Page 45 of A Highland Bride Disciplined (Scottish Daddies #2)

“ K ian.” Scarlett tried a smile. It wobbled, but it was a smile. “I’m nae the one bleeding.”

“Scarlett.” He wasn’t smiling. Heat moved through him as the surge that had driven him clean through Roderick’s guard and to the far side of the man’s last breath echoed in his ears.

But this wasn’t that heat. This was the kind that came when a man’s heart reminded him it could still be lost. “Come with me.”

Color rose into her cheeks, faint beneath the spill of worry and relief.

Had she any idea what she’d said in the nursery?

The edges of it shone in his head, about nearly losing her family, about foolishness and guilt. It lit something in him that he had written off for good.

Effie shifted beside the cradle, trying to pretend she was invisible. He looked to her. “Effie, take the bairn to the warm cradle by the hearth. Keep her with ye. If anyone but me or Scarlett or Morag knocks, ye do nae answer.”

He flicked a look over his shoulder at another guard who had been standing by the door the entire time. “And ye — send Tam to me the instant he’s seen the injured to sitting.”

The man straightened. “Aye, m’laird. We’ll hold this room,” he said, and Effie anchored the baby more securely in her arms with gratitude.

Kian bent, careful of the drying smears, and ghosted his mouth over Elise’s bonnet. He didn’t dare more than a breath of a kiss and a whisper of warmth. The strange ache he’d been refusing all week pulsed once, deeply. It was something protective and primal that had no place on a ledger.

He straightened. “Come,” he said to Scarlett.

“Where?” She asked it, but she went when he took her hand, that clever hand he’d seen steady babes and brandish knives and wag at lairds, now tucked in his like it had been made to.

They slipped into the corridor, past the man who closed the door behind them, securing Effie and Elise inside.

They moved easily past the scuffed marks of boots and the streak where a shield rim had scraped stone. Voices murmured on the stairwell. Someone hummed under her breath the way folk do after terror, testing the air to see if it would hold music again.

His chamber door stood cracked. The room beyond smelled of heat and lye and lavender. Morag’s doing. Of course it was.

She was still in there, back to the door, pinning drape strings and swearing affectionately at a stubborn knot. A copper tub steamed at the hearthside, scenting the air with rosemary. Clean linens were piled on a chair, a shirt hung from the bedpost, ironed within an inch of its life.

Morag turned, saw them both, and halted mid-scold, eyes flicking over the blood, the ruin of Scarlett’s gown.

“Och,” she said softly, more feeling than she usually allowed into a single sound.

And then, brisk once more, “Water’s at the right heat, m’laird.

Bandages on the chair. I’ll send Brighde for the men in the hall.

And I’ll send a girl to fetch ye stew the moment ye’ve —”

“Thank ye, Morag. That’ll be all for now. I’ll send for ye when I’m ready,” Kian said firmly, but not unkindly.

She assessed them both with the unerring eye of a woman who had raised whole households with her tongue and will, then nodded. “I’ll shut the door.” She squeezed past without further comment, though Scarlett received the briefest, fiercest brush of a hand at her elbow on the way.

The latch clicked. The quiet didn’t feel dangerous now. It felt earned.

Scarlett stood very still, looking at the tub like it might be a trick. “Ye should take a bath,” she said at last, voice hushed the way voices go in churches. “And rest.”

He didn’t move toward the water. He moved toward her. “Help me.”

She blinked. “Help —?”

“With the straps.” He tipped his chin at the buckles along his shoulder and ribs, the leather at once heavy and strangely too light now that there wasn’t a blade whistling at his head.

Scarlett uttered a small, unsteady breath of a laugh that might once have been a gasp. “Aye. Of course.”

She closed the distance to him. Her fingers finding buckles and straps that he couldn’t reach without wringing his shoulder. She was careful. Not because she thought him fragile, but because some part of her had decided that he was sacred for the moment, and that decision made his bones hum.

He watched her through it, every quick glance and narrowed focus, the way she bit the inside of her lip when a knot stuck. “What ye said,” he murmured, when her hands had steadied to the rhythm of the buckles. “In the nursery.”

Her fingers faltered briefly. “I — said a great many foolish things.”

