“I think you like a bit of both,” she told him, gunning for a smile.
He nodded seriously instead. “It depends on my mood.”
Clark knew his father criticized because he cared. Because he thought Clark needed pushing and prodding to live up to his potential. Inside his dad’s head lived a relentless taskmaster and Alfie Edgeware credited that harsh, wily animal with his success. Knowing didn’t stop the rush of nausea.
“I suppose we’ve only got one real option now.”
“Yeah.” Riley took out her phone. “I’ll order an Uber.”
“No, I meant we pull out the big guns. Break this fucking curse.”
Her brows rose. “I’m listening. You got an idea?”
Clark smiled, surprised that he could. “It just so happens, I do.”
Chapter Twenty
Apparently, for archaeologists, “pulling out the big guns” meant “using your academic credentials to get access to a university’s rare books room, even if said rare books room was technically closed to the public due to ongoing renovations.”
Or at least, that was what Riley had taken away from Clark’s call to the head of the collection at St. Andrews.
“We’re in.” He’d grinned as he hung up, looking only slightly wild-eyed from where he sat beside her in the back of a very expensive Uber on their return trip to Torridon. “A security guard will be there at ten a.m. tomorrow to meet us.”
“Great.” Riley hadn’t totally understood the plan at that point, but he looked so adorably eager. After his dad had been such a horrible monster—like so bad that for a few hours she was glad her own dad had had the decency not to stick around—she would have gone pretty much anywhere that made him smile like that.
When she got back to the inn, after she did all the normal face-washing, teeth-brushing stuff—Riley put on her pj’s and called Ceilidh to see if she’d want to take the train with them in the morning to visit the collection. As far as she could tell, Ceilidh was the only person who loved old books more than Clark.
“Damnit, I’ve got class,” her friend moaned. “Can you just take pictures of everything? Like just all of it?”
“Oh, sure,” Riley agreed. “That shouldn’t be a problem. Clark said they only have like two hundred thousand books in there.”
Ceilidh made another sound of excruciating pain. “Don’t rub it in, you horrible woman, or I won’t let you take my car and you’ll be stuck on the bloody train for one thousand years.”
Riley laughed.
The following morning, Ceilidh not having made good on her threat, Clark and Riley met the surly security guard after the four-hour drive.
“Don’t get yourselves locked in.” The guard ushered them through a very old-looking door. “The knob will lock automatically behind you, and my shift ends in an hour.” His bushy white mustache twitched. “I won’t come back.”
“Noted, sir,” Clark held the door for Riley, who tried to nod in a way that conveyed her utmost respect for academic institutions, their employees, and procedures as they walked inside.
“Whoa.” She hadn’t had a firm vision for a rare books room, having never visited one or really thought about them existing before, but even with some scaffolding and tarps covering parts of the space, the massive room at St. Andrews was majestic.
Riley couldn’t help stopping to take a deep inhale of the sweet, dry scent of preserved paper. America had a lot going for it, as far as she was concerned, but man, Europeans really took the cake when it came to old stuff. And gun laws. But that was a different story.
It wasn’t just the books that were old here—it was everything. Her mom would have called the space handsome. It had all the HGTV stuff she drooled over—high, vaulted ceilings, crown molding.
Clark made a beeline for a computer desk in the corner, a man on a mission, but Riley just swiveled her head, taking in the books in all directions, including up.
Some had spines bound in cloth or leather, some books were skinny, and some were extraordinarily fat; volumes lived in little families. There were books under glass, their pages open to show the gilded, hand-painted illustrations.
“Holy smokes.” It was the first time she’d thought about a university as more than just somewhere to go to get a degree that let you make more money. This place, this room, kept so many centuries of knowledge—it hurt her heart that she only got access for a few hours.
She envied Clark the way he didn’t even blink when they walked in. This was his world. Of course he’d feel at home here.
Riley found him bent over a keyboard. “It was nice of you to bring me here.”
Before she came to Scotland, she’d thought working alone made her stronger. Now she wondered how much she’d missed out on by not asking for help sooner.
As Clark looked at her, the determined frenzy he’d been in ever since his dad left lifted. His eyes warmed. “Do you like it?”
“How could I not?” She’d already passed several sections she wished she could linger in. Books on botany and mysticism and geology.
Clark smiled and then pointed at the screen. “I think you’re about to like it even more.”
She leaned forward to read over his shoulder. “History of the Clan Graphm: from public records and private collections, compiled by Amelia Georgiana Murray MacReive. Published in 1790.”
“Why didn’t you collect this as part of your first round of research?” It seemed promising. A study of clan life before, during, and right after the events of the curse in 1779.
“It came up in my initial searches, but because of the condition of the book you can’t remove it from the collection.” He pointed to a note in the catalog. “Let’s just say I was less incentivized to make the trip out here when I looked a few months ago.”
Riley nodded. She recognized the same fierceness in his face from when he’d defended curse breaking at the restaurant. They were here because of his father. Because Clark was finally striking back against a lifetime of tyranny.
He hadn’t developed a newfound belief in her calling beyond her request and a sense of obligation. Clark didn’t feel, as she did, that they stood at the precipice of something ancient and powerful. So close—if they could push through this last stretch—that they might have the unique ability to fix something that had been broken for so long. As much as Riley wanted to believe he was really in this with her, she didn’t dare hope.
Look at Gran and her mom. Curse breakers didn’t get partners, romantic or otherwise. They got adventure and adrenaline, gratitude when they did a job well. And if Riley could help it, they got paid.
The way Clark’s father looked at her, like mud under his shoe, wasn’t an anomaly. His whole circle of gentleman academics would turn up their noses at her family legacy. Clark might be willing to fight for her once, but she couldn’t see him signing up for the job full-time.
Following the tracking number, they found the book tucked away in a special temperature-controlled cabinet, its spine bent and peeling with signs of wear. After taking special care washing and drying their hands, they took the text over to one of the room’s glass tables and pulled out two chairs.