Page 1 of The Scot Who Loved Me (A Scots Through Time #3)

Chapter

One

S omewhere in the Arctic

Present Day

Dr. Harper Ross didn’t believe in perfect moments, but she had to admit, this came awfully close.

The Arctic sun glinted off the ice sheet, casting rainbows across the white expanse.

The wind was stiff enough today to remind her where she was, but not enough to numb her fingers as she carefully scraped away at the permafrost core sample.

“Hand me the spectrometer?” Harper asked without looking up, her eyes fixed on the subtle band of discoloration in the ice core.

Dr. Sarah Owens passed the instrument over. “You’ve got that look again,” she said, amusement warming her voice.

“What look?” She mumbled, adjusting the settings.

“The ‘I’m-about-to-prove-everyone-wrong’ look. It’s quite intimidating, you know.”

Harper glanced up, momentarily, pulled from her focus. “Is it? Sorry.”

Sarah laughed, the sound bright against the vast silence of the tundra. “Don’t apologize. It’s why I requested you on this project. You see patterns no one else does.”

She smiled easily as she spoke, but for an instant, Harper thought she caught something shadowed in her friend’s gaze, a fleeting tension around Sarah’s eyes, quickly masked by her familiar warmth. But she dismissed it immediately, attributing it to fatigue from their long days on the ice.

As they continued working, a memory surfaced from their first project together, two years ago, in a cramped research station in Greenland.

She’d overheard Sarah fiercely defending her unconventional methods to their skeptical colleagues.

“Give her space to do what she does best,” Sarah had insisted.

“Harper sees connections the rest of us can’t.

” She’d stood frozen outside the door, shocked to hear someone voicing a belief in her abilities.

After years of isolation, Sarah’s words had felt like sunlight breaking through a long winter.

Ever since then, she’d trusted her friend and colleague implicitly.

A flush of pleasure warmed her cheeks, and she ducked her head back to the sample, grateful for the excuse to hide her face.

After years of being the odd one out, the “weird rock girl” who preferred geological formations to people, having her peculiar way of thinking valued felt like finding water in a desert.

Excitement coursed through her as she peered closer at the deposit. “This core sample is showing something unusual,” she said, running her finger above the thin, dark band in the ice. “It shouldn’t be here, not at this depth, not with these isotope ratios.”

Sarah crouched beside her, their shoulders almost touching as they both examined the core. “What are you thinking?”

Her thoughts flew, connecting dots scattered across years of research and fieldwork. “The conventional wisdom is that these permafrost deposits formed gradually, right? Seasonal freezing and thawing over millennia.”

“That’s the textbook explanation,” Sarah agreed.

“It’s wrong.” Harper couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice.

“These mineral deposits, they’re not consistent with gradual formation.

Look at the crystalline structure.” She adjusted the portable microscope and gestured for Sarah to look.

“See how the alignment is almost perpendicular to what we’d expect? ”

Sarah peered through the lens, her breath creating a small cloud in the frigid air.

“You’re right. That’s... unexpected.” She straightened up from the microscope, her expression carefully neutral, though her lips tightened almost imperceptibly.

Harper, too caught up in her own excitement, failed to notice the slight stiffness in Sarah’s posture or the brief flicker of something unreadable behind her eyes.

“It’s more than unexpected,” she said, her words tumbling over each other as her excitement built. “It suggests catastrophic formation, a massive, sudden event rather than gradual accumulation. If I’m right, we need to rethink the timeline of Arctic permafrost development completely.

She pulled out her tablet and began hammering out notes, the cold forgotten as warmth spread from her center. This was what she lived for. The moment when the earth revealed its secrets, when the stones and ice told stories no human had heard before.

“Perhaps this explains the strange carbon dating results from our last expedition,” Sarah said, her excitement growing. “The ones everyone attributed to contamination.”

Harper nodded. “Exactly! They weren’t anomalies at all, they were data points we weren’t interpreting correctly because our foundational assumptions were flawed.”

She pulled up the previous expedition’s data on her tablet, fingers flying across the screen as she plotted the new information against the old readings. The resulting graph confirmed what her instincts had already told her, the pattern was unmistakable.

