Page 13 of A Highland Healer Captured (Scottish Daddies #3)

S kylar told herself the kiss had been a mistake.

A moment’s madness.

She told herself this so often through the afternoon that the words began to lose their shape, turning from iron to smoke every time she glanced at the door and remembered the heat of his mouth, the rough scrape of his beard, the way her own bones had gone soft with wanting.

Why would he kiss me?

Control, she decided. Manipulation dressed as hunger. A laird’s trick to keep a captive quiet. It had to be.

She kept to Grayson’s side anyway. That was the vow she could hold in both hands.

The boy dozed more than he woke, lashes dark on his too-pale cheeks, breath shallow, a faint rasp under every exhale. When he stirred, she coaxed sips of mullein-honey from a cup and told him about a swift she had watched while he slept.

“Where?” he asked weakly.

“Just there in glen. It knifed the wind so sharply that it made a line through the late-morning mist.”

Grayson smiled and hummed a sweet reply before sleep took him under again. Skylar sat there cataloging the tiny changes—color, moisture at the lips, heat at the brow—as if enough careful watching could force improvement.

It wasn’t until late afternoon that she realized they were alone in the solar.

The guard usually sat a respectful distance in the passage, but still in view.

Katie or Cora usually bustled around with cloths and mugs or cleaning.

But now the room held only the song of the fire, the whispering scratch of her quill where she annotated her journal, and Grayson’s thin breath.

The door was not even latched.

A strange lightness touched her ribs.

Freedom?

Nae remotely.

But a loosening, like the twists and turns of a sailor’s knot relaxing.

Zander had not come roaring back with chains either.

In the days that followed, the pattern held.

When she walked the corridor to the surgery, Mason trailed at a distance, though not at her elbow.

When she climbed the stair to her chamber, Cora sometimes walked with her, speaking softly of inventories and keeping up a constant, comforting patter about jars and jars of dried petals.

But her bedroom door remained unlocked. Katie visited often throughout her day, but no longer hovered.

Her new relaxed routine was either a courtesy or a miscalculation, she could not say. Though, no matter how her stay was improving day over day, Grayson, however, had not.

Skylar tried gentler steams over warmed rocks, thyme and chamomile rising in fragrant clouds that loosened him for an hour and no more. She layered onion poultices at his chest to draw heat, then swapped them for mustard plasters to stir circulation.

She measured his waking pulse at wrist and throat, frowned at the speed of it, and noted how quickly the color fled his lips after the smallest excitement.

“He needs the outside,” she said to Katie on the second day after the kiss, watching the boy sleep while the light died from the windows. “Air that moves. Light that isnae filtered through smoke. The closed rooms make him worse.”

Katie worried her lower lip. “But last time?—”

“I ken. I was just statin’ facts,” Skylar muttered, and swallowed the argument. She would not risk the storm again. Not yet. Not while she was this uncertain—of the treatment, of the laird, of herself.

Instead, she turned to craft. “Cora,” she said the next morning, beckoning the girl closer in the surgery.

“I will need supplies I didnae see on the shelves in the surgery—elecampane root, whole, not powdered; Iceland moss, if ye can find it; wild cherry bark, well dried; and coltsfoot, though fresh is best. Send a runner to every crofter ye trust, and to any chapel-herb garden that keeps a medicine bed.”

Cora’s dark brows rose, pleased. “A bold blend.”

“A stubborn illness needs a stubborn draught.” Skylar managed a smile. “And Grayson’s illness is as stubborn as any I’ve ever seen.”

Cora made her notes neatly, promised to get the list in front of the laird before the sun reached its height, and slipped away with quiet purpose.

By noon, a trickle of offerings began—bundles wrapped in scrap cloth, small pouches of bark, a jar of shriveled lichens that smelled like sea wind and clean stone. Skylar sorted and sifted, rejecting the worst, praising the best, feeling the old craftsman’s pleasure steady her hands.

Seven days into her stay—she realized the count with a start, as if time had been a rope paid out behind her without her noticing—she asked, a touch too casually, where the laird had gone.

Katie had a way of answering without realizing she gave anything away, and Skylar had a way of guiding a conversation that had brought stubborn shepherds to the truth of their ailments more times than she could number.

“Where’s the laird been all week, anyway?” Skylar asked as she strained a syrup through linen, the dark thread of wild cherry dripping slow into a jar.

