were crowded as she picked her way carefully over the narrow wooden gangway from the Argyle, across the deck of another steamer and up on to the pier, clutching her portmanteau. Beautiful as the Highlands had been, she had felt more alien there than at any time since leaving London eight years before. The Gaelic language, with its soft, lilting tones, was lovely to listen to, impossible to decipher. She had not been prepared for her own English accent to mark her out as foreign. At times, she had encountered downright hostility. They had long memories, those whose families had paid the price for fighting for the Jacobite Prince Charlie. More recently, enclosure and the introduction of sheep to the lands had brought a new grudge against the Sassenach landowners. Cordelia, raised in a household which lived and breathed the politics of Britain’s growing Empire, had been appalled by her own ignorance of what was, in theory, part of her own country.
On a very small scale, politics had torn her own family apart. Listening to the tales of what politics had done to the Highlanders gave her rather a different perspective on her own life. In those remote, tiny, hard-working communities, family was all. Cordelia could no longer ignore how much she missed her own. She was lonely. There were times when the cost of this independent path she had chosen felt like too high a price to pay. Times, such as now, standing on the quay with the crowd pressing round her, when she would have given anything for a familiar face.
But she had never been one to mope, had always loathed regrets, and there was no point in wishing things could be different. Cordelia turned her mind to the problem of her baggage, and where, and how she was supposed to collect it. Jostled, her skirts and toes well and truly trodden on, she looked for a porter. There were many, but all were occupied, and all seemed to be deaf too. She had thought that being back in a city would restore a little of her equilibrium, but the harsh language here sounded almost as foreign as Gaelic.
‘And to make matters worse, I seem to have become invisible,’ she muttered to herself, resorting to using her elbows to push past a large man holding a very loud conversation with a very small man on one of the steamers.
It was then she saw him, standing quite alone a few yards down, at the end of the quay. She could not have said what drew her attention, only that it was drawn, almost as if she were compelled to look at him. He was dressed sombrely, in a black coat and trousers, black shoes. His hair was cut short. Deep auburn, it was burnished by the silver-yellow rays of the setting sun filtered through the darkening clouds, giving him the look of a fallen angel. He had been staring off into the distance, but as she watched him he turned, their eyes met, and Cordelia felt a jolt of recognition, though she was sure she had never seen him before. Perhaps it was from having listened to too many ghost stories while she was in the Highlands, but she had the strangest feeling, like seeing another form of herself. You, her bones and her skin and her blood called, it’s you.
She couldn’t look away. It was with a feeling of déjà vu, or fate, inevitability, that she watched him approach her. His face was not gaunt, but it had little spare flesh. The lines which ran from his nose to his chin spoke of a tough life rather than either age or decadence. A hard face with a strong chin and nose, his mouth was his only soft feature, with a full bottom lip forming into a querying smile. The quiver inside her turned from recognition to attraction. This one, her body was saying now, this man.
‘Is there something I can do for you?’ he asked.
Is there something ah can do furr you? His accent was strange, a soft burr with a rougher edge lurking in the background, the sweetness of chocolate mixed with the grittiness of salt. ‘My luggage,’ Cordelia said, ‘I don’t suppose you know where I can collect it?’
‘You’re English.’ She must have instinctively braced herself for he smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to hold it against you.’
Ah’m no gonnae haud it against you. Cordelia smiled. ‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am to hear that. I had thought the French held my country in low esteem, until I travelled north. I am just come from Oban, but I have been travelling in the Highlands for several weeks and I—’
‘I thought I knew you,’ he interrupted her. ‘When I saw you staring at me, I thought we must have met, but I don’t think we have.’
He had caught her arm as she made to turn away. She had taken a step towards him in response. He was not wearing gloves. His skin was pale. His nose looked as if it had been broken. His eyes were deep-set and deep blue. His lashes were the same dark auburn as his hair. He was frowning at her, studying her closely, a puzzled look on his face that echoed just what she had felt when first setting eyes on him.
‘I thought it too,’ Cordelia said. ‘That I knew you, I mean. It’s why I was staring. I’m sorry, it was rude of me. I did not mean to disturb you.’
She made no move to go, however, for her body was rooted to the spot. She was acutely aware of him, of his hand on her arm, of the concentration of his gaze. He had very broad shoulders. Under that dark suit, there was a hard body. The thought made her blood heat. She could feel a flush creeping up her neck.
‘You didn’t,’ he said. ‘Disturb me, I mean.’ He looked down at his hand, but instead of releasing her, pulled her towards him, linking them together, arm in arm. ‘Oban, you said you sailed from?’
She nodded.
‘You’ll have come on the Argyle then. She’s sound enough, though that beam engine of hers is well past its prime. Napier’s steeple will become the standard, you mark my words, though if you ask me—’ He broke off, smiling at the confusion which must be writ large on her face. ‘I’m havering. Your luggage will be this way,’ he said. ‘I’m Iain Hunter.’
‘Cordelia. That is, Cordelia Williamson. Mrs.’
‘You’re married.’
‘Widowed,’ she said hastily, not pausing to think why it mattered to reassure him.
‘I’m glad,’ he said. Then, ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’
He didn’t look in the least bit contrite. In fact, there was a gleam in his eyes that gave Cordelia a fizzy feeling in her stomach and made her decidedly light-headed. A more prosaic woman would have said she needed food, but though she had many faults, she had not once in her twenty-eight years been accused of being matter of fact. Impetuous, yes, and heedless too. Both of those traits she had worked very hard to curb in the past few years. Now, as she tripped along beside Iain Hunter, shielded from the bustle not just by his body but by the way the crowd seemed to part for him, she felt a terrible, wicked, irresistible impulse to be both.
‘What about you, Mr Hunter,’ she asked, ‘are you married?’
‘No,’ he replied.
‘I am glad,’ Cordelia said.
He stopped in his tracks. ‘What am I to take from that?’
It was a fair question. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, deflated. ‘I’m in a strange mood. The travel, most likely. I thought— When I saw you, I thought— But it was silly of me.’
He touched her cheek, where the pulse beat at her temple. His fingers were cold. It was the lightest of touches. She felt as if he were trying to read her mind. ‘You could have asked me the same thing,’ he said, ‘when I told you I was glad you were widowed.’
‘What would you have said?’
‘Something along the same lines,’ he answered. ‘I was thinking— I was feeling—strange. I saw you, and I thought, oh, there she
