Chapter 10
NOT ONE OF THEM
Oliver seethed. His teeth clenched together, every word of Sorcha’s landing like an arrow into its mark. She said nothing he hadn’t heard a hundred times before, but coming from her mouth wounded him in a fresh way.
“Coward?” he ground out. “You think me a coward?”
There must have been something in the cold fury with which he spoke that silenced her. Something almost like fear passed over her face as he leaned his face down, leveling his gaze with hers.
Good. He thought. Let her see me for what I truly am.
“What else am I supposed to think, my lord?”
Her words dripped with such insincerity, snapping the rest of his resolve.
“In all my years,” he began furiously, “I have never met someone so unabashedly arrogant yet so incomprehensibly wrong. You stand there and make assumptions, as if you could possibly know me, know my character after a scant few hours together spent in silence. You largely overestimate your own intelligence if you think that your interpretations of a few of my choices gives you the full scale of my character. How very presumptuous you are.”
She chaffed at his admonishments, clearly irritated by his tone as much as his words. But Oliver didn’t give her the second to respond. He kept going, ranting at her for the things that had long since been brewing within him.
“Ye have seen my mother,” he told her, letting his accent slip as his rage continued to build.
“Ye already ken my greatest secret. I am half a Scotsman and half English. The result of a man falling for a woman he had no business loving. I am welcomed by neither my father’s people nor my mother’s.
The English mistrust the Scottish blood I carry.
And the Scots can only see the English title and arms I wear.
Do ye ken what that leaves me with? Nothing and no one save for my mother. ”
“I did nae ken that—”
“Of course ye didn’t,” he cut off, refusing to accept the pity she was getting ready to offer.
“Because ye are entirely too prideful to ask. It is appalling that I am so hated, so mistrusted by both sides when I have only ever been a man of my word. I have never betrayed or raided or stolen or harmed any of them. Do ye truly think the English and the Scots can say the same?”
Her silence served as answer enough for him.
“My father’s own people, other members of the peerage, viewed him as a wee more than a Scottish sympathizer, a rebel.
They called him a traitor and ousted him from their ranks.
All because he loved the daughter of a Laird.
When he went to try to smooth the waters, his efforts were repaid with a knife in his back.
And I dinnae mean that in a metaphorical sense.
I mean they skewered him on his own sword and then closed ranks, concealing the blackguard responsible for his murder. ”
“Why?” she breathed in horror.
Oliver shrugged with an ease he did not feel. His chest was tight, hot with fury.
“Some of the more brutal lords were trying to impose laws on the Scots that were harsh by even the most generous of standards. In reality, they were downright brutal. My father wouldn’t stand for it.
He was quite loud with his objections. They did not take a liking to him and his stance.
It was simpler that they remove him entirely as an obstacle than anything else. ”
“So they killed him?”
“Aye.” He stared at her hard. “I was not yet twenty. But my youth did not make me naive. I kent that if my father’s so-called ‘friends’ had no qualms about slaying him, they would come after me next.
I turned to the Frasers, my mother’s family, hoping to find an ally with them.
This is where my youthful wisdom ran dry. ”
His tone had taken on a sardonic edge, though no less lined with fury.
“They took one look at me and decided I was their enemy. All they could see was the English crest on my saddle and that was enough for them to wage war upon me. I did everything right,” he whispered, his breath hot on her flushed skin.
“I went alone, left my sword in its sheath. I even waved a white flag hoping that I would at least be granted an audience with the Laird. Little good that did me.”
“He would nae speak to ye?” She breathed, clearly astonished by the open hostility he had been met with.
“Oh, he spoke to me all right. Though his words were nothing but insults and commands that his men attack in full force. I was not allowed to finish a single sentence before the arrows started flying.”
“What did ye do?”
“I fought. At least until I came to my senses and realized that I would never be able to make an ally out of the Frasers. And then I turned my back and ran.”
“So they let ye go then,” she sighed in relief.
“Nae before taking a piece of me.”
Her slight brows furrowed, creating a sweet kind of line between her eyes.
One that he would have savored if not for the heaviness of the topic.
Emotions warred within with a ferocity that he could not quell.
Standing in such close proximity, watching her eyes shift and change as he hurled his story at her unnerved him.
He did the only thing he could think to give himself room to breathe.
Taking half a step away from Sorcha, Oliver turned and shed his coat.
He flung it across the stable door, ignoring the dirt that was sure to stain the dark navy of the fabric.
Moving before he could doubt himself, before she could anticipate what he would do next, Oliver reached for the hem of his shirt and yanked the linen off his back.
Her gasp told him that even in the shadows of the lantern lit stables, his scars were still visible.
It was a mercy, he thought, that he could not see her face.
He didn’t want to see the way her eyes were sure to drift along his back, from the top of his shoulder to where the wound had wrapped around his hip.
Despite his mother’s best efforts, the slash had been jagged, made worse by the frantic race home he had made with his back split nearly in half.
It was not a neat scar, not the kind that made young maidens swoon in open admiration of some perceived heroism.
This was the kind of scar that made you question how a person could be so hated, how humanity could be so cruel to its own kind.
With his shirt balled in his fists, he counted his heartbeats, willing the traitorous organ to steady itself.
He had nearly accomplished the feat when her frigid fingertips grazed the now healed skin of his back, sending a chill down his neck.
Her touch cooled something in him. She moved gently, as if she was nervous the scar still ached.
The only thing to thwart her path down his back were the stark white bandages his mother had wrapped him in only a few hours before.
When she reached the lowest part of the wound, where the pink tinged flesh wrapped around his hip, mirroring the way the Fraser guard had pulled his sword through Oliver, he sucked in a breath and stepped away.