Katie, folding cloths, barely looked up. “The Kirn preparations. Ye’ll hear the pipes before long. Stalls to set, beasts to judge, ale to cask, songs to pick, and every cousin of every crofter wants a say.”

“Ye celebrate Kirn?” Skylar kept her tone light and let the word ring as if she was simply searching memory.

“Aye, of course?” Katie asked, straightening and playfully scowling at Skylar.

“Still the same Harvest thanksgiving or are ye celebrating somethin’ else?”

“Och! Aye, and the fields gave well enough this year, God be thanked, so it’ll be a proper feast. There’ll be games in the yard and a procession with the last sheaf, and the children will have sticky hands, and the old men will argue about whose bull is handsomest.”

“And the laird?”

“Busy,” Katie said, cheerful as ever. “Always outdoes himself, he does. Loves when the clan comes together, it seems. Quite nice.”

Skylar nodded and bent over her jar so the maid could not see the way her expression shifted. A festival meant bodies. Bodies meant noise. Noise meant cover. If she was to run, that would be the time.

It was the first thought that came after Katie’s explanation, and it struck her with shame that Ariella’s face did not come first—pale with fever, eyes sunken, the pen-strokes of her aunt’s desperate letter dense as rain.

She had not forgotten her cousin. She had simply…

lived, inside this other need, this other child, this maddening laird. Guilt slicked her palms.

She asked sly questions after that, the way she would pull at a thread under a bandage to see if the wound knit clean: What hour did the cattle walk the ring? Where would the musicians gather to tune? Which gate would be opened for the drovers’ carts?

Katie answered everything as if it were the most unremarkable thing to share.

Mason, had he been in the room, might have caught the shape hidden under Skylar’s curiosity.

Cora, had she been near, might have tilted her head and asked why a healer needed to know which gate went unmanned after dark.

But the men were elsewhere, and Cora was away sorting nettle from mint in the stores, and Katie, bless her, liked talking.

In the quiet moments between questions, Skylar pressed her palm to Grayson’s chest and counted. She felt the tight flutter there as if some small, desperate creature beat against a cage. Outside, gulls cried. Within, the boy slept.

When night fell and she retreated to her chamber, she did not blow the candle at once.

She spread her journal in her lap and wrote—notes on dosage, on timing, on the ratio of moss to mullein, on the way the draught should be warmed and never boiled—and then she wrote, in a hand that slanted more sharply: Festival.

Seven days. West gate? Pipers’ entry? Ask for more linen—excuse to stand by the yard. Must heal Grayson before.

A line later: Ariella.

Another: I am sorry.

Sleep came, when it came, like a poorly mixed tincture—too weak to hold, too bitter to soothe.

She drifted to the edge and back again, caught between the soft tug of Grayson’s thin laugh in memory and the pull of a road that ran away from this keep, this laird, this vow that had complicated itself into something like love and fear braided together.

When at last the candle guttered and died, she lay in the dark with her eyes wide and her heart drumming, as if her body had already begun the flight she had not yet dared to take.

Zander did not avoid Skylar. He told himself that twice before breakfast and a third time as he signed off on the tally for ale casks while Fergus and Tamhas argued in muted tones near the door.

He did not avoid her. He had a keep to run and a harvest to plan and a council to keep from flaying one another or him, and all of that would have been true even if he had not kissed the woman who hated him.

The kiss lodged in him like a thorn in his side.

He could ignore it while he was barking at drovers about where to pen the bullocks and nodding at the cooper who swore the largest barrel would not leak, not this year, not after the repair.

He could ignore it while he measured the yard with his eye and imagined the sweep of folk through the gate, the clatter of hooves, the piping, the laughter.

He could not ignore it when he passed the solar and heard a low laugh from within that was not Katie’s.

He did not go in.

He went on, jaw tight.

Later, Mason fell into step beside him as they crossed the yard, both men squinting toward the west wall where scaffolding rose to mend a crack that was above the gate.

Strathcairn had seen worse seasons. This was a good year.

God had sent rain and sun in right measures; their cattle would show well; the folk had already begun to hum the songs that belonged to harvest and no other time.

“Ye look like a man chewing stones,” Mason said mildly.

“Do I?” Zander did not slow.

“Aye. And I ken which ones,” Mason added, which earned him a sharp look. Mason only lifted a shoulder. “Ye like her.”

