Page 18 of A Highland Healer Captured (Scottish Daddies #3)

B y the time Skylar reached the solar, the room was both familiar and new—familiar because she knew every corner now, every draught, the exact way the fire struck light off the iron kettle; new because Grayson’s breath had changed and that made every other thing in the world tilt.

Katie had propped the pillows behind him, so his chest opened easier, warm cloth at the ready, a cup of water sweetened with honey to coax his throat to stay soft.

“Good lass,” Skylar murmured, and meant it. She pressed the back of her hand to Grayson’s brow.

Nae too hot .

She laid two fingers at his wrist.

Too quick.

She bent and let her ear hover just above his chest and counted the small, rattling story his lungs told.

“It hurts,” the boy whispered without complaint, which hurt worse.

“I ken.” She tapped a rhythm against the blanket—slow, even, the way she wanted his breath to go. “We’ll help it.”

She set to work. Distantly she was aware of the heat of Zander’s mouth and how quickly it had become a memory she could taste. But her hands knew this work, and that was the point of hands.

Steam first—water barely shy of boiling poured over a fist of thyme and mullein in a clay bowl, a cloth tented over boy and bowl and healer while Katie faded to the edges.

“Count with me,” she said, and Grayson tried. Ten breaths. Fifteen. A cough. The sound tore at her, but she did not let her face say so.

When the steam’s magic ran thin, she tried the second cup of the angelica blend, small sips curved into his mouth with a spoon, waiting between each to see if it soothed or bit.

It did neither for long. She tried a poultice warm at his breastbone, the sweetness of onion braid tempered with mustard, laid so lightly even his thin skin wouldn’t scald.

He grimaced less than he had the first time; his tolerance had become skill.

Midnight came and went, and Skylar felt more like an old woman muttering conspiracies to herself than a sound healer.

“It doesnae seem right… it’s like he’s regressing.”

Katie kept a steady stream of water and cloths, but was otherwise silent. Somewhere in the small hours of the morning, Skylar’s own breath went rusty from holding it.

“I should have found it by now,” she told the floorboards under her breath. “I should have named it.”

Zander had appeared at the threshold as the sun started turning the sky pinks and yellows and blues. Skylar didn’t look at him. She just nodded toward the chair, and he took it, hands loose on his knees, the tension in his body leashed.

“Where’s Katie gone to?” she heard him ask the otherwise empty room.

“Went to sleep some time ago,” Skylar muttered, then busied herself with the steam once more.

“ Ye should have slept,” Zander said from the chair, and when Skylar looked up sharply she saw the worry making a map of the lines around his mouth, exhaustion in his eyes, his knuckles white where he’d remembered to keep his hands still.

She laughed, a soft, cracked thing. “That makes two of us.”

Before he could answer, Grayson stirred. “Da?” He angled his face without lifting it from the pillow, looking toward the chair with something like apology in his eyes for being awake and in need. “Da, can we… go outside?”

Skylar froze. The air in the room changed as surely as if someone had opened a door.

Zander didn’t speak at first. He leaned forward, forearms on his knees, and Skylar watched the battle go through him—rage at the idea of wind on a weak chest, at the world’s cold; the deeper rage at denying joy to a child who had so little of it to choose from.

“We can have a picnic,” he said at last, voice a shade rougher than usual. “When the sun’s up. We’ll take bread and cheese and sit under a tree and ye’ll tell me which birds the book lied about. Mayhap I’ll even sketch them properly for ye.”

Grayson’s thin face lit like someone had set a candle behind his skin. “Truly?”

“Truly.” Zander then looked to Skylar then, and there was a question in his eyes, and something else beneath it that made her face hot in a way that had nothing to do with the fire.

“It’ll be good for him,” she said, rendered, for once, to plain truth. “If he goes slow. If he sits more than he walks. If the air’s nae sharp.”

Zander nodded. The night’s fatigue had stripped him to the man under the laird. Skylar liked this version more than was probably safe. “We’ll make it so.”

He’d entered and she had taken care to not look at him, but now she couldn’t seem to stop. He held her gaze the way he held a sword—firm and intent. Hunger moved through the look like a shadow, and she hated the way her body answered it, the way a string plucked resonates in its instrument.

