Page 57 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

He'd been telling himself things like that for weeks. He was getting no better at believing them.

The night was clear enough for stars, scattered thick over the Minch, and somewhere out on the black water a seal called once and went quiet.

His grandfather had had a name for the bull seal on the eastern rock. He remembered his voice saying it. That low, rumbling burr, entirely serious, the way the old man was serious about everything he'd decided was worth taking seriously.

He'd have liked her. He'd have sat her down by the fire and talked to her for six hours, and she'd have given back every word of it, and he'd have loved her for it.

Alpin pressed his thumb into the frog of his belt, hard, and looked at the water.

He heard footsteps behind him. The crunch of gravel, unhurried. Niall stopped two paces to his right and said nothing.

Alpin didn't look at him. Niall didn't speak. The firth moved in the dark between them, that long, slow drag of water pulling back over stone, and a minute passed slowly, with nothing to mark them but the tide.

Then Niall said, "I've been thinking."

"Have ye?"

"Aye." His voice had none of its usual edge. "I've been thinking about the number of times I've watched a man see something good and work very hard to ruin it."

Alpin's jaw tightened.

"And I'll say this plainly," Niall went on, "because ye ken I will anyway. I have never, in thirty years, seen anyone work quite so hard at it as ye. It's impressive, truly. Almost a talent. I've watched ye turn it over in yer head, put walls up round it, go to the shore every night to convince yerself it's only the water ye came for, and I've been patient about it because ye're the Laird and I'm supposed to respect the dignity of the sit."

He paused. "But ye're also the most stubborn man I've ever met, and patience is starting to wear thin on me."

"Go home, Niall."

"Aye, I will." He didn't move.

The wind swept hard across the narrow headland, carrying the sharp, cold spray of brine and the bitter tang of wet kelp up from the jagged black rocks below. Night had flattened the ocean into a vast, restless sheet of obsidian, broken only by the pale, churned foam where the breakers smashed endlessly against the cliff base. The granite beneath their boots vibrated with every heavy thud of the tide, a dull, rhythmic pulse that echoed in the dark stone.

The water shifted. Something rolled low off the point—a deep, subterranean groan of a swell finding the hollow sea caves—and both of them listened to it in silence, their heavy wool cloaks snapping sharply against their shins in the dark.

"I'll go home and get a decent night's sleep, which is more than you'll manage standing here staring at water that doesnae have any answers in it that ye havenae already tried."

His voice stayed level. Not teasing, not cruel. Just the flat, plain truth. "Ten years, Alpin. Ten years ye've stood down here, and the water hasnae told ye a single thing worth hearing yet. It's nae going to."

Alpin said nothing. He watched a point of starlight reflect off the black surface twenty yards out, appear and vanish, appear again.

"She's good," Niall said. He said it quietly, with certainty in his voice. "Ye ken she's good. Ye stood in that hall and watched her make Greer smile inside a fortnight, and ye and I both ken that is surprising, because Greer doesnae give that for nothing. Isobel's stopped keeping herself small around ye because she's nae the only woman in the castle anymore, and she has someone to stand next to. The keep is louder." He stopped. "Ye used to say the quiet was what ye wanted."

"I never said that."

"Ye dinnae have to." Niall shifted his weight, gravel crunching once under his boot. "Ye went looking for it every time the hall had people in it. Ye went to the water every time the fire had voices round it. That was what ye said."

He was quiet for a moment. "It's nae quiet anymore. And ye came to the shore anyway, same as always, because it's easier to stand down here than go back in and decide what ye mean to do about the fact that ye daenae want the quiet as much as ye thought ye did."

The seal called again, further out this time, the sound carrying flat over the water and then swallowed by the dark.

Alpin's thumb moved against the leather of his belt, that same hard unconscious circle, and he stopped it when he noticed it.

"I ken what ye're going to say," Niall said. "It's only a contract. The council wanted a lady, and she's there, and the keep is running, and that's the whole of it, and ye daenae need me telling ye how to manage yer own hall." A short pause. "Ye can say it if ye want. I've heard it enough times I could likely say it for ye."

Alpin didn't say it.

Niall let the silence hold for a breath longer than was comfortable, and then his hand came down on Alpin's shoulder, heavy and firm.

"Go home," Niall said.