Tenderness always was.
“You drive me mad,” he murmured against her mouth.
“Good,” she whispered, kissing him back just as lightly. “I’d hate to suffer alone.”
He laughed then, a quiet and shaky sound, and rested his forehead against her shoulder. She wrapped her arms around his back, feeling every slow breath he took as if it were threaded through her own ribs.
For a long time they just stood like that: two rebels in hiding, two fugitives bound by gold and lies and something far more terrifying:
Choice.
Intention.
Future.
Finally, Harris shifted, brushing his thumb along her lower lip. “Sleep, lass. We’ve a long road tomorrow,” he murmured.
She nodded, letting him guide her to the bed. When they lay down, he didn’t reach for her.
No, she did.
Curling against his chest, burying her fingers in the fabric of his shirt, like he was the only warm thing in the whole storm-washed island.
Harris hesitated only a moment.
Then his arm came around her waist; careful, steady, and utterly irrevocable.
“Fiona,” he whispered into her hair, the truth pulling itself out of him in the dark, “I dinnae ken how to not want you.”
She smiled into his chest.
“Then don’t.”
Chapter 29
Heather—Present Day
The rain had spent itself by dawn. Portree woke rinsed and quiet, the harbor glassy beneath a pewter sky. Heather blinked awake to the soft hiss of tires on wet cobbles and faint warmth where Flynn’s arm had been. The other half of the bed still smelled like soap and salt and sleep.
She reached for the journal on the nightstand, the one she’d found tucked behind the bookcase in Glenoran’s library during the reno, and traced the indented lines of her mother’s last entry.
If the thistle endures, follow it home.
Outside, seagulls cried like restless spirits. Somewhere below, a delivery truck backfired, anchoring the morning to reality.
The bathroom door clicked open. Flynn stepped out in a clean shirt, damp hair curling at the edges, two paper cups in hand.
“Coffee, lass. Liquid courage for antiquarians on the run.”
Heather smiled, still half cocooned in the duvet. “You bribed the front desk again, didn’t you?”
“Called it an early start for the hardworking restoration crew.” He set the cup on her bedside table and leaned down to brush a kiss against her temple: soft, domestic, the kind that lingered longer than planned.
“Crew buy it?” she asked.
“Aye. They think we’re takin’ a drive up north to see a chapel roof I might bid for. Which, as luck would have it, sits not far from Kilmuir Parish.”
She arched a brow. “So we’re still playing the world’s most scenic cover story.”