Grayson saved them both. “She should come too,” he said, already turning his head back toward Skylar. “Lady Skylar. Please?”

“I’m nay lady,” she said, flustered, then rallied. “But I’ll come if yer da thinks he can survive two stubborn souls at once.”

“She needs sleep,” Zander said automatically, and then saw something in Skylar’s expression that made him rephrase. “Ye need sleep.”

“Aye,” she said, decisive because decisiveness was safer than softness. “An hour. That’s all. I’ll wash me face, change out of this—” she plucked at her stained apron “—and fetch the draught in case he needs it outside.”

Zander tipped his head, formal as a knight making treaty. “We’ll meet ye under the tree,” he said, and pointed without needing to look toward the window and the rough bark where notches climbed like a ladder—Grayson’s would-be perch. “The old elm.”

“I ken the one.” She gathered her skirts and her satchel, patting Grayson’s blanket once more. “Ye’ll wait for me,” she said to the lad.

“I always wait for ye,” he said solemnly, and the loyalty in it cut her more cleanly than any insult she’d ever received.

She paused at the threshold. Zander had stood to see her go, as if he didn’t trust his body not to follow without permission. “An hour,” she reminded, and heard how her voice curled around the promise like a ribbon.

“An hour,” he echoed.

She left on that echo, letting the corridor’s chill pull the heat from her cheeks, walking fast because if she didn’t, she might turn back and put her hand in the middle of his chest and ask him?—

What, exactly?

To be the man he’d been for the last fifteen minutes, and not the one who’d stolen her from a road?

To keep reading about hawks with his son until the sun rose?

She didn’t know.

Best to move.

In her chamber she splashed water on her face until her skin prickled, changed for a cleaner gown, braided her hair tighter as if restraint could be worn like clothing.

She swallowed a mouthful of oatcake, another of watered ale, and forced her mind to make more lists: blanket, cup, draught, a packet of marshmallow and moss in case the air stung him.

Every time her thoughts tried to slide toward the sight of Zander’s mouth curving when Grayson laughed, she shoved them back into jars.

When she slipped out again, the keep had gone to that strange gray hour that isn’t quite morning but isn’t night, either—the hour when men who haven’t slept look like ghosts of themselves and women who’ve worked through dark stand steadier than saints.

She crossed the yard with her bundle and told herself the skip in her pulse was from the cold.

But that was a lie.

The yard was empty enough to feel private. Zander wrapped Grayson in two blankets, lifted him carefully, and carried him down the stairs and out beneath the old elm as if he were offering his son to the air itself.

He had forgotten how a sleeping keep sounded—a handful of distant voices, the soft clink of a watchman’s buckle, a raven scolding no one in particular from the roofline. The grass held last night’s dew for ransom.

He set the boy down on the woven mat he had tucked under his arm at the door and settled him against a pillow. “How’s the air?” he asked, half teasing, because fathers should tease sons even when their hands shook.

“Cold.” Grayson grinned. “Good cold.”

“Good cold,” Zander agreed. He found a comfortable angle on the ground beside him and looked up. Above the wall, the sky had begun its slow undoing from black to blue, thin as milk at the edge. A bird marked it—one dark point becoming two becoming a scatter.

“What else do ye like that isnae birds?” he asked, an honest question; he wanted other things to anchor his son to the world in case the sky failed them.

Grayson considered this with the seriousness that made him seem older than six and then younger than it in the same breath. “Stories. Dice.” He shot a quick look from under his lashes. “Nae cheatin’. Just the click.”

Zander huffed. “I’ll forgive the clatter if ye forgive your uncle’s loose purse.”

“I forgive him everything.” A yawn snuck up on the boy and stole the last of his sentence. “And sweeties. But Katie says me belly is a knave.”

“Yer belly is a knave,” Zander said gravely. “ Mine is a king.”

Grayson wheezed a laugh and then sobered. “Will there be sweeties at the Kirn?”

Zander had known this was coming. He’d heard the whisper of it in Katie’s chatter, in the way the maids’ steps picked up when talk turned to patties and pies.

