Read Chapter 1: The Rain on the Moor

The Range Rover's tyres lost their purchase on the third attempt, the wheels spinning a slurry of peat and water that smelled of ancient decay. Eilidh Grant killed the engine, gripped the steering wheel with both hands, and let out a breath that fogged the windscreen. Outside, the Scottish moor had dissolved into a grey abstraction of rain and mist. The satnav insisted Castle Kintail was two hundred yards ahead, but all she could see was a track that had given up being a track and become a bog.

She had been driving for four hours through weather that seemed personally offended by her presence, and now this. She checked her phone. No signal. Of course. The Highlands didn't do signal. They did wet granite and ancient grudges, and today, apparently, they did a very specific kind of misery reserved for women in expensive Land Rovers who thought they could just roll up to a Category A listed building and make it habitable again.

The rain hammered the roof like a thousand tiny fists.

A sound cut through the deluge, engine noise that didn't belong to her—a low tractor rumble, straining and coughing. Eilidh squinted through the streaked glass. A shape materialised from the wall of rain, huge and green and ancient, a tractor that looked like it had been salvaged from a wartime photograph. It slewed to a halt beside her, mud spraying across her passenger window. Through the water streaming down the glass, she saw a figure drop from the cab.

He was tall. That was the first thing. The second was that he was soaked, dark hair plastered to his skull, a waxed jacket doing nothing against the weather. He didn't hurry. He walked around to her driver's side with the unhurried stride of a man who owned the rain, who owned the moor, who owned every miserable drop of this landscape and expected it to behave accordingly.

She lowered the window a few inches. Cold air and moisture hit her face like a slap.

"You'll be the restorer," he said. Not a question. His accent was thick, Highland, the vowels stretched like taffy.

"And you'll be the laird," she replied. "I'd say it's a pleasure, but that would be a lie."

His mouth tightened. Up close, he was younger than she'd imagined—mid-thirties, maybe, with the kind of severe bone structure that suggested generations of hardship etched into the genes. His eyes were pale, an indeterminate grey-green, and they held no warmth whatsoever.

"You're blocking my track," he said.

"It's not much of a track. And I'm stuck."

"Aye. I can see that." He crouched slightly, peering through the gap in her window. "You've buried it past the axles. You're not going anywhere in this."

"Unless you help."

"Unless I help," he repeated, and there was something almost mocking in the echo. "And why would I do that?"

"Because I'm here to save your castle from falling into a pile of rubble?"

A flicker passed through those pale eyes—irritation, or surprise, or perhaps both. He straightened. "My castle is none of your concern. The Commission's funds should never have been approved."

Eilidh stared at him through the rain-streaked gap. She'd been warned about Hamish MacKinnon. The brief had mentioned his opposition to the restoration project, his reclusiveness, his refusal to engage with Historic Environment Scotland or the Heritage Lottery Fund. What the brief hadn't mentioned was that he would be handsome in a hard, unforgiving way, or that the sight of him standing in the downpour with his jaw set like something carved from the moor itself would make her want to argue purely for the pleasure of it.

"Your castle," she said slowly, "is a historic monument owned by a trust of which you are merely the sitting tenant. The repairs were approved by every body that matters. You don't get a vote."

He smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. "Is that what they told you in Edinburgh?"

"Glasgow, actually."

"Worse."

She bit back the retort forming on her tongue. The rain had found its way through her window gap and was dripping down her neck. She was cold, wet, tired, and two hundred miles from the bed she'd imagined sleeping in tonight, and this man—this ridiculously arrogant, obnoxiously attractive man—was standing there wasting her time.

"Look," she said, forcing a civility she didn't feel. "I'm going to be here for six months. We're going to be working in close proximity. Perhaps we could start from a position of not wanting to kill each other?"

"I don't want to kill you," he said. "I want you to leave."

"Not going to happen."

He held her gaze for a long moment. The rain drummed on the car roof. Somewhere in the distance, a bird cried out, a thin desolate sound swallowed by the weather. Finally he shrugged.

