Page 6 of The Scot Who Loved Me (A Scots Through Time #3)

As if in answer, the sky darkened abruptly. Wind whipped across the beach, stinging her face. Harper scrambled to her feet, clutching the map against the sudden gale.

She needed to get back to the B&B before the storm hit. With a shrug, she shoved the map into its case and started up the rocky path, but her boot caught on a loose stone. She pitched forward, hands flying out to break her fall.

Pain seared through her left palm as it skidded across the sharp rock. Harper hissed, rolling to a sitting position as blood welled from the raw scrape. Crimson droplets spattered onto the map case clutched in her other hand. At least it hadn’t rolled into the water to be carried out to sea.

Lightning split the sky, striking the cairn with a deafening crack. Electricity raised the hair on her arms. Thunder cracked, so loud she felt it in her bones.

“I need to get out of here,” she gasped, struggling to her feet.

Up on the ridge, the old woman watched her. Their eyes locked, and the woman nodded once, her expression knowing and somehow sad, and in the next flash of lightning, she vanished.

The world twisted. That was the only way Harper could describe it. Reality itself seemed to bend around her. Colors intensified, then bleached away. Sound compressed, then expanded to a roar that filled her head. The ground beneath her feet turned insubstantial and soft as cotton candy.

Another lightning strike hit so close that the air itself seemed to ignite.

Harper screamed, but no sound emerged from her throat.

Her body felt wrong, stretched and compressed, as if being torn apart at the molecular level.

The rational part of her grasped for explanations.

Hallucination, lightning strike, temporal lobe seizure, but nothing fit what was happening to her.

Darkness swallowed her.

When consciousness returned, it came in fragments. The coarse scratch of sand against her cheek. The distant cry of seabirds. The smell of salt and something else. Woodsmoke?

Harper forced her eyes open. The beach was the same, yet not. The sky had cleared to a perfect blue, the storm gone as if it had never happened. She pushed herself up on her knees, wincing at the throb in her scraped palm.

The map case lay beside her, undamaged, but she’d lost the key. Thankfully, the key was required to lock the case, so she could still get to the map. She climbed the ridge where the B&B should have been visible, but there was only unbroken landscape.

“What the hell?” she mumbled, disoriented.

She must have taken a wrong turn after the storm.

Maybe she’d been knocked unconscious briefly and walked in circles.

Her fleece-lined jeans were soaked through, clinging uncomfortably to her legs.

Her sweatshirt and jacket were equally drenched, and her teeth were chattering.

Her backpack was gone, along with the field notebook. Dr. McNeill was going to have her head.

She needed to get back to the village, find Mrs. Ferguson, and get her bearings. Harper started down what she thought was the path back, clutching the map case like a lifeline. The terrain seemed steeper, wilder somehow, the trail less defined than she remembered, more mud than gravel.

Her ponytail had come completely undone, and she cursed as strands of wet hair kept slapping across her face.

She pushed it back for the tenth time, scanning the horizon.

Where was the cell tower that she’d seen from the beach earlier?

Where were the power lines? The cars? The tiny village with its pub and lovely B&B?

At the crest of the hill, she stopped short. Where the Institute’s field office should have been, there was nothing but open grassland. In the distance, smoke rose from what appeared to be a small encampment.

“I’m completely turned around,” she muttered, reaching for her phone. It was gone.

Fine, she’d have to walk until she found someone. Maybe Mrs. Ferguson was right about the weather changing the landscape. The disorienting effects of coastal fog were well-documented. It was just the weather, geology, and her own exhaustion playing tricks.

She was still trying to sort out which direction to go when a shout rang out behind her. Harper turned and collided hard with a wall of solid muscle. Strong hands gripped her arms, steadying her before she could fall.

She looked up, and up, into the face of a man who couldn’t possibly exist. Tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair pulled back from a face that might have been carved from the island’s ancient stone.

He wore a belted plaid of vibrant reds, a linen shirt, a leather vest, and leather boots that rose to his knees.

Behind him stood two similarly dressed men, their expressions a mixture of shock and suspicion.

Great. Historical re-enactors or tour guides. Probably sponsored by the Institute to mess with the new girl.

“Very funny,” she said, leaning back. “Did Dr. McNeill put you up to this? Nice costumes, but I’m really not in the mood.”

The man’s grip didn’t loosen. His eyes narrowed as they flicked from her face to her clothes, then to the map case in her hands. His next words came in a deep voice full of gravel and Scotland, making her sigh.

“Who are ye?” he demanded. “And what the bloody hell are ye doing with my map?”