Chapter 5 #2
“Including those border raiders?”
She turned her head startled and alarmed. “What makes you think they were not after you?”
He propped an elbow on his knee. “Because the abbey is in the opposite direction of the border crossing. And a conversation with the mountebank told me otherwise. No . . . I suspect your man, Geddes Graham, was after you. Not to play nice, either.”
A heavy silence fell between them. If only she could think clearly. Roxburghe was right. She could never go back to the abbey. “Geddes is a weasel. He is an informant for . . .” She refused to say my father. “For the king’s warden,” she said, the most hated man in all Scotland.
People would despise her, too, when they learned his daughter still lived. Her life as she had known it was forever at an end. A part of her wanted to laugh at the absurdity and utter irony.
Instead, she started to shiver from the combination of wet, cold, and pain and wrapped her arms about her torso. “Geddes and I have never got along. I took money from him that belonged to Jack.”
Wrapping a torn piece of fabric from his shirt around his palm, Roxburghe returned to her side and knelt on one knee. Hard muscles encased not just his arms but his legs. She had so desperately wanted to find a weakness in him, yet his strength overwhelmed all impressions.
“You need to dry out. We cannot remain here. Can you walk?”
He was asking if she could walk barefoot in the woods. The soles of her feet were as callused as cow’s hide. She’d grown up barefoot. But she had injured her thigh. She could feel warmth pooling against the cloth of her breeches. “Wouldn’t it be better to await your men to find us?”
“Lest you have not noticed, we are on the wrong side of the river. I doubt even you have a taste for raider company, dressed as you are.” With care, he gently tilted her chin. “I don’t want to kill anyone over you tonight, Rose.”
She pulled from his grip. Her ring on his finger, like the small earring in his ear, flickered in the moonlight.
And fueled the pace of her thoughts.
What manner of man would not be afraid of border raiders when he was but one against many? A border raider himself. The same kind of man who had let her keep her weapon—who would risk death to jump into a raging river after her.
That he had done so for the life of his brother only made her own actions and defiance less clear in her mind.
Ruark ascended the path that let away from the river, a small winding trail more suitable for goats than humans. The sound of rushing water still roared in his ears. Twice while climbing, he’d stopped to hand Rose up the slippery boulders.
The trek had been treacherous for half a mile as the crude path narrowed upward through moss-covered rocks into woods of rowan, ash, and tall pine.
Barefooted, the path was even worse. He’d noted blood on one of Rose’s feet.
But there was nothing to be done at this moment. It was the only trail out of the wash.
Neither of them spoke until they reached the woods and the noise of the river faded. Without asking her permission, he sat her on an old rotten log to rest and reached for the torn hem of her breeches.
She misunderstood his intent and caught his hand to stop him.
“Easy, Rose. You have to allow me to look. You are bleeding.” He sat her foot in his lap and followed the trail of blood with his fingers up the slim curvature of her calf.
She squirmed. “You do not need to touch me . . .”
He noticed that about her: she disliked being touched, or perhaps only his touch disturbed her, for she seemed consumed with tenderness for others.
It was not her foot that was injured, he realized.
The blood came from a jagged gash on her thigh that he could see through a tear in her breeches.
He silently swore. She had attempted to bind it with torn cloth from her shirt.
He rent one of his sleeves, then rose and knelt in a shallow stream to rinse the cloth.
He returned to her side. “Why didn’t you tell me you were injured? ”
“What would we have done? Hailed a carriage and ridden out?”
He suspected Rose was the type of person who could be bleeding from an artery and still would not open her mouth in complaint or ask for help. She intended to carry her own burden whether she be his hostage or nay. So it surprised him when she squeezed her eyes shut, clearly afraid of what he saw.
“Is it . . . horrible?”
He could see it was deep but she had done a fair job of stopping the bleeding. “I will know more when I see the injury in the light of day.”
“Bind it tightly, but not so tight you cut off the circulation to my leg.”
Though he knew quite well what he was doing, he did not mind her instruction if it gave her the illusion that she held some power over her life.
