Thorsay House, though owned by the Lairds of Thorsay, served as a way station for traveling Thorsayians. Ramsay found that he’d just missed a favorite cousin, Kendra Douglas, who’d taken refuge in the house after a disastrous scandal. She’d been a lively little thing. He’d taught her and Signy Matheson and several other younger children the basics of fencing.

He stopped at Hatchard’s and found a trove of letters from the Rogues Redeemed of the Portuguese cellar. Impressively, they all had survived the wars and he managed to dine with one of the men while he was in London. Then he set sail again, first to Edinburgh and finally on a small coastal trading vessel that took him the last stretch to Thorsay.

Ramsay spent much of this last leg of his long journey in the bow of the boat, feeling a reluctant sense of homecoming. The silvery seas and austere scattered islands seemed to be bred into his bones.

When the vessel finally moored at the dock below Skellig House, Ramsay left the deckhands to unload his crates of antiquities. Impatiently he climbed the hill to the family home. Skellig House was a compact stone structure designed to stand against the fiercest winds off the North Sea. Behind it towered a massive stone monolith erected by the ancient inhabitants of these islands.

Nothing seemed to have changed in the dozen years since he’d left. His pace quickened as he wondered if his grandfather still lived.

As he approached the entrance to the house, the door swung open and someone stepped out, his gaze turned toward Ramsay. No, not a man but a tall woman, that was clear from the way the wind shaped her gray gown around an undeniably female figure. The same wind rippled her blazing red-gold hair like a banner of war.

When he was a dozen feet away, she brushed back her hair and said in a voice colder than an Arctic gale, “What took you so long, Kai?”

He stopped dead in his tracks and stared. In the years he’d been gone, bony little Signy Matheson had become a damned Nordic goddess!