The crunching gravel under their feet was loud, and she lost her footing for a moment as a larger stone turned under her sole. Lachlan’s fingers wrapped around her upper arm before she could stagger properly, and the touch of him seemed to burn through the layers of her woolen clothing, caused her thrashing heartbeat to skip clumsily.
“Perhaps you could have brought me up here when it was still light?” she grumbled, seeking to distract herself from the embarrassment of her own awareness of him, but she forgot that her sharpness had dulled and so the thrust was nothing but a feint.
He turned her loose and continued on. “I’d rather there be no chance of us being seen for now.”
“Anyone at all could look out their door and see us.”
“Which doesnae concern me—you are my wife after all. They’re welcome to see where we’re going,” said he, “just nae where we end up.”
Finley’s eyes narrowed.
But then they had arrived at the old house, and were ducking into the central room. The skittering sounds of the pebbles, like the patter of rain, made Finley a different—unpleasant—sort of nervous. Whenever the seasons changed, the cliff showered its loosening stones more frequently. Finley feared they may not hear the next chunk of cliff to fall as it hurtled toward them, and they certainly wouldn’t see it, but she thought perhaps that was just as well.
She felt her hand being pried away from the death grip she had on the front of her shawl, and Lachlan wrapped his fingers around hers.
“Let’s go quickly,” he said.
She jerked her hand free. “If you think I’m going up those stairs with you, you’re mad.”
He reclaimed her hand. “Not the stairs—the storeroom. I cleared a path earlier, and I pray God it’s still that way.”
“Oh well, aye, let’s just leave it to God,” she quipped with a roll of her eyes in the dark. “He obviously favors the Carsons above all others.”
She thought she felt his fingers tighten for an instant before he nearly pulled her arm from her shoulder, dragging her through the room in a trot. Finley hunched down and brought her left hand up to cover her head, much protection as it would be. But in only a few moments, she felt the air go close around her ears, sensed the darkness deepening, and Lachlan stopped so suddenly in front of her that she ran into his wide back and bounced off. She would have fallen on her bottom if he hadn’t been holding on to her still.
His hand slid from hers after she was steady on her feet, and in the next moment the weak light from the dampered lamp bloomed before Lachlan’s face, washing the little cave room with warm, yellow light and Finley blinked against the glare.
He’d made a comfortable-looking pallet up off the floor against the back wall, and there was a collection of the few personal effects he’d brought with him from Town Blair on their wedding night.
“It’s smaller than I remembered,” she said, looking up and around at the sharply sloping ceiling that disappeared in shadows on one side. “Odd that it’s so small, really. For a storehouse.”
“That’s what I grew to think, too. Here,” he said, lightly touching her elbow and stepping forward, herding her toward the low bed. “Sit down.” He set the lantern on the ground near her feet.
Finley did as he suggested without comment, her skin once more awash in gooseflesh at the intimacy implied by their location. She watched him walk back to the opening of the storeroom and crouch down before a small fire ring he’d made to one side of the doorway. He reached toward a little pile of dried peat while he talked.
“I put the fire here so as to warm the room without suffocating,” he explained, and Finley thought it a rather obvious choice; the small room would easily catch the heat of the flames like the backside of a fireplace while the smoke traveled out into the cavernous opening of the main room. Did he think her so stupid?
But as Lachlan fanned the coals to glowing, throbbing red beneath the blanket of dried vegetation, Finley saw the thick cloud of smoke billow up and then into the storeroom as if a tempest was behind it. She raised her shawl over the bottom part of her face and readied herself to rise and step from the room before her lungs were choked, but to her surprise, the smoke swirled up to the ceiling and away into the deepest shadows as the fire flickered to life beneath the little sticks of driftwood Lachlan was steepling over the pit.
Finley rose to her feet, her face turned up as she walked toward the corner of the room, and Lachlan met her there.
“Do you see it?” he asked quietly, seemingly right into her ear.
Finley nodded as the bottom edge of the cut in the cliff flickered in the glow of the lamp. She turned her head to look at him and he was indeed right behind her. “Is it another storeroom?”
He shook his head. “Not quite.”
She didn’t hesitate to step up when Lachlan bent and cupped his hands into a stirrup. He boosted her as he straightened and then turned his hands, pushing her up as she grabbed at the edge of the opening. Finley hooked her elbows over, then one knee, and a moment later she was crawling into the cold darkness of yet another cave room. But Lachlan was right: it wasn’t quite a storeroom. It wasn’t really a room at all.
“My God,” she breathed, gaining her feet and looking up. There was no sloped ceiling here: the space was a dark, rectangular shaft, soaring open perhaps fifty feet to a tiny sliver of night sky above.
The walls danced with upward light. “Finley.”
She turned and braced her hand against the side of the opening, looking down to see Lachlan holding the lamp aloft. She crouched and reached down to take it.
“Back up,” he commanded, and Finley stepped away, her slippers crunching over large pieces of detritus. She looked around the floor, holding the lamp aloft, realizing that she had stepped on long, deadly-looking slivers of dry, rotted wood planks, and her eyes went up again, seeking the sky.
She heard Lachlan’s huff and grunt as he jumped and scrabbled up beside her. The towering void above seemed to start to spin, and so Finley dropped her gaze to the man flickering with shadows, but very clear to her senses.
