Chapter Five
The trees remained tightly clustered as they pressed onward.
The rain didn’t stop falling, though thankfully it hadn’t come down in a full shower yet.
The ground upon which they walked so briskly was unforgiving, or at the very least, not kind to her footwear.
And the man in front of her didn’t become any less mysterious, less fearsome, or less cranky.
She debated several times saying she’d had enough, that she might be better off heading in a different direction.
But she hadn’t said it out loud. An hour and a half later, the improbable and alarming sight of those horses flying overhead still provoked a dazed fright.
What she had said—basic questions she’d asked—had been either ignored or, once rebuffed with a curt, “Hush.”
A shiver wracked her frame. The steady rain had soaked through her denim jacket and t-shirt, pasting the cold fabric to her skin.
Her skirt, heavy with mud and water, clung to her legs, chafing with every step.
Inside her espadrilles, her feet slid forward, toes squishing in the cold muck.
She’d never felt so bewildered, so utterly lost.
Find the positive, she told herself, a technique she used with her third graders when things seemed hopeless or upsetting. She struggled here, unable to conceive of even one thing that was going right for her at the moment.
I’m alive, was all she could think.
This was countered almost immediately with the horrific certainty that she really wasn’t dreaming. She’d accepted that some time ago, but that didn’t help her make any sense of... anything.
Annoyance flared through her misery. The man ahead of her moved through the wet woods as if the mud and rain didn’t exist. He never slowed his long-legged stride, never glanced back to see if she was still there.
He simply walked on, expecting her to keep up.
He was a good ten yards ahead of her, picking his way purposefully through the trees and thick brush.
Why am I following him? She wondered, not for the first time.
Her previous answers had all boiled down to only two things: he seemed to know where he was going inside the forest, and he hadn’t yet caused her harm.
Not exactly a rousing endorsement, but with what had happened to her—which she still struggled to make sense of—she was feeling particularly vulnerable.
She wasn’t easily frightened, she knew, but then, there had been little in her life that had ever caused her to be afraid. Until now.
Anna quickened her pace, trying to close some of the distance between her and the guy with the shackles, even as she still wasn’t sure what compelled her to follow him.
She’d barely sped up before her foot landed on a patch of muddy grass and shot forward without warning.
Her other foot slid backward at the same time, her legs scissoring out from under her until she collapsed into the mud.
A strangled cry burst from her as she flung both arms out, desperately trying to regain her balance, but the rain-soaked ground offered no purchase whatsoever.
Her feet continued slipping in opposite directions until she surrendered altogether, allowing herself to collapse sideways into the mud with an undignified thump, one leg stretched awkwardly before her and the other folded beneath her.
She pulled her hand from the ground at her side, where she’d plunged it to keep herself from tipping over, and shook off the mud with the lethargy of misery.
“Ah, the hell with it,” she said, giving up.
Her shoulders sagged beneath the weight of exhaustion, and she lowered her head, finally allowing the tears she’d fought so hard to keep at bay to spill over.
“What am I doing?” she asked herself, her voice cracking.
She closed her eyes and tried to steady her breathing, tried to rein in the want to cry good and hard for all that she didn’t understand.
She then rubbed the heels of her hands over her brows, praying that when she opened her eyes, this was not happening, that she’d find herself back outside the little bookstore, Ryan looking at her with that crooked smile, asking if she’d have dinner with him.
She opened her eyes, and found a pair of large, bare feet planted firmly in the mud not two feet away.
A defeated little groan escaped her.
Her gaze traveled upward, over powerful calves streaked with drying mud, to the odd woolen pants that ended below his knees, then higher still to the long, rain-soaked shirt stretched across broad shoulders and chest, a shirt that looked as though it had once belonged to a man considerably better fed than the one standing before her now.
Finally, her eyes reached his face, lingering for just a moment upon the thick black beard and the sharp planes of his cheeks before meeting the same hard blue eyes that had regarded her with equal parts suspicion and impatience since the moment they’d met.
Once again, he reached out his hand toward her.
Anna swatted at it with frustration. She meant to knock his hand away, but her own missed entirely, passing uselessly beneath it.