Neither of them said anything for a long moment. He supposed he had stunned her into silence. Curiosity had him turning back to face her, angrily shoving his arms back into the sleeves of his shirt. It wasn’t until he had tugged the fabric back into place that he spoke.
“I have lived torn in half since that day,” he confessed.
“I am forced to balance my responsibilities as an English gentleman without forgetting my Scottish heritage. All the while, neither lineage will have me. It is all I can do to ensure that my tenants, the only people in the world who have any modicum of loyalty to me, survive winter after cold winter. They depend on me, ye ken. They trust that my efforts will help see them through. And I must do so with nay allies, nay one to turn to should I need a hand.”
He stepped towards her again, closing the distance between them.
“So, I do hope you will forgive me if in a moment of weakness, I quite forgot myself. I am wholly unaccustomed to seeing a woman beaten for sport, and could not stand to think of what a man like the Baron would do to you. Perhaps that makes me a coward,” he murmured, putting a hand on the wall above her head, effectively trapping her beneath him.
“But my conscience would allow me no other choice.”
Sorcha couldn’t remember the last time a man had been able to steal her breath and muddy her thoughts so effectively. Quite simply, she was stunned.
His impressive figure, muscles taut and honed from a lifetime of work on his lands, would have been enough to sway any girl.
That was nothing to say of his arresting golden eyes or the way his long light brown curled locks kept falling into them, a line of darkness over his sunkissed skin.
She had been entirely unable to take her eyes off him.
And when he had pulled away from her only to show him the most vulnerable parts of himself, she couldn’t help but touch his scars.
She supposed his tale was told in an effort to frighten her away, to make her second guess baiting him.
Any man who had survived the wounds he had, with no help to boot, was a formidable opponent.
It was clear he had loathed her pity, and so she had resigned not to give it.
But she couldn’t stop the seed of empathy from blooming in her chest. She knew well what it meant to be entirely alone in the world.
Just as she knew what it felt like to be the only person in the room governed by a different moral compass.
They breathed as one while she sorted through her thoughts.
His confession made her second guess everything she had assumed about the Marquess.
She had bristled at his accusations of ignorance and naivety, but he had been right.
One look at him, and she had been utterly convinced he was a different kind of man altogether.
She had no idea what to do with the version he had just revealed himself to be.
“It is in my nature to protect those who have no one else to do so,” he told her, voice low and rough. “I have done so from the moment I inherited my father’s title, and I will continue to do so until the title is passed onto the next in line.”
There was something in knowing that he had counted her amongst those in need of his aid that moved her.
From any other man, it would have irritated her.
She was a skilled fighter, capable of besting any man, after all.
But she knew Lord Blackwood’s protection came not from underestimating her abilities, but rather a desire to protect her from feelings of isolation.
It had been a long while since she had ever been counted amongst any group of people, save for Aila and Taryn.
To find herself in ranks with the Marquess’ valued and most protected warmed something in her chest she had been unaware was cold.
Much like her thoughts, her eyes were unable to remain in a single place.
They darted all over his face, searching for any sign of deceit or trickery.
Finding none, as she knew she would, her gaze finally landed on his mouth, full and inviting.
It was there she lingered and in a mere matter of seconds, the air between them fizzled with something much different than the tension that had been there before.
He must have sensed the change as well, cataloging where her eyes had been lodged. A thin trickle of sweat ran down her back, despite the chill in the air. She was consumed with anticipation, not unlike the feeling she got moments before a battle.
As he stepped closer still, his thighs brushing against hers, Sorcha consoled herself that any woman might have fallen prey to his trap. He had left his shirt devilishly undone, leaving his tanned and taut skin on proud display.
“Oliver,” he whispered, his breath on her lips.
“What?”
Her hands went to his chest; whether to pull him in or push him away, she couldn’t tell. Her thoughts were too jumbled a mess to decide.
“Ye must call me Oliver.”
Even through the haze he had so cleverly constructed, Sorcha could still see the offer for what it was—a truce, an offering of friendship and perhaps something more.
“All right,” she breathed. “Oliver.”
His name felt right on her lips, just as she was sure his mouth would too. Had it not been for the warmth that spread across her fingertips. It was sticky and wet and so utterly out of place that Sorcha jerked back with a start.
Oliver’s laden eyes popped open at the sudden distance she had put between them.
“Forgive me,” he gritted out, his voice gravely and harsh. “I seem to have forgotten myself.”
He moved to pull away from her entirely, no doubt to turn on his heels and stalk out of the stables, leaving her in his wake. But Sorcha wasn’t going to let him.
“Nay,” she said, clearing her own thick throat. “It is nae that.”
She stretched her fingers towards him, grasping the unbuttoned collar of his shirt, giving him pause. He said nothing as he lifted a brow at her.
“Ye are bleeding,” she said by way of explanation.
Holding her red stained fingertips up, she showed him the proof of her statement. Her eyes drifted down to his chest, where the white bandage was now smeared with blood.
“Yer mother worked so hard on that too,” Sorcha chastised as lightly as she could manage. “I watched her spend such time making those stitches neat and tidy so they would nae scar. And here ye are, traipsing about in the cold, undoing all that hard work.”
He offered her a sheepish smile and a gentle shrug.
“I had to stop you from leaving,” he said softly, his words that of a perfect English gentleman.
“Well if backing me into a wall and shouting yer life’s troubles did nae do the job, this certainly has. Come on, Oliver,” she instructed, offering a smile of her own. “Let’s go find yer mother and get ye cleaned up again.”
The shift between them, the one prompted by the closeness of their bodies and the stories they had confided in each other with, was made permanent when Sorcha grasped Oliver’s hand. She did not let go of his warm, reassuring touch as she led him into the castle.