“Nay.” He caught one hand where it lay at the last buckle, warm and still stained with a touch of someone else’s fear. “Nae foolish.”

She looked up. Whatever was in her eyes would have stopped a stampede. “I thought I’d made ye hate me.”

“Never.” The word came without thought, without calculation. It was as true as the bruises on his ribs. “I’ve wanted to shake ye, aye. To pin ye to the nearest wall ’til ye listen. But hate? Nay.”

Her mouth twitched like she might laugh at the image if she weren’t this close to crying again.

“I’ve been afraid,” she said, the fact of it small and clean and devastating in the space between them.

“That I was nae made for this. Nae clever enough or kind enough to be a maither. Nae safe enough to be by yer side.”

“That fear lies,” he said at once. It came out a command. He didn’t soften it. “It’s lied to ye every day that ye’ve held that bairn and every night ye’ve watched her breathe. And it lies now.”

Her chin trembled. “I nearly gave her away.”

“We’ll nae carve today’s guilt into bone,” he said. “We’ll learn from it. Together.”

Her breath went ragged with relief she was still too proud to name. “Together,” she whispered.

“Help me more,” he said softly, because if he didn’t pull her forward into something ordinary and intimate, he’d pull her forward into bed still wearing half his kit.

She finished the last buckle, and he shrugged out of the cuirass.

It hit the floor with a thud he felt in his feet.

She swept the ruined shirt from his shoulders, and he let her see the map of the night’s work.

He was covered in dried sweat and blood, bruises, a deep healing scrape on his shoulder, and several old scars that he barely remembered getting.

The tub steamed behind him like an invitation.

He finally moved to it, and when he slid into the heat, a groan climbed out of him he’d sooner have died than let even Tam hear.

Scarlett’s mouth curved. She rolled her sleeves to the elbow, knelt at the tub’s edge, wrung a cloth, and set to rinsing the stain from his forearm.

He watched her. Not calculating. Not planning. Just… watching. The word he wanted was on his tongue, shockingly simple and bigger than any oath he’d ever spoken. He could feel it burning to be said.

“Scarlett,” he started.

She glanced up, cloth stilled. “Aye?”

“After —” He couldn’t say it while he was covered with someone else’s blood and the last of the battle’s crackle. He wanted to be clean when he said it. “I’ll tell ye after I’m nae stinkin’ like a smithy.”

Her smile ghosted across her face again. “Then I’ll scrub ye ’til ye shine, Laird Crawford.”

The water went from hot to merely warm, steam thinning to a gentle breath in the air.

Scarlett’s hands were steady now, sure with the cloth, sure with the small tasks that make a world whole again.

The wringing, rinsing, passing soap, smoothing lather across his shoulder where a bruise bloomed like ink beneath skin.

“Turn,” she murmured, and he did, and her knuckles traced the ridge of muscle along his back as if that might erase the way it had tightened around a sword hilt for hours.

He felt himself loosening in places he hadn’t let loosen since he was a boy who still believed problems could be solved by outlasting them.

“What ye said,” he tried again, when the last of the stain swirled away toward the tub’s rim. “In the nursery.”

Scarlett set the cloth aside and rested her forearms on the copper’s edge, close enough that the steam lifted tiny curls near her temple.

She looked a little sad now, a little fierce, and a little like a woman who’d finally stopped fighting herself.

“I thought I was goin’ to lose Elise and ye tonight,” she said.

“I let you believe that I wanted ye to give me space. When perhaps the safest place to be was the opposite. I —” She swallowed.

“I’ve wondered if I deserve to be at yer side. Or Elise’s even.”

He moved before the thought fully finished, water sloshing as he stood.

She made a startled sound and looked away on a gasp, backing away from the tub.

Color flooded her throat and crept up to her cheeks, to her ears.

He reached for the towel, dragged it over skin in quick, economical streaks, then stepped from the tub and crossed the plank floor to her with water still chasing a path across his chest.

“Ye’ll never speak that nonsense in me hearing again,” he said, and this time the command didn’t need iron because it carried on breath and thudding heart. He took her face in his wet hands. “Ye belong here. With me. With her. There is nay world in which ye are nae enough.”

