The Winter Sea (Slains, #1)(30)

It did, in fact, bring me a certain sense of satisfied accomplishment to draw my castle floor plan, all those neatly ruled lines on the page, and the room names spelled out in block capital letters. I didn’t have crayons, or else I’d have colored it, too, for good measure. But when it was done, I felt better.

I set it to the side of my computer, where I’d see it while I worked, and went to make myself a sandwich. I was standing at my window, eating lunch and looking out to sea, as I so often did, my mind on nothing in particular, when I first saw the dog.

A small dog, running down the beach, ears flapping happily as it splashed through the foam-edged tracks of waves as though it scarcely felt the cold, pursuing something round and bright that rolled along the sand. A tennis ball, I guessed, and watched the dog catch up the ball in triumph, wheeling back to run the way that it had come. A spaniel, spotted brown and white.

Even before I saw the man the dog was running to, the man who stood with hands deep in his pockets, shoulders braced against the wind, I’d set my plate down and was looking for my toothbrush. And my coat.

I didn’t know exactly why. I could have, if I’d wanted to, explained it in a few ways. He’d been friendly to me that first day, and after spending all this morning cooped up in the cottage, I was keen to get outside and talk to someone, and I liked his dog. That’s what I told myself the whole way down the hill and up the road, across the narrow wooden footbridge and around the looming dunes. But when I’d reached the beach myself, and when he turned his head at my approach and smiled a welcome, I knew then that none of those was actually the reason.

He looked more like a pirate this morning, a cheerful one, with his dark hair cut roughly in collar-length layers and blown by the wind, and the flash of his teeth white against the clipped beard. ‘Were my directions no help to you, then?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You were on your way to Peterhead, the last we met. Did ye not find the way?’

‘Oh. Yes, I did, thanks. I came back.’

‘Aye, I see that.’

‘I’ve rented a cottage,’ I said, ‘for the winter.’

His grey eyes moved with interest to the place where I was pointing. ‘What, the old one on Ward Hill?’

‘Yes.’

‘The word is, it’s been taken by a writer.’

‘Right. That’s me.’

He looked me up and down, with humor. ‘You don’t look much like a writer.’

My eyebrows lifted. ‘Should I take that as a compliment?’

‘You should, aye. It was meant as one.’

The dog was back, all muddied feet and wagging tail and wet nose snuffling at my knees. I scratched his floppy ears and said, ‘Hi, Angus,’ and the spaniel dropped the tennis ball, expectantly, beside my shoe. I picked it up and threw it out again for him as far as I could throw.

The man beside me looked impressed. ‘You’ve a good arm.’

‘Well, thank you. My father played baseball,’ I said, as though that would explain it. And then, because I realized that we’d never introduced ourselves, I said, ‘I’m Carrie, by the way.’

He took the hand I offered him, and in that swift, brief contact something warm, electric, jolted up my arm. He said, ‘I’m Graham.’

‘Hi.’

He really did have the best smile, I thought. It was sudden and genuine, perfect teeth gleaming an instant against the neat beard, closely trimmed to the line of his jaw. I missed it when he turned his head to watch the progress of the dog. ‘So, Carrie, tell me, what is it you’re writing?’

I knew that everyone I met in Cruden Bay would ask that question, and eventually I’d have to come up with a tidy, single-sentence answer, something that satisfied their polite interest without boring them to sleep. I tried it now, and told him, ‘It’s a novel set at Slains, back in the early eighteenth century.’

I’d thought that he might nod, or maybe say that sounded interesting, and that would be the end of it. Instead, he turned his head again, face angled so the strong wind kept the hair out of his eyes. ‘Oh, aye? What year?’

I told him, and he gave a nod.

‘The Franco-Scots invasion, is it? Attempted invasion, I guess I should call it. It wasn’t exactly a raging success.’ He bent briefly to wrestle the ball out of Angus’s teeth and then tossed it back out, several yards past the point where my own throw had landed. ‘An interesting choice,’ Graham said, ‘for a novel. I don’t ken that anyone’s written about it, that way. It barely makes the history books.’

I tried to hide my own surprise that he would be aware of what was written in the history books. Not because I’d made any assumptions about his intelligence, but because, based on the way he looked, the way he moved, I would have expected he’d be more at home on a football field than in a library. Showed what I knew, I thought.

I hadn’t noticed that the dog was overdue in coming back, but Graham had. He looked along the shore, eyes narrowed to the wind, and whistled sharply through his teeth to call the spaniel back. ‘I think he’s hurt himself,’ he said, and sure enough, Angus came limping towards us, the ball in his mouth, but one front paw held painfully.

‘Stepped on something,’ Graham guessed, and crouched down to investigate. ‘Broken glass, it looks like. Not a bad cut, but I’ll need to get that sand out.’