Chapter Nine #2
In truth, his displeasure barely eased before he stepped away to secure both horses to the trunk of a slender sapling. Satisfied they wouldn’t wander, he crossed to the stream, already pulling the blood-soaked shirt over his head.
Anna followed, but slowed when he removed his shirt.
She’d known he was large, more than half a foot taller than her, with broad, squared shoulders.
After months of captivity, she’d expected him to be gaunt beneath his tunic, yet he wasn’t.
There wasn’t a spare ounce of flesh on the man, but neither was he wasting away.
His back was wide and powerfully built, tapering to a lean waist, the muscles beneath his pale skin shifting easily as he crouched beside the water.
Anna stepped closer, and whatever appreciation she might have felt was quickly overshadowed by the full measure of his suffering.
His back was a canvas of violence. Some scars were old and puckered, silvered with age, while others were fresh—long, thin welts layered over a constellation of bruises in shades of purple, blue, and green.
A new horror settled in her stomach. She couldn’t reconcile the agony written upon his skin with the man’s stoic silence. How was he even standing?
But as her gaze moved over him again, concern did not entirely erase her awareness of the body beneath those injuries.
His shoulders were enormous from this close, his arms thick with muscle.
Even battered and exhausted, Bram was an extraordinarily impressive man, and the realization brought an entirely different sensation curling low in her stomach.
Anna looked away abruptly, heat rushing into her cheeks, appalled with herself.
The man was covered in evidence of having been beaten and tortured, had just killed people, while she had apparently been ripped out of her own century, and somehow her body had decided this was an appropriate moment to notice that Bram MacCailin was spectacularly built.
She risked another glance.
It wasn’t only that he was handsome, or even the undeniable physicality of him.
There was something raw and elemental about Bram that she had no better words for.
Nothing about him was polished or modern.
The powerful body, the scars, the controlled economy of every movement all belonged to a life of brutal necessity she couldn’t begin to imagine.
He was unlike anyone she had ever known, and the sheer, unvarnished reality of him was utterly compelling.
He rose then and turned toward her, and while Anna felt her face grow embarrassingly warm, she didn’t look away.
His chest was as powerfully sculpted as his back, broad and hard with muscle, a scattering of dark hair narrowing toward his stomach.
Her gaze might have lingered there if not for the ugly wound marring his side, and the last of her appreciation vanished beneath renewed concern.
“Oh...” she whispered.
The sword had carved an angry slash across the top of his shoulder, deeper near the front and tapering as it curved toward his back. Blood still welled sluggishly from the deepest part, though not with the alarming flow Anna imagined must have come when he’d first been struck.
She recalled something just then. “I might...” she began uncertainly and dropped to her knees, rifling through her purse. “I might have something.”
She’d owned the little purse-sized kit for years and had never once needed it, but practicality had compelled her to pack it. Band-Aids for blisters, ibuprofen for a headache... She’d tried to prepare for the small troubles of travel, never imagining a crisis of this magnitude.
She unzipped the little red pouch and examined its meager contents: Band-Aids, alcohol wipes, a tiny tube of antibiotic ointment, Ibuprofen and, for some inexplicable reason, a pair of plastic tweezers.
“What have ye there?” Bram asked, suspicion immediately entering his voice.
“A first-aid kit.” She stood and approached him, then looked from the handful of Band-Aids to the six-inch gash across his shoulder. “Though apparently one intended for much smaller injuries.”
“What will ye do with it?”
“Clean the cut, for one thing, and hopefully keep it from getting infected. And these might hold at least the deepest part closed.” She showed him the paper-wrapped bandages, then caught his dubious expression and sighed, wondering how she might explain to a fourteenth century man tools from a modern world. She had no idea.
“Do you trust me?” she asked instead.
“Nae,” he answered without hesitation. “Nae particularly.”
“Oh.” She was more dejected by the answer than seemed reasonable, a surprising sting of disappointment. “That’s a shame,” she said, her voice soft, fairly certain that she trusted him quite a bit.
He regarded her for another long moment without speaking, and Anna found herself standing unusually still beneath the weight of his gaze.
They had ridden pressed together for nearly an hour, yet somehow this felt infinitely more intimate.
Perhaps because there was nothing between them now but a few inches of air, or because he was shirtless and the sight of his powerful chest, matted with dark whorls of hair, was as distracting as his naked back had been.
She forced her gaze upward, tilting her head to meet his eyes.
This close, she noticed the impossibly dark lashes surrounding eyes nearly as black.
A tiny scar cut through one eyebrow, and a faint line was permanently etched between his brows, as though he’d spent most of his life angry, unhappy, or wearing his war face.
She cleared her throat. “Well, anyway, I have these things. They won’t be enough, but they should help clean it and keep it from getting infected. And these,” she said, wriggling the Band-Aids again, “might hold the skin together. It’s better than leaving it open.”
He seemed to examine her closely for another long moment before he nodded.
Anna tore open an alcohol wipe and stepped nearer.
She held the tiny square up for his inspection before reaching for him.
Her fingers settled lightly above his elbow, but as she brought the cloth toward the wound, she saw that her hand was trembling.
Damn it. She drew a breath and tried again, but the trembling only worsened, which in turn made her lip quiver.
Before she could pull her hand away, Bram caught it gently in his.
“Anastasia.”
She stared at their joined hands, holding herself very still, not even blinking.
“They would have done us harm.”
Her throat tightened. She nodded jerkily. Her lip trembled embarrassingly, and she pressed it firmly between her teeth.
His thumb moved once across the back of her hand, though she didn’t know if it was deliberate.
“Ye dinna need to do this—”
“Yes, I do. I can do it.” She drew an unsteady breath. “I need to do something.”
Bram watched her for another moment before slowly releasing her hand.
Anna concentrated upon the little square of cloth between her fingers rather than the blood upon his skin, and when her hand steadied sufficiently, she touched it to the deepest part of the wound.
Bram jerked away. “God’s wounds, lass!”
Anna startled and nearly dropped the cloth. “Sorry! I should have warned you. It stings, but it will clean the wound.”
“?Tis as though ye poured fire upon it.”
Ordinarily she might have laughed at the affront in his voice. Today she only winced. “I’m sorry. I really should have warned you.”
His lips compressed, but after a moment he inclined his head for her to continue.
She traced the pale, uneven lines of older scars near the new wound.
She wondered if this fresh gash would someday heal into just another bloodless mark on his skin, a footnote in a life defined by violence.
The thought left a hollow ache in her chest—a sadness for the man who seemed to have never known a world without it.
When the cut was as clean as she could make it, she opened the antibiotic ointment and squeezed some onto one finger. Bram eyed the substance with immediate distrust.
“What manner of medicine is that?”
Anna glanced at the little tube. “Antibiotic ointment. It helps prevent infection.”
“What is in it?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
One dark brow rose.
“I know what it does,” she defended, “not how to make it.”
Bram’s expression remained skeptical, but he gave a curt nod, permitting her to spread the ointment carefully over the cut.
Afterward, Anna wiped her finger against the inside of her jacket sleeve and opened the Band-Aids.
There were only six, and after considering the length of the wound, she decided to use three across its deepest portion and save the remainder.
“All right,” she said then, opening up all three bandages.
“These should hold the skin together, like stitches. But you must keep them on and try not to get them wet, or the adhesive will fail.” Carefully, she placed the first strip across the widest section of the wound.
She added a second right beside it, and then a third, overlapping them slightly until the deepest portion was covered.
“I’m sorry this is all I have,” she said, gesturing with the tiny bandages. “It’s not enough for... for this.”