side was stained darker than the rest, almost black in the grain.

Calum leaned closer. “Well, now.”

Olivia barely heard him. She knew perfectly well that she shouldn’t smell it.

Two centuries in a damp tunnel should have left the wood carrying little beyond mildew, wet soil, rot, and whatever microscopic life had been happily feeding on it since George Washington was young.

She lifted the cup and inhaled. The first breath stopped her cold. Honey.

Olivia held perfectly still and breathed in again, slower this time, afraid that expectation had supplied what the wood couldn’t.

The honey was there, faint but unmistakable, followed by toasted grain and dried apple. Smoke came afterward, sitting behind the fruit, and beneath everything was the mineral note Glenbrae’s recreations kept reaching for without quite finding.

Cold stone. Clean water. Something almost flinty.

Olivia’s pulse kicked. The modern whisky always seemed to lose itself at the end. Whatever memory remained in this old wood still felt connected, as though all the pieces had once belonged to the same thing.

The scent deepened as she held the quaich close, and for one impossible moment she could almost imagine the whisky that had filled it, amber beneath candlelight, warm from another hand around the bowl.

Her heart gave one hard beat.

“Olivia?”

She opened her eyes, ears buzzing.

“This is it.”