"Suit yourself." He turned and walked back toward the tractor.

"Where are you going?" she called after him.

"Back to the castle. It's where I live."

"Just—wait." She shoved the door open, emerging into the rain fully, feeling it soak through her jacket immediately. "You'll just leave me here?"

He paused, half-turned. "You're a modern woman with a modern car. I'm sure you'll manage. There's a winch on the back of the tractor if you're feeling resourceful."

"Resourceful. Right." She stood in the rain, her feet sinking into the sodden ground. "You know, for a laird, you're not very good at hospitality."

"Never claimed to be." He climbed into the cab. The engine coughed, caught, rumbled. "There's a gate at the end of the track. Keep it closed behind you. The sheep aren't supposed to get through."

The tractor lurched forward, spraying mud in a wide arc. Eilidh stood in the downpour and watched him disappear into the grey curtain of rain, dragging her dignity through the mud behind him.

She could call the office. Tell them the job was impossible, the client hostile, the conditions insurmountable. She could turn the Land Rover around, if she could get it free, and drive back to Glasgow and take the other commission, the one in Dumfries, the one with a sane client and a hotel with central heating. She could do all of that.

Instead, she walked to the back of the Land Rover, pulled out the winch cable, and fixed it to the tractor's tow bar. It took her twenty minutes, soaked through to her underwear, cursing his ancestors down seven generations, before the wheels caught and the car lurched free. She drove through the open gate, got out, closed it behind her, and got back in, water streaming from her hair down her face.

The castle appeared through the rain like something from a dream, or a warning. It rose from the moor on a rocky outcrop, grey stone darkened almost to black by the moisture, its towers reaching toward the low sky with a defiance that seemed almost human. Even half-ruined, even crumbling, it had a presence—a weight of centuries that pressed against her chest as she drew closer.

She parked in what had once been a courtyard, now a tangle of weeds and collapsed masonry. The main door was a huge oak slab, reinforced with iron straps and studs, and it stood slightly ajar, as if the castle had been waiting for her. She pushed it open.

The hall swallowed her. Cavernous, vaulted, with a fireplace that could roast an ox, windows so tall they disappeared into shadow above. The floor was stone flags worn smooth by generations of feet, and the roof leaked in a dozen places, creating a near-constant patter of drips into scattered buckets. The air smelled of damp, of age, of dust and something else—something like old smoke, like stories that had been told so many times they'd soaked into the plaster.

And standing in the middle of it, drying his hands on a rag, was Hamish MacKinnon.

"This is my great hall," he said. "It's been in my family for eight hundred years. My ancestors have defended this place against English armies, clan feuds, and the Reformation. I'll not see it changed by a woman from Glasgow with a clipboard and a grant application."

"Noted." Eilidh walked past him, her boots echoing on the stone. She ran a hand along the wall, feeling the roughness of the old plaster, the cool solidity of the building's bones. The rain hammered the roof above them. Water dripped in the shadows. Somewhere, high up, a shutter banged against a window frame.

She turned back to face him. He was watching her with those pale, wary eyes, his rag forgotten at his side.

"I'm not here to change your castle," she said. "I'm here to keep it standing. There's a difference. And whether you like it or not, I'm here for the next six months. So we can either be colleagues, or we can be enemies. But I promise you, Mr. MacKinnon—I'm not leaving."

The words hung in the air between them, heavy as the weather outside. He didn't move. Didn't blink.

Something shifted in his expression—a crack in the stone of his face, one that healed almost immediately.

"We'll see," he said, and turned and walked away, his footsteps receding into the gloom.

Eilidh stood alone in the great hall, listening to the sound of the castle breathing around her. Drips fell into buckets. Wind moaned through cracked windows. And somewhere in the walls, a draft moved with a sound almost like a voice, almost like a word.

She was soaked, exhausted, and her feet had gone numb an hour ago. She hadn't even brought her bags in from the car.

But she was here. That was what mattered. She was here, and she was beginning.