But today, she and Alis needed to establish a methodology for their excavations. It felt surreal to be walking an archaeological site with Alis once more, sharing ideas and theories.
Chrissi tried to ignore how appealing he looked today, the wind snapping his frock coat and tousling his hair into wild shapes. He appeared unfettered. Free. He had given up on his top hat the second time the Scottish breeze had snatched it from atop his head. Standing at her side now, he tapped his hat against his thigh.
“I think we should start there.” Chrissi pointed to a section where the mound dipped a few feet into the earth. Despite the early hour, the sun was already high in the sky. “That area faces east and is the most likely spot to find an entrance tunnel. Most mounds tend to be oriented toward the rising sun. If, of course, this is a burial mound.”
“Do ye have doubts?”
“Not really. The standing stones there—” She pointed to the stones resting fifty yards from the mound. “—indicate that this was a site of some importance. But everything is conjecture until we put shovel to earth.”
Nodding, Alis gave her a soft look, the sort she had once taken for granted.
As ever, she felt the siren call of him—the magnetism that had always spilled in his wake. It whispered at her senses, the teasing brush of a feathered wing luring her to throw off all caution and reach for adventure and far-off shores.
Well.
She had done that once and now knew that feathered wing belonged to an albatross—a harbinger of heartache and grief.
No more.
Granted, her personal vows were easier to remember without the scent of Alis’s masculine cologne filling her nostrils and the coiled power of his large body at her elbow.
“What will we be looking for, then, as far as the entrance is concerned?” he asked, thankfully breaking the spiral of Chrissi’s thoughts.
She lifted an eyebrow and tilted her head. “Typically, chambered cairns have three distinct features: a long tunnel-like entrance, a central chamber, and small niche side chambers. Given the height of the tunnel entrance, the earth leading to it needed to be shored up. Therefore, the ancient builders would have constructed a breastwork on either side of the entrance—large stone walls to hold back the dirt. The stones would have sloped from the height of the door to the ground, creating a channel of sorts. My goal is to begin hunting for a channel.”
Alis stared at the landscape, obviously trying toenvision what she could already see in her mind’s eye. Her father and her husband had always praised Chrissi’s ability to think like people and cultures long since passed.
“You have a knack for seeing a landscape as the ancients would have,” Stephen had said on more than one occasion.
He was not wrong. While on an excavation, Chrissi would often feel a hum, a sense of how past peoples would have viewed and interacted with their surroundings. It had led to more than one find.
“Your instincts were always uncannily accurate,” Alis said now, unwittingly agreeing with her late husband. “I’ll send my men up so ye can begin.”
He had designated a crew of five men to do the digging—field hands who welcomed the extra coin, he said.
“Thank you.”
“I look forward to your notes. Just leave a list of what ye would like me to do each day, and I will see it done.”
Chrissi looked up at him, wind tugging at her bonnet.
Alis gazed back, his dark eyes reflecting the green grass at their feet and the clouds racing overhead. A whole world contained there, Chrissi supposed.
A world she had once adored with every atom that comprised her body.
A world she would have to fight daily not to tumble headlong into once more.
That was the problem.
She could (and would) work with Alis on this excavation.
She would earn funds that were pivotal to her future.
But could she do both of those things without pining for him? Without stewing in a mire of jealousy as he courted and wed another woman?
Without ending up alone and clutching the tattered shards of her heart?
She forced her eyes away from his, afraid he might see the truth there.
