Page 1 of The Story of his Highland Bride
1
“Where are you?” a stern voice crackled through the phone. “Eloise? Can you hear me?”
Eloise Longman checked the screen, where a single bar of signal flickered up and down. “Harriet, I’m going to have to call you back. I’m out in the sticks. I can’t hear you properly.”
She didn’t want to, either. Not really. A holiday was supposed to be a holiday, free of interruptions, but her phone hadn’t stopped pinging since she’d hit the road three days ago. Then again, a holiday was usually supposed to be arranged in advance; this was more of a last-minute escape, so her editor had some right to be annoyed.
“Don’t you dare hang up!” Harriet barked, her impatience pushing through the limits of technology to rattle in Eloise’s eardrums. “Look, Eloise, I don’t mean to be insensitive, but where are my pages? You said they’d be with me two weeks ago,then you said last week, and then you disappeared… and I still have no pages.”
Eloise sighed and stared through the windscreen at the stark, wintry trees that guarded the entrance to the Clava Cairns. The sweet old lady at her B&B had recommended the spot the previous night, insisting that it would inspire any burnt-out, miserable writer who had hit a serious wall when it came to thinking up any words that were worth putting on a page. And with a deadline fast approaching—already past, as it happened—Eloise was desperate enough to try a bunch of old rocks in the middle of winter.
“They’re coming,” she said quietly, praying to the woodland ahead that it would be true. “I’m out of range at the minute, but when I get back to where I’m staying, I’ll send you something. I swear.”
Harriet puffed out an annoyed breath. “You’d better, El. I’ve tried to be sympathetic, but… I don’t know, why can’t you just use what’s happened to get a good story out? Everyone knows that heartbreak and misery are the best weapons in a writer’s arsenal.”
Eloise wished she could say she was surprised by what she was hearing, but she’d heard it so many times over the past month that she was thinking of getting it printed on a poster to hang in her office at home. An office in a house that no longerfeltlike home. How could it, when the one person who had made it feel safe had up and abandoned her? No, not abandoned her, betrayedher.
“I’ll send something tonight,” Eloise repeated. Not for the first time, she willed herself to have the backbone to just hang up on Harriet and never pick up again.
Another annoyed breath hissed through the phone. “I’ll be waiting. I promise, Eloise, I’m not going to shut this laptop until I have pages from you.”
“You’ll have them, one way or another.”
After a terse farewell, Harriet ended the call, leaving Eloise in no mood to get out of the car. She had the heater blasting, and the first Christmas songs had started to trickle through the radio stations though it wasn’t December for another couple of days. It served as a painful reminder that, this Christmas, she’d be alone.
He would never let me put the tree up until December 1,her mind sighed, holding onto memories that would never be repeated. That big old fake tree that they’d bought together when they moved into the house four years ago would stay in the attic, gathering dust until she found the willpower to sell the property, and the tree along with it.
“Get it together, Longman,” she told herself, grabbing her coat from the passenger seat. “You’re twenty-seven, you’re not dead. So what if you’re never going to spend another Christmas, another Easter, another anything with him? He doesn’t deserve a minute of your time. Never did.”
She’d repeated so many mantras like that over the past month, after her entire world had been pulled out from under herwhile she was putting up Halloween decorations. The positive affirmations helped briefly, until the existential dread came back to bite her, but she was determined to use the surge of anger to at least get out of the car and see these rocks.
Shuffling on her coat, thick gloves, a scarf, and jamming a hat down on her head, she popped open the door and braced against the whistling wind that stung her face. There was no one else in the icy parking lot. No one else mad enough to head out into the Highlands in a winter storm, with heavy snow on the way. But that was the thing about heartbreak; it could make a person mad, make a person do crazy things to try and feel something.
“Wow, that’s cold,” she hissed, bending against the gusts that threatened to knock her off her feet.
Fueled by pure rage, playing out the memory of the day everything changed, she stalked toward the path that cut between the trees up ahead.
“I’m sorry, El, but I just don’t love you anymore. I’ve tried to fall back in love with you, but… I can’t make myself feel something I don’t, and I shouldn’t have to. I can’t come second to everything else. All the dates you’ve cancelled because you had chapters to write, all the times you’ve sent me to dinners and parties alone because you had edits to do, all the times—”
She snarled at the audacity of him. Whenever he was the one who needed to stay late at the office or hop on a call in the middle of a breakfast or dinner that she’d spent hours preparing, she never said a word. Whenever he dragged her to fancy events andthen disappeared for hours to mingle, leaving her by herself, she never complained. But she knew the truth—it was her success he couldn’t handle.
At first glance, the Clava Cairns weren’t the shock of inspiration and awe that she’d been hoping for. They looked like every ruin her mother and father had dragged her around when she was a kid. In fact, now that she thought about it, she might’ve been dragged around this very site, but her childhood trips to Scotland had blurred together over the years.
She decided to give the Cairns more of a chance, and followed the gravel path, trying to imagine what it would have looked like when it was first created, way back in the Bronze Age. What were the people like? Were there young women like her, nursing a broken heart, even then?
A blanket of russet-colored leaves mulched on the ground, fallen from the bare sycamores and chestnuts that leaned in over the ancient burial site, like they were eavesdropping. As far as atmosphere went, some inspiration was creeping into her mind.
Just in front of her sat a strange, doughnut-shaped structure of piled rocks that came to head height in some places, chest height in others. Bigger boulders made the foundation, with smaller rocks carefully stacked on top, and around the perimeter were chunks of carved stone, cubes almost, that were spaced equally around the central circle like soldiers on duty.
Following the well-trodden dirt path around the odd cairn, Eloise found a narrow gap that cut into the very heart of thecircular cairn, reminding her of an old-fashioned keyhole. In the round center, she saw a method to the way the stones were piled; it looked more like a drystone wall than any old rocks chucked on at random.
“Still not gettingquitethe inspiration I was promised,” she muttered, turning to see the rest of the site.
However, her eye was immediately caught by a taller, rectangular sentinel of stone that seemed to guard the entrance to the cairn behind her: the tail of the keyhole.
“I could do something with you,” she mused, approaching the stone.
Just then, the fierce wind that had been tossing and battering the leafless sycamores ceased abruptly, like someone had sucked the air out of the cairn site. And where the biting gusts had nipped relentlessly at Eloise’s cheeks, a warm current now caressed her icy skin, as if this corner of the Highlands had decided to skip winter and go straight to spring.
