Page 22 of A Highland Healer Captured (Scottish Daddies #3)

T he single syllable went through her like winter water. She couldn’t tell whether the shiver that ran along her spine was fear or fury, or the bitter spark of relief that she hated.

That shameful flicker that confessed she didn’t want to leave the boy, not yet, not like this, not while the cup that had tried to take him still existed in someone’s hand. She set her jaw. “Ye gave yer word.”

“I gave me word to keep him breathing,” he said evenly. “I’ll nae carve the promise thin enough to let it bleed out while we stand here arguing the shape of it.”

“It wasnae thin.” Her voice rose, heat threading through it. “Ye stole me. Ye told me I’d go once he was safe. I’ve held him to this world all night long and?—”

“And ye think I’ll cut the rope now?” His voice didn’t rise, which was worse.

“Ye saved him from one dose. Whoever did this may dose again. If ye want him alive as much as ye say ye do—if ye want to keep whatever vow ye made to yerself the day ye first touched his brow—then ye’ll stay long enough to help me find the hand that feeds him poison. ”

“This is comfort dressed as command,” she snapped, anger and something more frantic pricking her eyes. “A man’s way of calling a cage a kindness.”

“I’m asking ,” he said, and it did something to her because he wasn’t the sort to gild orders in courtesies he didn’t mean. “Nae for me. For him . Stay.”

She felt the world tilt, and hated that it didn’t tilt clean.

Ariella’s name flashed through her like a bell.

Run, then heal, then run, a voice urged.

Heal, then run, another argued.

Daenae run at all, whispered something treacherous that wore Grayson’s laugh for a mask.

Skylar pressed her palm to her sternum as if she could pin herself to the best version of herself by force of will.

“Daenae look at me like that,” Zander said, and the roughness in it sounded like a man who knew exactly the knife-edge he’d put her on and hated himself for it.

She needed to get out of this room before she did something she could never take back.

“I’ll send for yer kin. I’ll send a rider to yer aunt. I swear it on—” He stopped, breathed, changed the oath. “—on me son’s breath.”

She stared at him and believed him, which only made things worse. “Why have ye always chosen the vow that ties me to ye,” she whispered.

“I choose the vow that holds him.”

The room felt smaller, the walls closer. She was suddenly very aware of how near his body was to hers, of the heat rolling off him, of the blood still wet at the cuff of his sleeve.

She told herself the shiver down her back was fear of what he’d become if he didn’t have her work to hold him steady.

It might have been. It might also have been the echo of his mouth in the study, the memory of how easily she’d gone against herself when he’d kissed her like a man in a burning building taking one breath of good air.

“Fine,” she said, and hated that the word came out a shade huskier than she meant. She cleared her throat. “We’ll do it me way. Quiet. Methodical. We’ll not spook the snake from the heather before we ken the angle of its fangs.”

He held her gaze as if weighing how much she could bear if he broke his vow not to frighten her. Then his shoulders lowered a fraction. “Ye’ll help me name them.”

“Aye.” She finished the knot and smoothed the bandage with her thumb, feeling the rough rasp of hair at his wrist. The nearness did something treacherous to her breath. “For Grayson.”

“Aye,” he said, and for the first time since she’d spoken the word poison she saw something relax in him, some inner muscle unclench. It made him look younger. It made her angrier. “We’ll do it yer way.”

She handed him another strip of linen. “Wrap it tighter. Ye’ll burst those stitches on the wall again.”

“Only if the wall lies to me,” he said, and the faintest crooked smile pulled his mouth. It should not have eased her. It did.

She turned away, because she needed the distance, because the look in his eyes when he wasn’t braced for war felt like an arm around her waist tugging her closer than her sense permitted.

“Then go,” she said to the door, to the night, to the next terrible hour. “Wait with him. Tell Katie what we’re looking for without telling her we’re looking. I’ll be in the surgery for ten minutes. I need charcoal properly done, not bread smashed with temper. I’ll send for Cora.”

She felt Zander behind her hesitate, as if he wanted to say something that would make a different kind of vow and didn’t trust the shape of it. “Skylar.”

He had made to open her chamber door, but then closed it again. The latch falling right as Skylar turned to look back at him.

