Page 145 of Bonetide

“You’ll want to ring them about the light, or get the registration shifted to your own name if you’re stopping for good and they make you an offer. You’ve been here a wee while now.” A long pause, a squint of his eyes. “Folk tend to buy a runabout, once they know they’re staying. Cheaper than the hire in the long run.”

“I’ve been meaning to sort out something more permanent.”

“Aye.” He straightens, then bends back down, and his expression turns troublesome. “You’ve not seen DI Sinclair about, have you? Out your way? He’s not checked in to work for some time, and it’s not like him to do so. I know he said he was going to ask after some people, and I know your name was on that list.”

The rain seems to be heavier all of a sudden, the sound of the drumming on the roof becoming a cacophony.

“No,” I reply smoothly while my heart has turned into a machine gun. “Not since he stopped by to ask about the missing woman. Few days back.”

“Ah, well, you take care on that road, Miss Galloway,” he says, though there’s hesitation in his voice. “Get the light seen to.”

He raps the roof of the car twice with his knuckles and goes back to his own vehicle, and I pull off the side of the road with my hands shaking so hard I can barely hold the wheel. I watch him in the mirror the whole way down the track until the bend takes him, and even then, I’m not sure he’s stopped watching me.

By the time I get the car parked at the cottage, the rain’s gone torrential, hammering the bracken flat, sheeting off the slope. I run for the door with my coat over my head and burst in soaked anyway.

The moment I step inside, however, I know Alasdair is here. I feel it.

I take off my coat and hang it up, then go into the kitchen where he’s been standing at the window, staring out at the bay.

“Where were you?” he asks flatly. No hello or anything like that, though I suppose he’s never been much for pleasantries.

“The shop,” I tell him, putting my purse on the counter. “The village. I needed to get out of the house, get some supplies.”

He turns toward me, his eyes blue and piercing.

“You’ve got no groceries.”

Ah, yes. Fuck.

“You went to the village and came back with nothing in your hands,” he says, his voice quiet and careful, which in turn tells me to be careful. “You don’t go to the shop and come back empty, foxglove. You at least always have a tin of biscuits with you. So, I’ll ask you again—and I’d have you not lie to me—because you know I wouldn’t do the same to you. Where were you?”

The cottage is very quiet under the drumming rain.

“Fine,” I respond with a sigh. “Fine. I did go to the shop. But I went to talk to Mhairi. I went to ask her what I could do. About you. About all of it. About the killing, and the slipping, and the women in the loch, and the fact that I’m one bad night away from being one of them…I went to find out what to do about you, Alasdair. There. That’s the truth. You wanted it, there it is.”

The confession hangs heavy in the air between us, but at least it’s no longer weighing in my chest anymore.

Alasdair swallows hard and I watch his expression slowly change. It’s not anger, not really. It’s something worse, something cold and calculated, temperature of the room dropping by degrees. “Behind my back.” His tone is pure ice.

“It’s not like that,” I protest.

“You went to a cunning woman behind my back to find a way to deal with me.” He takes a step, teeth bared at me. They’re not pointy, but it’s generally unsettling nonetheless. “Like I’m a thing to be managed. A problem at your table.”

“That’s not—” I start, but where’s the lie? He’s right. I try to give him a placating smile. “You’re scaring me right now; do you know that? This is exactly the⁠—”

“I’m scaring you?” He laughs, but it’s cold, and bitter, and devoid of all humor. “After everything—after I came up out of that loch faster than I’ve moved in a hundred years because I couldn’t bear the thought of pulling you up dead—now you’re scared? Scared because I have some feelings about what you’re doing now, sneaking behind my back?” He’s closer now, the chill coming off him, and his eyes have gone too bright, too fixed, his pupils like tiny pin pricks.

“I just mean, I know you’re angry about all of it, but I was just trying to help.”

“Help? So now you go to Mhairi to find the leash. Was that the plan, then?”

“It wasn’t like that⁠—”

“Then what was it like, Iris?”

We’re almost touching now, both of us breathing hard, the rain roaring on the roof, and the air between us has that charge it always has, the terrible magnet of it, fury and want indistinguishable, and I don’t know which of us moves first.

His mouth crashes down on mine and I’m against the wall before I’ve drawn breath, his body pinning me there cold and hard, the kiss all teeth, furious. My hands find his hair, and his hands are already at the button of my jeans, shoving them down past my hips. His deft, cold fingers find me, and I’m wet for him because of course I am, because I’m broken in exactly the way that wants this, and he makes a low sound against my mouth when he feels it.