“Leave me alone,” she cried. “I’ve had enough. I’m done.”
He regarded her for a long moment, his expression revealing not one ounce of sympathy.
“Ye’re nae done,” he said quietly.
She stared at him in disbelief.
“We’re nae safe yet.”
Something inside her snapped.
“Then tell me what’s going on!” she demanded, smacking her hands down into the muck at her sides.
“Who are you? Who were those horsemen? Why are you wearing handcuffs? How did I get here? I was standing outside a bookstore in York only this morning and...” she stopped and drew in a deep breath.
“Are you an escaped convict or an...?”—she couldn’t quite bring herself to say escaped lunatic.
“Aye, I’ve escaped,” he finally acknowledged. “From a transport meant for York and the gallows.”
The gallows? Holy hell! What was going on?
“What did you do?” she asked at last, forcing the question past the lump in her throat.
“I fought for Scotland.”
Anna stared at him, waiting for the rest of the explanation, but none came. She supposed she ought to feel relieved that he hadn’t confessed to murder or some equally horrific crime, but his answer only left her with twice as many questions as before.
While she stared at him, no less dumbfounded or frustrated, he asked her, “Why did ye run with me?”
She shook her head, her mouth hanging open. At length, she answered pitifully, “I have no idea, except that you seemed about as desperate as I felt at the moment.”
“Aye, and as we remain,” he said. “We’ll want to put more distance yet between us and the English.”
Her brow knit—further than it had been for the last several hours. “The English?”
A shadow of greater displeasure crossed his face. “Aye. Trust me in this, lass: they’ll be nae more kind to ye simply because ye are English as well.”
She flipped her hand over in a helpless gesture, hardly able to comprehend why he seemed as uninformed, as confused as she was. “I’m not English—not British, I mean. I’m from America.”
He narrowed his eyes slightly. “I ken nae what that means,” he admitted at last. “But it changes naught. A bonny lass wandering alone through these woods would be an invitation to every manner of knavery.”
How could he not know what she meant by saying she was American! And... knavery? Again, his old-fashioned speech made her gape.
“Ye will remain, weeping in the mud?” he asked next. “Or will ye choose to rise?”
Anna’s eyes widened and her brows shot up into her forehead, his manipulation hardly being subtle.
That was the sort of thing a teacher might say to a child determined to sulk on the playground, except he said it with no attempt to sound less than patronizing—weeping in the mud!
But then, she had to acknowledge the effectiveness of it, placing her pride on one side of the scale and her self-pity on the other, leaving her to decide which she might choose.
She grumbled under her breath as she struggled to gather both legs beneath her. The instant she thought she’d found her balance, one foot slid again on the rain-slick ground, but before she could topple a second time, a large hand closed firmly around her upper arm.
Effortlessly, he pulled her upright.
Anna steadied herself, instinctively brushing at her skirt to make sure it settled properly, and wasn’t hung up around her thighs. She sighed in resignation and looked up.
While he still held her arm, she was struck again by the contrast of him—the gauntness beneath the imposing frame, the startling intensity in his blue eyes.
Up close, she could see a thin white scar that disappeared into his beard and another that left the bridge of his nose slightly crooked.
He was all hard lines and untamed energy.
“Yer name?” he requested after what seemed a very long and silent moment between them.
“Anastasia,” she answered evenly, as if her brain had somehow recalled how feebly she’d introduced herself to Ryan. “Anna for short.”
“Bram MacCailin,” he returned, “Mormaer of Craig na Coille, chief of the MacCailins, and son of Cailin mac Domhnaill.”
Anna frowned in honest confusion. She wasn’t certain what puzzled her more: that he’d listed what sounded like half a dozen titles after his name, or that he’d done so with such complete seriousness, as though any of it was supposed to mean something to her—as though that’s how people introduced themselves.
“So...” she said after a moment, “Bram?”
He inclined his head.
Yeah, she wasn’t going to remember anything else he’d said.
***
The rain had ceased, leaving only the steady drip of water from the canopy overhead. Bram paused, listening. Nothing but the whisper of the woods. Through a break in the trees, he glimpsed the faint blue of distant hills.