Conscious of how she looked, her eyes and hair awash in a checkered patch of moonlight, and wearing a nearly transparent shirt, more undressed than other women he’d bedded, he concentrated on applying the cloth firmly to her thigh and wrapping the makeshift bandage around the wound.
And for one moment, decency reared its symbolic head, denouncing him for a bastard.
“Between what remains of my shirt and yours, we are running out of medical supplies,” he said. “At this rate we will both be down to our breeches.”
“Then ’tis fortunate you allowed me to keep my dirk.”
The tendons stood out on his arms as he leaned forward. “Indeed.”
He peered at her, reminding himself she was cold and in pain, and then suddenly looked past her down the narrow trail.
Something, a noise, voices in the night, touched the periphery of his senses. But he heard nothing now. “What is it?” Rose asked.
He didn’t answer. His body tensed. He stood. “Remain here.”
The path hooked sharply just ahead, and he walked toward an outcrop of rocks.
Farther from the invading sound of the river, he could hear voices.
Torchlight glow speckled a hollow below.
He crouched behind the rocks and scrub. It was a group of some twenty or thirty redcoats bivouacked for the night.
Bloody Sassenach soldiers.
The flames from a central fire flickered over their faces and red coats and knee breeches. Some of the men were drunk. Others played dice. The late-evening breeze carried the sounds of their subdued laughter and voices as they sat around the fire. All, without exception, were well armed.
Rose suddenly came up behind him. “Dragoons—”
He clapped his palm over her mouth and dropped to the ground on his belly beside her, looking back down at the hollow. One of the men made a searching glance toward the rocky ledge but returned his attention to the tin plate in his hands as the bloke beside him said something that caused laughter.
Ruark pulled back slightly and peered at Rose, who glared back at him from over the rim of his hand. “A scream carries too easily,” he said softly against her ear. “If you make a sound, Rose . . .”
He meant the threat in his words. “This is a well-armed British detachment and by the looks of it they have been drinking. Trust me. I can guarantee they will not treat you nearly as kindly as I have thus far.”
She nodded in understanding, and he eased the pressure of his hand. The ferocity in her eyes dimmed only slightly as she spit dirt from her mouth.
“I do not trust you.” But her anger with him did not preclude her recognition of the danger she also faced. “What are we going to do?”
They’d followed the only trail out of the wash. Rose was physically unable to go back the way they’d just come. He studied the hollow and found a row of tents at the wood’s edge, and he smiled to himself.
“We steal a horse.”
“Are you insane?”
The wind was rising and the sound of restless trees replaced that of the river. He could always count on rain in Scotland. Tonight he wouldn’t mind. “The patrol has bivouacked for the evening,” he said.
Careful not to dislodge any stones, he edged them down the trail, helping Rose walk with one arm beneath her shoulders.
He could have slung her over his shoulder like a sack of oats and been done with it but he saved her the indignity.
Much to her dislike some moments later, he borrowed her dirk.
The thing was bloody convenient to have, and he didn’t know when he’d have use of a weapon.
He wouldn’t have allowed her to keep it otherwise.
An hour later, he had secured himself a fine black horse belonging to the officer in charge, and a pair of boots that actually fit.
He had also acquired a knapsack and a cloak, which he gave to Rose when he returned to where he had left her, gagged and tied to a thick exposed tree root.
He hadn’t trusted her not to crawl away while he hunted down a horse and food, and the moment he’d come across rope, he’d used it.
As he knelt in front of her, he warned her again of the consequences if she should cause him any more strife.
Then he lifted her onto the saddle and climbed behind her.
Only after they’d ridden a distance from the Sassenach camp did he remove the gag, which was all that had been left of his other sleeve.
“You are an ogre, Roxburghe. The French pox is too good for you!”
He laughed and gathered her closer with one arm, liking the warm feel of her between his thighs. “What do you know about the French pox?”
“I know that nothing cures it.”
With that pronouncement, he grinned. A faint clink of the bridle and her firm bottom pressed intimately between his legs, he turned the horse south. “You are a lot of trouble, Lady Roselyn.”