“Sarah, look.” Harper turned the tablet so her colleague could see it. “If I’m right, this changes everything we thought we knew about climate patterns in the Arctic over the last thirty thousand years.”

If proven correct, her discovery wouldn’t just rewrite textbooks, it would fundamentally alter climate modeling for the entire Arctic region.

The Institute had invested millions in this expedition, specifically to understand how ancient climate shifts might inform predictions about modern climate change.

Harper’s theory could provide the missing piece that scientists had been seeking for decades, potentially influencing global climate policy and establishing her as a pioneer in the field.

For someone who had always stood on the periphery of her profession, this moment represented everything she’d worked toward since grad school.

Sarah’s eyes widened as she studied the graph. “This is... this is extraordinary work.”

“We should run additional spectrometer tests to confirm,” Harper said, already reaching for her equipment bag. “If we can collect samples from the adjacent sites and find the same pattern?—”

“We’ll have a revolutionary paper on our hands,” Sarah finished, her smile wide and her eyes sparkling with what looked like genuine pride.

“The Harper Ross theory of catastrophic permafrost formation.” Her voice held warmth and pride, but beneath it, a quiet edge lingered, a thin undertone of wistfulness, quickly covered by a bright smile.

Harper laughed, the sound surprisingly light. “We’ll need a catchier name than that.”

“Maybe,” Sarah agreed, “but your name should definitely be on it. This is your discovery. You should be proud.”

For once, Harper didn’t hide her smile or downplay her achievement. In that moment, surrounded by the ancient ice that had yielded its secrets to her, working alongside someone who truly valued her mind, Harper felt something she rarely experienced. A feeling of belonging.

Later that evening, back in her modest quarters at the Arctic research station, Harper sat hunched over her tablet, meticulously transcribing her field notes and cross-referencing the day’s data points.

Her fingers moved swiftly across the screen, carefully organizing their findings into precise, verifiable records.

She double-checked each spectrometer reading and isotope ratio, determined to fortify her revolutionary theory against any skepticism that might follow.

Stiff and ready for a break, she stretched, yawning, then headed to the common area where she found Sarah sitting quietly, staring through the frost-edged window into the endless Arctic night.

Recognizing the familiar shadow of homesickness, she went to the small kitchen and returned with a steaming cup of hot chocolate.

“My secret recipe,” she said, handing it to her friend. “It doesn’t quite taste like home, but it helps.” Sarah looked up, a small smile on her face as she took the cup. They sat together in comfortable silence, the warmth of friendship easing the ache of distance.

It was after midnight when the door opened quietly behind her, a brief rush of cool air across her neck as Harper glanced back to find Sarah lingering in the entryway, watching her work.

She smiled distractedly. “Hey. I’m just finishing up the documentation.

The data is strong, but I want to make sure everything’s airtight. ”

Sarah stepped closer, peering over Harper’s shoulder at the screen.

“You’re incredibly thorough,” she murmured, voice tinged with something she couldn’t place.

“I don’t know anyone else who documents like this.

” Her tone was gentle, admiring even, yet Harper sensed a slight strain from her friend.

They’d all been working so hard, Sarah probably just needed a good night’s sleep and a call back home to her boyfriend.

Tugging at the hem of her sweatshirt, she shrugged sheepishly. “I’ve learned the hard way. With theories this unconventional, documentation is everything. Without ironclad evidence, people will dismiss it.”

Sarah nodded slowly, scanning the detailed graphs and meticulously organized data. “Mind uploading this to our shared drive when you’re done? I’ll review it tonight as well, just to ensure we’re completely aligned.”

Harper hesitated for a moment, fingers hovering over the upload button. Every instinct screamed to keep her findings close until publication, but she pushed the doubts aside. Sarah had believed in her from the beginning. Trusting her friend was the least she could do.

“Sure, I’ll upload it in a few minutes,” she said, forcing a small smile. “I’d appreciate another set of eyes on it.”

Sarah smiled. “Of course. We’re in this together.”

As Sarah slipped out, Harper finished her last checks and tapped the upload button, watching as the files moved seamlessly into their shared folder. Ignoring the lingering unease at the edge of her thoughts, she closed down her tablet. She had done everything she could to safeguard her discovery.