Page 10 of Taming the Heiress
Dignity. She must summon and retain it, use it as her only shield. Later as the baroness she would invite him to the Great House, and there she could reveal the truth, if she decided to.
"Mr. Stewart," Norrie said. "Angus MacLeod said you went to Mull earlier and hired his son to take you. But I sail to Tobermory twice a week when weather allows. Next time you wish to go, I will take you and bring you back. No need to pay a man to go over the waves for you when Norrie MacNeill will do it for free."
"Thank you. I shall remember." Stewart smiled.
Watching him, Meg felt a wash of sudden anger, standing silently by, sea foam lapping at her feet. But she must quell her emotion, bide her time, think of her child first.
If Dougal Stewart found out about his son, he could claim the boy and take him away from her and her family and away from the island home where she had always thought he would be safe.Oh dear God.
She looked at Stewart then and found him studying her, his expression perplexed.
"Miss MacNeill—I must ask. Have we met before?"
Chapter 3
"I do not believe so, Mr. Stewart," Margaret MacNeill replied to his question. Her voice was quiet and melodic, her English perfect, with the soft lilt of the Gael rather than the broader Scots English. Her voice was careful and she seemed wary. Shy, perhaps.
Dougal nodded, and could not help but note as he glanced at her that she was slim and neatly made beneath her plain garments. Her feet were sand-dusted, her clasped hands smooth and lovely. If she worked with nets and gutted fish, like many Hebridean women, her hands did not show it. Her thick golden curls were pulled back beneath the drape and shadow of the light plaid, and her features were beautiful, delicate—yet with a trace of stubbornness in the chin and set of her lush mouth.
No wonder he thought he had seen her before. Such fair coloring and elegant bones were typical of many Hebrideans due to Viking ancestry. Norrie had it, too, in his fair complexion, high cheek bones, and vivid blue eyes.
Her eyes were luminous, silvery aqua. Frowning as he studied her, he remembered a moment when he had opened his eyes from sleep to see the girl sitting at the mouth of the little cave they had shared in the storm. In dawn's light, he had seen her face and her extraordinary eyes clearly, their color the delicate blue-green wash of a sky just before dawn.
Margaret MacNeill had those eyes. In fact, she was so much like the sea fairy he remembered that he felt the shock of recognition all through his body—a prickling along his skin, a deep clutching of certainty in his heart and gut. Could she have been real and he so muddled at the time that he had not known?
If she knew him, she gave no sign, no start. She seemed calm and cool, but he noticed a fine-drawn nervousness, a tight clasping of her hands, a flickering away of those eyes, the clenching of her narrow toes in the sand.
Still frowning, uncertain quite yet, he gave his attention to Norrie MacNeill. "Mr. Stewart is the chief of the lighthouse on the rock," Norrie told his granddaughter.
"Resident engineer," Dougal corrected, smiling. "I was assigned here by the Northern Lighthouse Commission. We have a grant of permission to build on Sgeir Caran and to maintain work buildings here on Caransay."
"I know, Mr. Stewart," the girl said crisply.
If she recognized him, Dougal realized, she was hardly delighted to see him. He could not blame her. What he had done was reprehensible. Disturbed by that thought, he kept an outward calm, yet he knew he must speak with Miss MacNeill alone, and soon.
What he would do about this, he did not yet know. Clearly he owed her an apology and an explanation—providing his behavior that night could be explained. He had been a thousand times a fool, and he must admit that to her.
"I saw you and your men cutting into the hard place today," Norrie said. "I heard your sledges and chisels when I went out over the waves to draw in my nets."
"The hard place?" Alan Clarke asked.
"Sgeir Caran," Margaret MacNeill explained, and Norrie hissed as if to shush her. "My grandfather, like many Hebridean fishermen, will not say the rock's name aloud."
"It is not a good thing," Norrie said.
"I'll remember that," Dougal said. "I will do my best to respect local traditions while I am here."
"Then why do you build on that rock," the girl asked tartly, "when it is legendary among the people of this isle?"
"I was not aware of any legends associated with the rock."
"The hard place belongs to theeach-uisge,"Norrie said. "The lord of the deep."
"The who?" Alan asked.
"A sea kelpie," Margaret MacNeill told him, "supposedly a creature of great magical power, who sometimes takes the form of a white horse and sometimes the form of a man."
"It is said that he comes to the rock now and again, seeking a bride," Norrie went on. "The black rock is his, you see. If his bride pleases him, he will quiet the storms that blow here, summon more fish into our nets, and bestow good fortune on us all. But if he is displeased, he will raise great storms and the fish will flee our waters. His power and his wrath could sink the hard rock, and Caransay itself, into the waves."
