Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Colin did not stop until St. Andrews was far enough behind them that even memory seemed to arrive breathless.
The place he chose lay beyond the road, hidden where a narrow burn cut through a fold of dark trees and slipped over stones with a restless silver sound.
No smoke could be seen from the track. If men rode the main road in search of him, they would pass within half a mile and never know. It was a good place.
Colin swung down first and reached for her. She looked at his hand as if it were an insult offered in public.
“I can dismount without assistance.”
“Aye,” he said. “And break yer neck in that gown.”
Rain loosened her hair from its pins and made dark strands cling to her cheek. Her bridal silk was torn near the hem, muddied at the side, and still she managed to look less ruined than offended by the world’s poor manners.
“I have survived a forced wedding, an attack, and several hours pressed against ye on that beast. I assure ye, Laird MacKenzie, a short distance tae the ground willnae finish me.”
The horse shifted. Elspeth’s proud expression wavered for half a heartbeat.
Colin hid whatever amusement might have betrayed him and set his hands at her waist before she could object again.
She went rigid at once. He lifted her down as carefully as he might have carried a blade by its edge, aware of her warmth beneath his hands and the strange lightness of her.
The moment her feet touched earth she stepped back.
Her slipper sank into the wet moss, and she caught his sleeve before she fell. Neither of them moved.
Her fingers were clenched in his shirt. His hand had closed, without thought, around her elbow. Between them the burn hurried over stones, filling the silence with a sound too soft for the violence of the day.
Elspeth released him as though he had burned her.
“It is a treacherous bit of earth.”
“It has likely been waiting years for yer arrival.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Dinnae be amusing. I havenae given ye leave.”
Colin turned away before his mouth betrayed him. There was danger in finding her sharpness pleasing. There was danger in the way she stood in the wilderness as if it had offended her personally and would be writing a letter about its conduct.
He expected fear. He expected tears, perhaps hysteria, certainly hatred. He wasn’t expecting this difficult, furious composure that made every insult sound like proof she had not been conquered.
He led the horse deeper beneath the trees and tied it where leaves would hide the pale mark of its flank. Elspeth remained where he had left her, looking about at the woods with increasing displeasure.
The evening air smelled of wet pine, peat, cold water, and the bruised green scent of trampled fern. Above them, branches caught the last of the rain and released it drop by drop. Somewhere in the thicket a bird gave a shrill call. Elspeth turned toward it sharply.
“What was that?”
“A bird.”
“I am aware it wasnae a harp.”
“A jay, then.” He bent to unstrap the rolled canvas from behind the saddle. “We’ll camp here until I ken the road is safe.”
Her outrage returned at once, which he preferred to the flash of unease he had seen.
“We are sleeping here?”
“Aye.”
“Among trees?”
“That is generally where the woods keep them.”
“Are ye daeing this on purpose tae provoke me?”
“I wouldnae dare.”
“Ye have done little else since meeting me.”
Since buying ye, his conscience supplied.
The words moved through him with the cold precision of a knife.
He pulled the canvas free and carried it toward the flattest patch of ground he could find.
He told himself a dozen times since the cathedral that he had not known she was ignorant.
Thomas Fraser had sworn the girl had been told, with the ease of a man who had long ago emptied truth of consequence.
Colin should have suspected. He should have looked past the bargain to the woman at the end of it.
Instead, he had seen a debt, a Crown command, an alliance useful enough to stop old blood from spilling into new war.
And then she had stood beside him at the altar, white as the gown they had trapped her in, with fury in her eyes and betrayal all around her.
He drove the first peg into the earth harder than necessary.
Elspeth watched him from several paces away. “Are there wolves?”
“Nay.”
“Bears?”
“Nay.”
“Men who purchase women and then drag them into forests?”
His hand paused on the rope. He looked up.
She held his gaze with that reckless courage of hers, though her face had paled with fatigue and cold.
A less careful man might have answered in anger.
Colin had been raised by such a man. He knew the shape of cruelty when it wished to call itself authority.
“I willnae touch ye against yer will,” he promised.
His words struck somewhere beneath her anger, where fear had been keeping itself alive.
“I didnae ask that.”
“Aye,” he said quietly. “Ye did.”
She looked away first, which gave him no pleasure.
He finished pitching the small tent with more care than speed, though the light was beginning to thin between the trees.
He laid blankets inside, checked the ground, gathered what dry wood he could find beneath a slant of rock, and built a small fire where its smoke would be broken by branches.
Elspeth moved from one patch of ground to another, trying to find a place where her gown would not touch mud, moss, bark, leaves, or any other feature of the natural world.
Every sound startled her. Every shadow earned suspicion.
Colin, who had slept in worse places than this with a sword under his hand and blood drying on his skin, found himself watching the careful lift of her skirts over roots as if it were a matter of state.
“There are too many noises,” she declared.
“There would be more in an inn.”
“In an inn, noises have the decency tae be human.”
“Human noises tried tae kill us this morning.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it. Her gaze dropped to his hand. Colin followed it and saw the blood. The cut across his knuckles had opened again, the rain having washed it thin and red down his fingers. He flexed them. Pain answered, small and unimportant.
Elspeth’s eyes sharpened. “Ye are bleeding.”
“It is all right, I have had much worse.”
She crossed the little camp as if anger alone kept her warm. “Sit down.”
He frowned.
