He was laughing.
Chapter Twenty-Five
’Tis always morning somewhere.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It was almost morning and Calum wasn’t laughing. He was standing in the library before an open window. He dumped out a bucket half filled with water. It was just one of many scattered randomly around the room. He set the bucket down and went to get another. He walked past the chair where Amy was curled up and sound asleep. She’d been asleep since the ceiling had stopped leaking. About a half an hour ago.
He stopped to watch her for what must have been the tenth time. He didn’t know why he felt compelled to look at her. He just did.
A log snapped loudly in the fireplace. He remembered himself and turned away. It wasn’t easy.
He grabbed two more buckets, crossed the room, and dumped them out. He closed the window and turned the latch, but he didn’t move.
He rubbed a hand over his tired eyes, then shoved his hands in his pockets and stared outside in an attempt to prove to himself he could look at something else.
It had been one hell of a night. Thank God it was almost over. Outside, the color of the fog was changing. The sun was coming up; it turned the dark gray curtain of mist into a bright white one.
This was the kind of fog that rolled in and walled off the islands, made them seem like small independent countries. Most mainlanders thought of the islands as places where you were lonely and trapped. Prisons.
Islanders seemed like foreigners to those who lived on the mainland where they could move about from town to town or city to city with something they mistook for freedom.
But Calum had Highland blood flowing through his veins. He liked the aloneness. The isolation. He had freedom here, where he could do as he wished. He was free to hunt or ride, run or walk about all that was his own.
To him it wasn’t a prison, but a refuge.
But he suddenly felt confused and uncomfortable in his own home; it was like waking up to find that his skin didn’t fit. He tried to sort out his feelings and found himself looking at Amy again.
She was still sound asleep in that chair.
Sometime in the past few years he had gotten to the point where he stopped looking at women unless they annoyed him. He had grown cold and afraid of them. He didn’t even know when it had happened.
But she didn’t annoy him. She fascinated him. She even made him forget that he didn’t particularly like women.
The door burst open and banged hard against the wall. Calum winced. His brother’s favorite entrance.
He turned and, sure enough, Eachann strode into the room with the shrew slung over his shoulder.
You could have heard her in Boston.
Calum’s feelings about women returned with a vengeance. He walked over and closed the doors again.
Eachann dumped the shrew in an empty chair and braced his hands on the arms, pinning her there.
“Let me up, MacOaf.”
“Your friend is all safe and sound. She’s right over there, George.”
The shrew raised her chin. “She’s only an acquaintance.” She turned toward Amy. “Not—” She stopped and suddenly whipped her head around.
Calum realized she was glaring at him.
“What did you do to her?”
He looked at Amy, then back to the shrew named George. “Nothing.”
“I know differently.” She tried to get up. “Let me up.”
