Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
The first thing Elspeth understood, once the cathedral had vanished behind them, was that a horse could be a most indecent creature.
It had no regard for modesty, shock, injury, or newly-made wives.
It ran, and with every furious stride, Elspeth was thrown back against Colin MacKenzie as if the beast meant to prove that escape required a closeness no priest had warned her of.
His arm was locked about her waist with such absolute possession that her breath seemed to belong less to her lungs than to the strength holding her upright.
The other hand kept the reins gathered tight.
His chest was a hard wall behind her shoulders, while his thighs caged hers against the saddle.
The heat of him came through silk, linen, wool, and fear with a wicked persistence that no amount of outrage could quite banish.
Elspeth had never been so near a man. She had been led through dances and stood in crowded halls where gentlemen bowed and smiled and spoke with careful nothingness.
But this was not a dance. There was no music, no mother watching, no safe space between one body and another.
There was only the thunder of hooves, the rough road jolting beneath them, and Colin MacKenzie’s breath at her ear.
“Slow down,” she gasped, though she did not know whether she wished him to slow the horse or the terrible beating of her own heart.
He did neither.
“Hold still.”
“I should be delighted tae obey,” she snapped, clutching at the saddle, “had ye provided me with a chair instead of a war-beast.”
His arm tightened as the horse leapt a rut in the road. Elspeth’s back struck his chest, and a gasp escaped her. She felt, rather than heard, his breath catch.
“Are ye hurt?” she heard him ask.
The question should not have softened anything in her.
It was hardly tenderness to ask whether one had broken the woman one had just bought, married, kissed, and stolen from a cathedral under attack.
Yet there it was, a tender note beneath his command, as if concern had slipped out before he could imprison it.
“I am furious,” she snarled. “It is a condition often mistaken for injury by men who have caused it.”
“Then ye are well enough tae argue.”
“I was born well enough tae argue.”
A sound moved in his chest again. It might have been laughter, had he been the sort of man permitted such ordinary habits.
Elspeth hated that she noticed it. She hated still more that the sound warmed the place where his chest pressed against her back.
Her body seemed determined to collect evidence against her sense: the scrape of his jaw near her temple when he glanced behind them, the leather-and-smoke scent of him, the firm flex of his arm when the horse veered and he brought it back.
She fixed her gaze on the road ahead and tried to think of murder.
“Who were they?” she demanded.
“I dinnae ken.”
A gust of wind snatched at her loosened hair and flung it across his mouth. He turned his face, and she felt the movement against the side of her head. The intimacy of it was so sudden, so improper, that her next breath came too shallow.
“Ye expect me tae believe,” she continued because anger was safer than silence, “that men in black burst intae a cathedral on the hour of yer wedding, and ye have nae notion who sent them?”
“I dinnae ken fer certain.”
“Ah. A husband of admirable precision. Bought by the pound and cautious by the ounce.”
“Careful, wife.”
The word struck harder than the wind.
Wife.
It was absurd. It was monstrous. It had been spoken over her while blood rang outside church doors and her mother stood white-faced beneath her father’s hand. Yet now, it lived between them, carried by the rhythm of a horse galloping away from every life she had known.
“I am nae yer wife in any way that matters,” she corrected.
His hand shifted at her waist, and the small adjustment sent a dangerous awareness through her middle. “The Church disagrees.”
“The Church also stood by while I was sold. I find its judgment presently lacking.”
“The Crown witnessed it.”
“Then the Crown may ride in front of ye and be crushed against yer chest for an hour.”
This time his laugh was brief, unwilling, and gone almost as soon as it had come.
It startled her more than his coldness. Laughter belonged to men with firesides, with brothers, with dogs sleeping at their boots, not to this severe creature who had looked upon a priest and made him finish a marriage while swords cried out beyond the nave.
Elspeth wished she had not made him laugh. She also wished she had not liked the sound.
The town thinned behind them. Stone gave way to damp fields, low walls, wet grass shining beneath the unsettled June sky.
The air grew cleaner and wilder. St Andrews became a pale memory swallowed by road and distance.
Still Colin did not slow. His body moved with the horse as if man and beast shared one intention, and Elspeth, trapped between them, began to feel each movement not merely as motion but as knowledge.
When the horse surged uphill, she was pressed back. When it descended, his arm braced her. When it turned, his thigh held her steady. Her veil had torn, one pin in her hair scraped her scalp and beneath all this discomfort stirred something far more alarming than fear.
Awareness.
Her body had become traitorous in its attention. It knew where he touched her. It knew when his breath warmed her ear. It knew that his hand, though firm, did not wander.
“Ye said ye arenae certain,” she spoke again, feeling safer in noise than in the silence of her own thoughts. “Then tell me who ye suspect.”
For a moment she thought he would refuse. The road stretched ahead, silvered by recent rain. The wind pressed her torn veil against her cheek, and behind her Colin’s heart beat steady and hard, a rhythm she had no right to feel and no means of escaping.
“Robert Munro,” he said at last.
The name meant little to her, though the way he spoke it gave it weight enough.
“Who is Robert Munro?”
“An old enemy.”
“Yers?”
“Mine. Me family’s. Me faither’s before me.” His hand flexed once at the reins. “Munro’s hatred is old. The attack fits him.”
“Old hatred,” she repeated. “How very noble. Men dae adore keeping hatred alive and calling it inheritance.”
He made no answer. That troubled her more than any retort.
She had wanted another sharp exchange, something against which she could set her anger and feel justified.
Instead, he was silent, and in that silence she heard the horse’s breathing, the slap of hooves through shallow mud, the distant sea fading behind them, and the quick, treacherous pulse beneath her own skin.
A drop of rain struck her cheek. Then another. Colin glanced up, then urged the horse onward with fresh urgency.
Elspeth stiffened. “Must we go faster?”
“We need distance before the weather turns.”
“From St Andrews? From Munro? From me faither? Or from yer conscience?”
That earned no laugh.
His mouth was close to her ear when he spoke. “From men who may still be hunting us.”
The words should have chilled her. They did. Yet they were spoken so near, in a voice roughened by wind and command, that a shiver moved through her which was not entirely fear.
Another mile passed. Time lost its civilized shape on the open road. Elspeth’s anger did not fade, but it grew tired at the edges. Her arms ached from holding herself rigid, and the place where his arm crossed her waist seemed branded by pressure and heat.
“We cannae stay on the open road,” he suddenly spoke. “Nae much longer.”
“Where are ye taking me?”
“Somewhere they willnae look first.”
The trees drew nearer. Rain jeweled the horse’s mane. Elspeth’s hands were cold now, but the rest of her remained shamefully aware of the man behind her. She was angry, frightened, humiliated, and unwillingly alive to every inch of contact between them.
She had been married by force, carried from danger, and set upon a road that seemed to lead nowhere she had chosen.
Yet as the horse plunged beneath the shadow of the trees and Colin bent over her to shield her from a low branch, Elspeth had the dreadful conviction that the most dangerous thing pursuing her was not Robert Munro, nor armed men, nor even the father who had sold her.
It was the treason of her own body, learning the shape of her husband before her heart had decided whether to hate him.