Zander stopped. The men on the scaffolding clattered and cursed softly as a plank shifted. “Ye’ve grown bold,” Zander said under his breath.

“I’ve grown tired of watching ye pace the length of yer temper like a beast dragging a chain. Ye like her. Just admit it already.” Mason waited, gaze steady. “Does she mean anything?”

Zander opened his mouth and found that the words inside were a snarl. He swallowed them and tried again. “She’s here to heal Grayson. That’s all. Nothin’ more.”

“That’s one hell of a lie. How exhaustin’.” Mason’s tone said he would accept another if Zander had it.

He didn’t.

He ground a palm along his jaw as if he could scrape away the feeling.

“She’s nothin’ I have time for,” he said at last, though the shape of the memory warmed his chest. The way she had kissed him back, not meek, not yielding, but fierce, as if she’d decided if he would take, she would take also.

And beneath that, like a river under winter’s ice, the steady, relentless current of their purpose: Grayson.

Always Grayson. “I need her hands on me son, nae on me.”

Mason huffed something that was not quite a laugh. “Are ye nay longer worried of her tryin’ to escape again? Is that why ye’ve called all of us off?”

“I daenae ken. I just supposed that she wouldnae be able to work with… with so much goin’ on. So, ye’ll continue to keep yer distance and so will Katie and Cora.”

“Right—” Mason said, suddenly distracted.

Zander followed the man’s gaze toward the scaffolding where one of the men had shrugged his way into a precarious perch and needed shouting down. Mason did, his voice ringing to the roofline, and when the man laughed and obeyed he felt a brief, clean satisfaction.

“The council is still restless,” Mason said at last.

“They’ll settle once the pipes play and their bellies are full… and the lass returned home without a war,” Zander replied, rolling his eyes. “Why they even bother?—”

“Mayhap if ye gave them a timeline… or mayhap just let her choose what she would do, ye ken? Stay or go,” Mason offered nonchalantly.

“She’s needed to stay until her work is done and done successfully. Grayson will live by her hand. That’s that.”

Mason’s mouth thinned, briefly, as if to choose the right words to say next, but instead he said nothing.

“If I want advice about how to deal with a healer who plans to run, I’ll ask ye for it,” Zander said firmly, and watched Mason’s brows lift.

“The sooner she heals Grayson, the sooner she can leave,” Mason said with a shrug. “But if ye’re too busy plannin’ the festival… I suppose I could help make sure she has everythin’ she needs?—”

“Nay,” Zaden said quickly, cutting him off. “I’ll manage.”

Zander did not ask what the hell that was supposed to mean. He didn’t even want to think about it.

Thankfully, Mason turned from him to fully face the scaffolding. The man’s next words were a slew of Hebridean curses at the men, which were answered with nervous laughter and louder clanking.

Zander walked on alone, to distract him from the wild, brown-haired lass in the solar, he let the chaos of his never-ending list of to-do items run through his mind.

I’ll go look at the south fence, now. Then to the kitchens to sign on the orders for barley flour. Should check in on Tamas in the butcher’s yard before I do that, actually ? —

Then, suddenly, Skylar’s accusation burned again in his mind— He needs ye to be with him… ye are failing him.

The memory nearly knocked the wind from Zander’s lungs. He stopped briefly, on the edge of the tree line, his grip impossibly tight around a low branch. He had hated her for saying it and hated himself more because it struck true.

This can all wait. I should go be with Grayson.

He looked briefly up at the keep, then back toward the fencing, and then back up at the keep again. Torn.

Zander grumbled roughly, and then turned away from the keep, wholly dissatisfied. He would finish all of the items on his list, and then visit his son so that they are not interrupted.

It was nearly sunset when he finally turned toward the keep’s inner stair. He decided to find a book with pictures of birds, and that he would read to Grayson and let the rest of the world wait.

And if Skylar Dunlop troubled his thoughts while he sat there, if the scent of rosemary and smoke lifted in memory as he turned a page and misread a line and heard a sleepy, amused correction from the bed, then well—He would own that weakness.

He had razed a clan to protect what was his. Stolen a lass from her father’s keep! Surely he could survive the nearness of a woman who both goaded and steadied him.

Just have to keep me eyes on Grayson and nae on the healer’s mouth. Easy.

Zander exhaled sharply as he took the stairs two at a time and went to find a book with birds in it.