Island of Darkness by Rebecca Stratton

Jason - Jason’s afraid it won’t work?” she guessed, and found her lips suddenly dry, and her palms pressed close together in an attitude of prayer. “Oh, Scottie, it must - mustn’t it?”
    “It will,” Scottie assured her quietly, and sounded so sure that she was almost bound to believe it.
    “Poor Jason.” She spoke softly, and felt Scottie’s eyes on her for several seconds before he spoke.
    “You’re very concerned about him,” he said at last, and she looked up to see that dark hint of dislike in his eyes again.

“Of course I’m concerned, aren’t you?”
    “Aye, of course, but not in the same way, I daresay!” She was searching for words, aware in a sudden flash of intuition that Scottie’s apparently quiet devotion to her went much deeper than she had realised. He was quite plainly jealous of her concern for Jason, and obviously meant her to know it. His brown eyes glowed with an expression she had never seen there before and his broad friendly face looked stern and distant.
    “Mebbe I’ve been wrong all along,” he suggested in a voice that had even more of a Scottish burr than usual. “I always thought it was me you came here to see. It seems I was mistaken.”
    “Oh, Scottie, of course you’re not mistaken!” She looked up at him anxiously. “I do come to see you,” she said. “You were the reason I came over again after the first time, you know that.”
    “Aye, I thought I knew that,” he said still in that flat, unfriendly voice. “But that was before you got on so well with Jason!”
    “But Jason likes to - to talk to me,” Leonora insisted, wondering where this could possibly end. If she quarrelled with Scottie how could she come to the rock again? “How can I simply ignore him, Scottie? It wouldn’t only be rude but heartless too - and anyway, it’s his home!”
    Scottie was all too willing to be persuaded, but he was still not quite convinced and he looked at her with a wary, narrow-eyed look. “And you’re not falling in love with him like the others have?” he asked, and Leonora shook her head.
    That mention of others cut much more deeply than it should, but she would not let him know that. “Of course not!” She laughed in an effort to convince herself as well. “You should give me credit for more sense, Scottie! Would I join a harem?”
    “I would hope you had more sense,” Scottie allowed, and for the first time smiled at her, putting an arm round her shoulders in a much more possessive way than she had noticed before. “Why don’t you come in and sit and talk to me for a while?” he suggested. “It isn’t so often these days that I get you to myself - with Jason out of the way it’ll be more like old times.”
    Lucia provided them with some ice-cold lemonade and they sat in the little room next to the kitchen and talked. It was Scottie who said most, talking about his old home and how he intended going back there one day to settle down. He picked up his glass of lemonade and took a sip, looking at her over its rim, his gaze steady for a moment, then shifting quickly as he put the glass down again.
    “You’d love Scotland, Leonora,” he said quietly.
    “Oh, I’m sure I would,” she agreed, and kept her own gaze averted, for she had a strange uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach that warned her that something unprecedented was to happen at any minute now. She laughed nervously. “It’s odd,” she said, “we came all the way here to Italy to live and yet I’ve never been to Scotland, which was right on our doorstep, you might
    say.”
    “It’s a common enough thing,” Scottie said quietly. “Not to appreciate what’s under your nose until it’s no longer there.”
    “You - you regret leaving your home?” Leonora asked, and he shook his head slowly, looking down at his hands where they clasped together between his knees.
    “Oh no,” he said. “But lately I’ve had the feeling I’d like to go back. I’ve seen a deal of the