She dragged in a breath that shivered. “I’m sorry if if it seemed like all I wanted was children without ye.”

“I willnae hear an apology.” His thumb smoothed the place where a tear would have been if she’d let it fall. “I thought ye wanted this marriage to be one of convenience. That ye meant our bed for duty alone. I told meself that I preferred that. It kept things tidy.”

“And?” The smallest smile. “Do ye like tidy, Kian?”

“In the ledgers, aye.” He dipped his head, his mouth touching hers once, light as breath. “Nae here.”

The kiss deepened, unhurried but inevitable.

It wasn’t the rough need of surviving or the defiant collision of two proud tempers.

It was a claiming that asked, an answer that gave, a soft opening to something they’d both barricaded for the sake of not breaking.

Her hands slid up his chest wanting, and he felt the ‘aye’ of her under his palms, the ‘aye’ of her mouth, the ‘aye’ of her body leaning into the long, clean line of him.

He let his hands roam. They travelled over her jaw, the nape of her neck, the slope of her shoulders freed of the ruined gown, the strong line of her back. She was trembling with an emotion that matched the one surging under his ribs.

He drew back only far enough to see her eyes.

“Tell me,” she breathed.

He knew exactly what she was asking him for, and finally he felt the the weight of the world melt from his shoulders as he leaned into her lips and whispered, “I love ye, Scarlett Murray.”

“I love ye, too,” she whispered back, voice breaking on it like a wave.

Heat and relief and something older than both broke him open. “God help us,” he said, and the words didn’t undo him, they made him right.

He kissed her like a starved man.

Her fingers found the tie at his hip and the towel slid away without either of them minding. He pulled her close and felt the shiver that answered him. He did not rush. He was done with rushing where this woman was concerned.

They reached the bed by a path that had only the sense of touch and breath to mark it. The brush of her knee against his thigh, the catch of her sigh as he found the tender hollow beneath her ear, and then her head fell back when his mouth trailed lower, tasting the clean heat of her skin.

He worshiped to the pace of her breathing, to the subtle arch of her spine, to the small sounds she tried and failed to swallow.

What came after was not tidy.

He pulled her to his mouth, and his tongue lapped at her with relentless pursuit of her climax. His hands slid up her torso and the pads of his fingers teased both of her nipples, each hand rolling at a different pace, searching for the right rhythm.

Her hands gripped his arms tightly, pulling him closer and then pushing against him, but he didn’t stop.

Not until her legs started to shake and her moans grew louder to cries of pleasure, and then finally she broke.

His name hot on her lips, and hers on his as he slowed his pace through her arousal and kneeled in between her thighs.

“Are we well, lass?”

She laughed and nodded her head, and it was a sensual and addicting sound that sent a shiver down his spine. He crawled up her body, planting soft kisses against her hot, pebbling skin.

He hovered over her, just for a moment, just long enough for her eyes to assess the situation and widen with excitement and need. And then he buried himself inside of her. A cry of need filled the space around them, and drove Kian absolutely crazy.

He needed to go deeper. He needed to feel her arousal dripping around him. Needed to hear his name on her lips again. His rhythm intensified, hips digging into hers as they both climbed, and climbed until finally she crumbled around him.

A fitful, raging shock that raged through both of them and stole the air from the room.

When they finally came to rest, breath tangling in the hush between their mouths, he felt something settle in his bones that no oath or victory or ledger had ever given him. Home.

They did not speak for a long time. Words weren’t needed. He smoothed damp tendrils from her temple and kissed the spot. She touched his jaw as if learning it by heart and laid her cheek to his chest as though there had never been a world where she didn’t.

When sleep came, it came like a kindness. They slid under the coverlet and into each other’s arms without ceremony. He tugged her closer with a drowsy insistence, and she went without hesitation, tucking her hand beneath his heart as if it belonged there.

Love had changed its shape. Control had loosened its hold.

And just beyond this room, down the hall, behind a closed door, a tiny breath rose and fell in a cradle, safe.

And in the quiet of Crawford Keep, beneath stone and timber and stars, a family had been forged.

Not by duty. Not by command. But by love, fierce and unyielding, that would outlast them all.