He smoothed a hand over the blanket as he shaped an answer that wouldn’t be a lie and wouldn’t be a promise he couldn’t keep. “There are always sweeties at the Kirn.”

“Can I go this year?” The words came not as demand or whine, only as wanting. Want is worse to deny than greed; it widens a man’s ribcage and sets it in a vise.

He could say no. He could wrap the boy in a dozen blankets and build a wall of men and tell himself that safety was worth any small grief.

He looked at the gate instead, at the arch of it and the morning beyond, at the yard where he could stand without strain for as long as the boy wished. “I daenae ken.”

Grayson didn’t pout. He did worse. He nodded once, as if bravery at six were an ordinary chore, and folded his mouth around disappointment to keep from showing it. His eyes went flatter and older. “Right.”

“We’ll see,” Zander said, hating how weak the phrase sounded on his tongue.

Grayson stared at the sky as if it might answer more directly. Then, with the sudden tilt of mind children are blessed with, he turned his head so fast the blanket sloughed off one shoulder and said, clear as bell metal, “Is Lady Skylar nae going to the Kirn? She’s a lady.”

Zander scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck and forced a laugh that had some truth in it. “Aye, she’s a lady. And yer healer. The two at once are a plague to a laird’s peace.”

“If Lady Skylar is at the Kirn,” Grayson said with the clear, ruthless logic of the innocent, “then shouldnae we all be there?”

“I cannae decide just now, laddie.” He tried to find ground that wouldn’t crumble under him. “I’ll consider it and tell ye later.”

His son did not argue. He simply went small, like a bird folding its wings because someone had made the sky too narrow. Zander felt the crack of it like a blow.

“Right,” Grayson whispered. “Later.”

He wanted to take the word back and give the boy everything.

He also wanted his son alive on the other side of winter.

Those wants fought to a draw in his throat.

He reached for the other subject that had been waiting like a well-placed plank over bad ground.

“The tree,” he said, pointing up. “Ye showed Skylar the cuts. I promised ye a perch.”

The boy’s head came up like a hawk’s. “Truly?”

“Truly,” Zander said, tasting how good it felt to say it and mean it. “We’ll finish the steps. I’ll lash a board across two good limbs and bind it with rawhide. We’ll set a pole like a mast so ye can hold when the wind kicks.”

“Like a ship!” Grayson’s whole face broke open into joy. “And we’ll call it—” He faltered, casting for a name fit to hold such small glory. “—the Gray’s Nest.”

“The Gray’s Nest,” Zander agreed, reverent because something in him needed ceremony for this tiny promise. “We’ll start with the first light that warms the bark.”

Grayson put a hand on his father’s shoulder and squeezed with all the strength he had. “I love ye, Da,” he said, as if it were a private oath.

Zander swallowed a sound that would have been a losing thing to let free. “And I ye, son.”

Footsteps on grass made them both turn. Skylar crossed the yard with a blanket roll and a basket and a cup, her braid dark against the clean line of her neck. The sun hadn’t cleared the wall, but the gray had gone to pearl, and the light made her look like something the dawn meant to keep.

Grayson sat up as much as the pillow would allow and shouted past Zander’s ear with all the force his small chest could lend him. “Skylar! Me da is goin’ to finish the perch for me!”

Zander didn’t have to turn his head to know she smiled; he felt the sound of it like fingertips down his spine. A soft laugh, intimate as a secret kept in a sleeve.

“Are ye now?” she called back, and the tease in it slid under his skin and took up residence. “Then I’ll fetch ribbons, laird, for the mast—so all the birds ken it’s a proper ship.”

“Sweet hells,” Zander muttered, not quite under his breath, and Grayson’s answering giggle made him glad he’d said it. He didn’t look at Skylar until he had his face in some order. When he did, she was close enough to hand him a cup and not quite touch.

“Picnic first,” she said, businesslike to save them both. “Then work.”

“Aye,” he said, and when their fingers brushed over the clay, the jolt of it told him what the day would cost and what it would give. He accepted both, just for now, because his son was laughing and the world was wide enough for a promise nailed into a tree.