“I’m caught on a ledge, but I can’t get up without help.”
He already moved toward the sound. “Are you hurt?”
“Only a few scrapes and bruises.”
He whispered a prayer of gratitude. “Keep talking so I can find ye.”
“I was trying to see the waterfall, and I fell.”
“You’re not safe out on your own,” he said, although he was too relieved to be angry. That moment when he’d peered over the cliff would live in his nightmares. He’d been convinced she’d left him at last, and in the most permanent way imaginable.
Compared to the fact that she was alive, nothing else mattered, not even the purgatory she’d put him through these last days.
“Right now, I might agree with you.”
“Did I hear right?” He was too worried to appreciate that this wry banter echoed the way things used to be between them. “Signorina Marina Lucchetti agrees with one of my conclusions?”
“Yes, it’s a miracle.”
He followed the sound of her voice and realized it rose over the lip of the cliff. Now he was near the place where she’d lost her footing, he saw broken bracken and torn grass that bore witness to how she’d scrabbled to stop her fall.
“I’ll raise a flag to mark the occasion when we get back to the castle.” He dropped to his stomach, not trusting the edge to hold his weight.
“If you get me out of this, I’ll help you.”
As he looked down, any urge to smile forsook him. Instead, icy fear dug its claws into his flesh.
“Good God, lassie, what have you got yourself into?” He struggled to sound as if terror didn’t tangle his intestines into knots.
She turned her dirty face upward and managed a smile. By heaven, she was gallant. She put the men he knew to shame.
Her back pressed into the side of the hill. Her feet balanced precariously on a narrow ledge that looked none too secure. On either side, she spread her arms against the rock wall. One hand curled around a protruding boulder. The other maintained a white-knuckled grip on a spindly sapling growing over the void. Below her, the hill fell away in a series of jagged ledges.
“A mess.” He was close enough to hear the panic beneath her jauntiness. “I need a big, strong brute of a Scotsman to save me. Fate has a sense of humor, it seems, and mocks my claims to self-sufficiency.”
“Aye, that’s fate for you,” he said, assessing her plight with sharp eyes. What he saw made his chest constrict with dread.
He could rush back to fetch one of the ponies and a rope, but he doubted he had time. As if to confirm his decision, Marina shifted an inch, and a shower of gravel rattled down the cliff.
“Will you trust me, Marina?” he asked as calmly as he could manage.
“Yes.”
This was no time to appreciate her swift confirmation. “I can pull you up, but you’ll have to turn around and climb toward me.”
God above, let his plan work. He could try to tug her to safety as she was, but she’d be dead weight on his arms, and he couldn’t risk the ground beneath him crumbling away.
“I can do that.” He hated to hear the quaver in her voice.
“Be careful, mo chridhe.”
“I promise that, at least.”
“Don’t wait.” This time, his voice held no false bravado at all.
Despite his command, she didn’t move straightaway. To Fergus watching from above, the few seconds’ delay lasted forever. Then gingerly she released her grip on the rock and started to shuffle mere inches at a time on the same spot as she tried to turn. More gravel came loose and bounced down the rock face. With every second of waiting, Fergus felt like he aged a millennium.
“Please talk to me, Mackinnon,” she muttered.