Chapter Eight #2
He'd nodded, his jaw tight. The westward path had been his preference too, but safety demanded they first put distance between themselves and their pursuers.
Last night, when Elena had mentioned her family's worry, he'd thought of his own mother—how her hands had surely twisted in her skirts, how she likely paced the floor with fright. Yet he found comfort knowing his father would have steadied her before mounting his own search, assuring her that all would be well, as he’d done many times before.
No opportunity to hunt presented itself and thus, Jacob knew some relief when they came upon a settlement tucked inside a narrow glen.
They first saw the village as a scatter of roofs beyond the rise, huddled low against the land as though it had learned to make itself small.
Smoke rose from two chimneys, thin and pale, carried sideways by the wind rather than straight up.
The fields surrounding it were narrow and carefully kept, stone walls mended with care, the earth worked close to the cottages and not much farther.
Jacob slowed the mare, not enough to stop outright, just enough to change the rhythm of their approach to show they posed no threat. He felt Elena shift behind him, felt the faint hopeful lift in her posture.
The road narrowed as it dipped toward the first cottages. No dogs barked and no voices carried. And yet, somehow the stillness seemed more deliberate than peaceful.
A woman stood near the outermost dwelling, young but worn in the way hardship taught quickly.
She paused with a length of linen in her hands, half-hung on a low line strung between posts.
A child stood close at her side, no more than four or five, one small hand fisted in his mother’s skirt, the other clutching a wooden cup.
Unmoving, the young woman with the flat expression stared at them from more than fifty feet away. Her gaze found Jacob first, seeming to take note of his seat and the sword at his side. Then her eyes slid to Elena, and her expression did not change.
Slowly, her hand slid away from the linen and she glanced around quickly, as if looking to see if others were about, if anyone saw what she did.
She did not wave or call out, but shook her head once, quite deliberately.
Jacob brought the horse to a complete stop.
The woman’s mouth pressed thin, her eyes steady and intent, as she lifted her chin and pointed, not toward them, but inward, toward the heart of the village.
Jacob followed the line of her gesture.
Near the modest cottage at the center of the village, a pole had been driven into the ground, the earth still raw at the base. From it hung a strip of cloth—faded, frayed at the edges, but unmistakable. The English lion, painted red, dulled by weather but no less clear for it.
The woman shook her head again, more urgently this time. Her free hand closed around the child’s shoulder, drawing him closer. She stepped backward, one pace and then another, guiding the child toward the doorway behind her without turning her back on Jacob and Elena.
A bit desperately, before she disappeared, Jacob made a small, unmistakable gesture—two fingers curved, miming the act of spooning food to his mouth, showing hunger and need.
The woman hesitated, looking briefly annoyed, before she raised a single finger.
Wait.
She ushered the child inside and shut the door.
Jacob scanned the village again. A shutter shifted somewhere farther in. A shape moved behind a wall and vanished. The English standard stirred faintly on its pole, a dull flash of red against gray sky.
Time stretched, long enough that he began to wonder about the likelihood of her simply not returning at all, and Jacob began to feel particularly conspicuous out in the open as they were.
Then the door opened and the woman stepped outside alone.
She moved quickly, half-running, as though each moment spent outside her threshold was a risk she meant to shorten.
She did not come all the way toward them, stopping instead at the edge of her small croft.
She crouched, set something down, and straightened at once, not looking at them once.
She turned back immediately, skirts gathered in her hands, pace brisk and determined.
In less than a minute, she was inside again, the door shut firmly behind her.
Jacob nudged the mare forward just enough to reach the jute sack she’d left.
He dismounted, grabbed the pouch and returned directly to Elena and the horse, handing her the package before he climbed into the saddle again.
Without a word, he turned the destrier and urged her into a swift trot to carry them back into the trees.
Once safely inside the trees, when he slowed the horse to walk, Elena pulled one hand from around his waist and unwrapped the offering.
“Oh,” she breathed, with a grateful sigh of breath. “A heel of bread, a wedge of cheese, and a handful of dried roots. Not much, but oh, how lovely,” she mused. “Bless her.” Her hand appeared in front of him. “Here,” she said, presenting what he supposed was half the bread.
He took the chunk and made quick work of it. Sadly, it did little to fill the voids in his gut.
They ate as they rode, the destrier picking her way carefully through the forest as it thickened.
Elena’s hand appeared again, with cheese this time, and then she coughed and laughed behind him. “Sweet Jesus, that cheese is awful.”
Jacob grinned, having thought the same thing, the cheese having nearly cemented itself to his teeth.
“Dinna please the tongue, but satisfies the gullet,” he replied, voice thick with dry humor.
He coughed and held out his hand for more, wincing as he did, reminded of the slash to his arm, which stung enough still that he feared it might be infected.
“My God, but that’s a crime against nature,” Elena determined, still speaking of the cheese, happily offering more to him from the side.
“The bread, at least, was honest,” he allowed.
“We should have eaten that last,” she suggested.
She shared the roots as well, dried neep—rough-cut pieces of dried turnip, chalky white and brittle, less pleasant than parsnip roots would have been but filling all the same.
“We should have saved the cheese,” Elena said after a bit. “We could have taken down birds in flight with that.”
Jacob grinned, still trying to dislodge cheese from his teeth. Unpleasant cheese aside, he did feel better.
No more words passed between them for a time, save the quiet sound of their chewing and the occasional creak of leather. Trees crowded closer; the sun climbed, but the growing density of the branches cast a greenish light over the forest floor.
