“Have you ever seen the herring run?”
She laughed. “Not hardly.”
“Look there.” He nodded out at the sea.
The moon was behind a big fat cloud but its light still spilled on the water, making it glisten and shine with a cool and quiet light.
Then suddenly the water was sparkling and twinkling as if lightning bugs were trapped in the sea. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of sparkling flashes spilling and flashing all over the water.
She laughed, because she’d never seen anything like it. It was magical and eerie and new. She could feel Eachann looking at her. He was leaning with his back against the railing.
He wasn’t watching the fish. He was watching her. She wondered what he was thinking. What he saw when he looked at her. Which then made her wonder what she was going to be. What her life was going to be like. Marriage to this man was her only choice.
She wondered why he was the only one in the world who seemed to know or care that she existed. She supposed Amy cared and would have come, but no one knew where Amelia Emerson was. And Amy had been adamant when she told her she would not go back. She wondered if Amy was as lost as she was, or if she was doing what she had suggested and was working a little female magic on Calum MacLachlan.
The fishermen had released their nets and they began to pull in the herring.
Georgina felt uncomfortable with the way Eachann looked at her and what those looks of his made her feel. She had that instinctive urge to lash out at him, but, to tell the truth, she was tired of fighting and she couldn’t fight him anymore anyway. He was the only future she had.
She felt a horrid sense of loss standing there watching the men haul up the fish. They spilled them all over the deck where the herring flopped and flipped their beautiful silver bodies all around the deck in a desperate attempt to get back into their home in the sea.
“I want to throw them all back,” she said, without looking at Eachann.
“It wouldn’t do any good. Someone else will just catch them.”
“Would they? You can’t know for certain. Look at them fight. Perhaps they could get away and swim far out to sea.”
“And get eaten by sea lions or other fish.”
He was right, but she didn’t feel any better for it. She excused herself and walked back to sit and watch. She felt like those herring flopping around on the deck.
At one moment when everyone was too busy and no one was paying attention, she stood and kicked a few of them overboard. It was stupid. But for some idiotic reason it made her feel better.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
He knows not the pleasures of plenty
who never felt the pains of poverty.
—Scottish proverb
By the time they reached the island and were in Eachann’s house, Georgina had resigned herself to her future. She had no other place to live. She couldn’t do anything to support herself. She had no choice but to marry Eachann.
He was building a fire in the fireplace while she sat in a chair and looked around the room. It wasn’t clean and organized like Calum’s part of the house.
She shook her head. “This is a hovel.”
He turned back and looked at her. “It’s lived in.”
“I guess I have no choice anyway.”
“No choice about what?”
“I have no place to go. I have nothing left. I guess this will have to be my home, especially if I’m going to be forced to take your offer.”
He didn’t say anything but straightened and leaned against the mantel.
“I suppose we can get along amicably, if you’ll just be reasonable for part of the time. We can treat this like a... well, like a business alliance.”