“Sit down, Laird MacKenzie, or I shall conclude that all the terrible stories told of ye left out the most damning truth. That ye are afraid of soap and water.”
He stared at her. “Are ye ordering me?”
“I am attempting tae preserve the life of the man who has made himself inconveniently necessary tae me survival.”
He lifted an amused eyebrow. “That is almost concern.”
“It is strategy. Dinnae flatter yerself.”
Colin should have refused. His hand did not require tending. They had more urgent matters than a shallow cut. He should have checked the horse again, watched the road, planned the safest path north when dawn came.
Instead, he sat upon a fallen log and held out his hand.
She knelt before him and reached for the cloth he had set with the supplies.
The position displeased him at once. It wasn’t because he thought she meant submission, for there was no force in heaven or Scotland likely to make Elspeth Fraser submissive.
It was because she looked too much like someone brought low by a day of other people’s decisions.
“Sit beside me,” he urged.
Her brows lifted. “I am tending yer hand, nae courting ye.”
“The ground is wet.”
“Dae ye ken any words that arenae commands?”
“Aye. Many. Few useful.”
With an impatient breath, she moved onto the log beside him, leaving a severe and deliberate space between them. Colin dipped the cloth in water and offered it to her. When she took it, their fingers brushed.
Her hand stilled. So did his.
It was absurd. He had kissed her before a cathedral full of witnesses.
He had held her against him for hours on horseback.
He had felt her body jolt with every stride, kept his arm locked around her while trying not to think of the soft pressure of her back against his chest, the scent of rain in her hair, the fierce little breaths she made when anger failed to hide exhaustion.
Yet that small brush of fingers seemed to strike both of them with more force than sense allowed.
Elspeth snatched the cloth and bent over his hand. The first touch of water stung. He did not move.
“There,” she said. “Proof ye arenae made entirely of stone.”
“Did ye require proof?”
“I had begun tae wonder.”
She cleaned the cut with more care than her words deserved.
Her brows drew together. Her mouth, still a little swollen where he had kissed her and she had bitten him, tightened in concentration.
Colin watched her because he could not seem to do otherwise.
She was furious with him. She feared him, though she hid it like a jewel sewn beneath plain cloth.
Yet she could not leave a wound untended.
It was an inconvenient kind of goodness.
“Take off yer shirt,” she suddenly ordered.
Colin’s attention returned sharply. “Why?”
“There is blood at yer wrist and sleeve. I cannae tell whether the cut runs higher.”
“It daesnae.”
“Then show me.”
His gaze held hers. “Ye want me tae take off me shirt?”
Color moved into her cheeks at once, swift and lovely and violently denied. “Fer medical purposes.”
“Of course.”
“Dinnae say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“As if I had requested entertainment.”
He leaned back slightly. “Did ye?”
She looked ready to strike him with the wet cloth. “I have never met a man more pleased with himself.”
“That wasnae an answer.”
“I dinnae want tae see ye without a shirt.”
“Nay?”
“Nay.”
Colin stood. Her gaze followed him for half a second before she forced it down to the cloth in her lap. He untied the fastening at his throat and pulled the damp shirt over his head. The evening air struck cool against his skin. He heard Elspeth’s breath catch before the burn covered it.
When he sat again, she was looking very carefully at his hand. Colin let the silence stretch. It was unkind, perhaps, but he was not saint enough to resist the pleasure of watching Lady Elspeth Fraser discover that contempt did not make a woman blind.
Her lashes flickered once toward his chest, then away. Then again, lower. The fire had begun to take, laying gold along the wet planes of his shoulders and the scar near his ribs, old and pale from a blade that had not gone deep enough to matter. Elspeth swallowed.
“Ye may look as much as ye like,” he smirked.
Her head snapped up. “I wasnae looking.”
“I didnae say ye were.”
“Ye implied it.”
“I implied ye had permission.”
“I dinnae require permission tae dae what I am nae daeing.”
He smiled. He could not help it.
Her eyes dropped to his mouth, saw the smile, and became more irritated still. “Hold still.”
“I am still.”
“Be quieter, then.”
Colin obeyed her, partly because he wished to see what she would do with victory and partly because his own amusement had become more dangerous than he liked.
Desire was simple. Desire could be understood, endured, dismissed when necessary.
But this odd pull between irritation and admiration, guilt and amusement, heat and something perilously close to tenderness, was not simple at all.
Elspeth cleaned the blood from his wrist. Her fingers were cool, careful, and uncertain only when they neared bare skin beyond the wound.
She was close enough now that her skirts brushed his boot and her shoulder nearly touched his arm.
The scent of her had changed from lavender and church incense to rain, horse, crushed fern, and woman.
His body noticed. His mind ordered it to silence.
She turned his hand palm upward. The movement placed her fingers against the inside of his wrist, where his pulse beat with humiliating honesty. Her eyes flicked to it. Colin knew the moment she felt the change in him.
A blush rose again beneath the dirt and rain on her cheeks. Her lips parted, then pressed together. She became suddenly severe with the bandage, winding it around his knuckles with unnecessary discipline. She tied the cloth tight enough as if to punish him a little. He let her.
She hated him. She had every right to.
And still, when her fingers had closed over his wrist, his first thought had not been of Robert Munro, the road, the Crown, or the men who might be hunting them. It had been that Lady Elspeth MacKenzie, bought bride and furious stranger, touched him gently.
That, Colin thought, was a far more dangerous wound than the cut.