At midday, they passed a tumbled wall, half-swallowed by moss and fern, and crossed a narrow and shallow burn that wound haphazardly through the forest. They made several quick stops, as they had previously, to see to private business and drink from the water before refilling Jacob’s skin.
By the time the sun dipped behind the hills, the forest had closed around them again, the path narrowing until it felt less like a trail and more like a suggestion. The air cooled quickly once the light thinned, gray bands slipping between the trees as evening claimed its ground.
Jacob slowed the mare and drew her off the trail onto a low rise ringed with brush and a fallen pine, the trunk half-rotted and silvered with age. It was far enough from the path to escape notice, but he circled the area anyway, mapping the ground in his mind before he trusted it.
“This will do,” he said, easing the mare to a halt at the rise.
Elena slid from the saddle before he could dismount to help her. The movement was careful but not graceful; her knees wobbled as her boots hit the ground, and she steadied herself with a hand against the steed’s coarse coat.
Jacob resisted the instinct to move to her, to offer a steadying hand. Instead, he turned his attention outward, scanning the trees, listening past the ordinary sounds of the forest. Birds settled and wind moved through leaves, but nothing else.
“Same as before,” he advised. “We should sleep fast and move before dawn.”
She nodded, taking a moment to stretch her arms over her head. “I’m nae sure how I can be so exhausted, having done naught but sit and ride all day.”
Jacob knew she didn’t expect an answer. Riding asked more of a body than it appeared to, and she was learning that lesson quickly enough.
He tied up the reins and crouched to brush aside a few scattered branches from where they might sit and breathed in a hissed breath as pain flared hot and suddenly up his arm.
Elena turned immediately. “What?”
He shook his head, already schooling his expression. “It’s naught. Just stiff.”
“It isn’t,” she said, crossing the small space between them without hesitation. “I heard that. Is it your arm?” Her gaze dropped there at once. “I wanted to look at it anyway—to be sure it’s nae infected.”
Pride rose first, instinctive and unhelpful, the old reflex to keep weakness hidden, but he tamped it down.
He had harbored the same concern since morning, having the heat beneath the skin, the tightness that went beyond soreness.
Jacob understood what trouble an ignored wound could cause on the road.
Better to see to it now than pay for it later.
He nodded once, conceding the point.
Elena was at his side as he rose to his full height.
She reached for his sleeve, but then pulled back, possibly realizing the sleeve could not be shoved up high enough, that the tunic would have to come off. “Let me see,” she demanded with quiet authority.
Grunting, Jacob doffed his tunic again, and Elena stepped closer at once, her fingers careful but sure as she loosened the linen and unwound it.
Jacob looked down as well and winced inwardly.
The skin beneath was reddened and warm, irritated by the pressure of the wrap, the grime of the day, and what little had been done to help it in the first place.
Elena’s frown did not ease. “Oh, Jacob, that dinna look guid.” She pressed the tip of one finger close to the open wound but not directly on it.
“It’s hot,” she announced unnecessarily.
“But what can we do?” she asked, raising her concerned gaze to him.
“Oh, shite,” she said, having her first good look at him after having spent the day behind him in the saddle.
“Jacob, your face is all flushed.” She lifted her hand and pressed her palm lightly to his forehead.
The coolness startled him.
Her fingers lingered, brushing back a loose lock of hair with an absentminded care, her gaze following that small action.
“Ye may be feverish,” she murmured.
The wound, any possible fever, the forest itself and the concern of pursuit—all receded from Jacob's awareness as Elena filled his vision.
He watched her as she stared back at him, brows crinkled with honest concern, and a wee bit of dawning awareness.
He found himself acutely aware of the space between their bodies, which had shrunk to almost nothing; aware, too, of the invisible line he ought not cross.
He stood stock-still, his mind and body narrowed to this small, magnificent circle where her hand touched his face, and she seemed only to wait.
She was close enough now that he could see the individual flecks of emerald in her green eyes, the faint scar at her right brow, the freckle high on her cheekbone that vanished into her hair when she smiled.
The forest dimmed around them, the last light gilding her features—weary, unguarded, expectant.
His gaze dropped to her mouth. Her lips were parted, just enough to betray the quickening of her breath, their color deepened by the twilight into something rich and tempting.
They looked soft, as if they would yield gorgeously under his.
The sight of them struck him with a sharp, physical pull, an invitation he had no right to accept and suddenly found difficult to refuse.
Treacherously, he imagined the feel of them beneath his own, the way they might warm and soften at his touch.
The thought tightened low and immediate, his body answering before his mind could restore reason.
It would take so little. A single step. The smallest tilt of his head.
Before he was aware of any conscious decision, he lowered his head.
His fingers brushed her waist, an instinctive touch meant to draw her in, but the simple action changed everything, leaving no doubt about his intention.
Elena’s hand drifted downward from his brow, along his cheek.
Her breath caught, barely audible, and her eyes were locked on his, her long lashes fanning downward.
He leaned closer, close enough to feel the warmth of her exhale against his lips.
And then clarity struck.
Liam MacTavish would have his head.
Jesu.
He had no right.
Deliberately, he pulled his hand back from her waist and lifted his head. Her hand slid further away. The air between them cooled immediately.
“We should sleep,” he said, his voice thick, but far more normal than he would have thought possible.
She stepped back at once, nodding tightly. He pretended that he had not glimpsed her stricken look before she turned away. Jacob exhaled slowly, his brows slanting downward.
Bluidy hell.
Wanting her—nearly acting on it—was an indulgence he could not afford. Not with her future bound elsewhere. Not with the image of her father hovering so annoyingly close.