“Yet she cannae find it in her cold heart to be generous about the Caran light. We need funds. The Fresnel lenses we need for the tower are devilish expensive. The whole cost of this could be near fifty thousand pounds by the time we are done.”
“We have interested investors in Edinburgh. When I attend Lady Strathlin’s soiree, I can ask for their commitment. As for the lady, it seems she will never invest in a light for her island. She simply hates the idea.”
“Hell’s own gale, that woman is. But you cannot run from a storm.”
Dougal huffed a laugh. “I try not to. We just need good weather to finish this job. Whether she wants it or not, we will see it done with the support of the government.” Dougal turned to see Norrie MacNeill walking toward him. The girl had joined him again, though without the little boy.
Graceful, lovely, he saw only her. The rush of the sea was loud in his ears, and his heart beat quickened. He thought of the sea fairy and felt a deep and sudden longing.
Whoever this girl was, he told himself, she was real, and he needed to collect his wits.
He looked likea pirate, dark and wild, in shirtsleeves and vest and open collar, hands at his waist, a booted foot propped on the edge of a log on the beach. He was all restrained power andassurance as he watched her walk down the beach beside her grandfather. She felt his gaze bore into her and almost through her.
She had expected Dougal Stewart to be handsome and charming, as others said, but she was not prepared for the impact of his steady gaze or his compelling presence, even at a distance.
Now she only wanted to turn and run, not ready to face him. Better they should meet when she could be proper Lady Strathlin, holding her own against the persistent engineer.
But when her grandfather waved at him and took her arm, Meg walked forward.
Crossing the beach, she heard her name and saw her cousin, Fergus MacNeill, walking with her son, Sean along the upper beach. She was glad Sean had obeyed when she told him to climb down from the headland. Though she was his mother, there was a bit of distance there, for she did not see him often enough. He knew she lived far away from the island and when he was older, he would go to live with her. When she had inherited the title and fortune, a single mother of an infant, she had agreed with her island kinfolk’s opinion that it was best for Sean to spend his early years on Caransay.
Before Sean’s birth, her family had put it about that Meg had married a man from another island, a man of the sea who had vanished, and made it known that she did not discuss it. Only Meg’s grandparents and great-grandmother knew the truth of Sean’s existence. The story was easy enough for the isle’s community of fishermen and wives to understand.
Her inheritance was harder to hide, but she had the support of kin and friends in her good fortune. Once she purchased the Caransay lease and brought benefit to her tenants and life on the isle, they recognized the importance of her new role, and knew she was doing the best she could for her son, the islanders, andothers. She was deeply grateful for the warm homecoming she felt each time she returned to Caransay.
And so her cousin Fergus and his wife Anna took the boy into their household. But just a year ago, Anna had died with the birth of a daughter. Left with two bairns to raise, Fergus moved in with his grandparents, also Norrie and Thora, so the children could have a family circle.
Now, watching her bonny golden-haired son run happily across the beach, Meg reminded herself that she could not follow, but must go meet the obstinate engineer, Dougal Stewart.
Sighing, she pushed back her hair, knowing she did not look her best, her hair wild and loose, her feet bare, her skirt above her ankles. On Caransay, she stayed in the Great House—a grand residence on the other side of the island. But in other ways, she reverted to the lifestyle she had always known, spent as much time as she could with her family and her son.
She loved the freedom here, loved dispensing with crinolines, stays, stockings, wide skirts, and snug shoes in favor of comfortable, practical clothing and simple shoes or bare feet. Caransay was the only place she could do that now.
“So will you tell the man you are the lady herself?” Norrie asked.
“That odious engineer? I will tell him nothing just now. He hates me,” she answered in the Gaelic she usually spoke while here. “I can hardly tell him I am Lady Strathlin when I look like this. I suppose I should invite him to tea at the Great House and tell him then.”
“Ha! The surprise will do him good. He is too serious, that lad.”
“I hoped my solicitors would find a way to stop his work project before I arrived on holiday. But they have not been able to do that.”
“Ach,solicitors, useless fellows. Look there.” Norrie gestured with his clay pipe. “See those huts they put up. Those Lowland structures will not stand against a good rain. That is not the sort of house we need here. But we told them they were very good houses!” He chuckled. “May their huts blow out to sea and carry the engineers with them!”
“Ach, Seanair. That is wicked!” But she laughed with him. A glance toward a cluster of thatched-roof little cottages told her that they were hastily erected, not as solid as Hebridean stone houses with thick thatched roofs weighted with rope nets and stones. “I never agreed to putting up a lighthouse out there, you know that,Seanair.”
“I know.” Norrie clamped his teeth over the pipe stem. “And the people wonder what you will do about it now that you are here.”
“I have already tried everything. He is a stubborn man.”
“Stubborn, wants his lighthouse, but he is not a bad fellow. I have spoken with him myself many times while you have been gone. I like the man, I do. It is the construction I do not like, for the harm it causes Sgeir Caran and the colonies of seabirds that settle on the rock each year.”
“The birds, the rock, the harm to our privacy, the threat to our legends—oh!” She stopped walking. Norrie frowned.
She stared at Dougal Stewart, who calmly waited for them. And she saw his face clearly for the first time.
“Oh!” she said again, as the beach seemed to tilt under her feet.
“What is it?” Norrie asked.