He didn’t look apologetic. Not because he wasn’t sorry, for some part of him clearly was, but because an apology wasn’t the right coin for what he’d asked.

He set his shoulders as if to carry her answer however heavy it came.

“We keep him close,” he said, voice measured. “We keep sayin’ he’s sick, and we let the rumor do our hunting. Whoever has been dosing him will have patterns: the hour they prefer, the cup they trust, the way they carry their kindness. We’ll watch the pattern while the keep watches Grayson.”

“Then we’ll set a snare in it,” Skylar said, mind already ordering lures. “A decoy cup. Two honey jars and a third that never leaves me hand. Ye’ll start bringing him bread yerself, so the kitchen has to learn how to spare ye rather than how to try to spare him. We’ll see who chafes.”

“Aye.” He took a breath as if the air had decided to leave with his courage and he had to wrestle it back. “Stay. Until we find the hand.”

Reluctance rose like a tide in her. It was real and powerful, and it brought Ariella’s name with it like driftwood.

It met another tide head-on, Grayson’s face in sleep, the way his small fingers sought hers as if the body knew how to be grateful before children learned to say it.

The collision made a complicated sea inside her.

He bowed his head once, the gesture spare and strangely elegant, like a man accepting terms of surrender and grateful to be held to honor by them. When he lifted his gaze, the hard light had softened at the edges.

“Thank ye,” he said, and it wasn’t laird to healer; it was man to woman. “For staying.”

It ought to have been a simple exchange.

It wasn’t.

He crossed the small space between them slowly, as if approaching a wild thing he didn’t want to startle, and lifted his bandaged hand to her face.

The linen was rough against her cheek, the heat of him steady beneath it. His thumb brushed just in front of her ear, a small stroke that had no claim in it, only awe and a strange, careful wonder.

She’d meant to pull back, but she couldn’t. The day had skinned her raw, and there was no room for smart replies or safe distances.

She stood there and let him touch her, and when he leaned in and kissed her, she opened to it like a door on a well-oiled hinge.

No fumbling. No performance. Just hunger that had lost its shame and found its purpose.

Zander kissed her, then, as if he’d learned restraint from war and decided not to waste it here. His mouth was warm and sure, his breath steady.

He didn’t devour.

The man built.

Brick by brick, kiss by kiss, until the height of it made her a little dizzy. When his bandaged hand slipped from her cheek to the nape of her neck, she felt the weight of the day drop through her like chain and then vanish, drowned in the warmth gathering low and slow in her belly.

Her thoughts tried to line up with warnings.

They didn’t hold. Sensation replaced them as the scrape of his stubble travelled along her jaw, and his lips coaxed hers to give and then take, and the soft sound she made when he angled her head and deepened the kiss because he’d discovered how she liked it and went there again, as if memory were a gift he intended to use.

“Skylar,” he hummed against her mouth, and the sound of her name with his breath in it turned her knees inattentive.

She caught his shoulders and felt the breadth of him, the strength held back for her sake. The kindness in that restraint undid her as surely as the heat.

She rose onto her toes and pressed closer. He answered with a low noise he likely hadn’t meant to let her hear, and let his hands map the line of her back, the curve of her waist. Everywhere his palm passed, sensation bloomed, bright and insistent, like sparks landing in dry grass.

When his mouth left hers and found the hinge of her jaw, the delicate slope below her ear, she discovered how easy it could be to forget the world. He kissed there with intent, slow and knowing, and a shiver arrowed down her spine.

He learned her by listening to how she tilted when he reached the spot beneath her ear, and how her breath hitched when he lingered at the hollow of her throat. He followed those tells like a man tracking in snow.

“Do ye—” he began, as he gathered her skirts in his hand.

“Aye,” she whispered, gripping his shoulders for balance.

When he trailed kisses along the line of her collarbone, when his hands curved her waist and drew her nearer, when his mouth returned to claim hers at the moment she needed him to. And she was not altogether sure that she stood on the same floor.

His hand slid deliciously up her thigh as the other held her steadily against his chest.

Skylar sucked in a sharp breath as his large fingers started to caress her core gently, dipping in and out of her slowly, until her slick arousal started to drip down her leg.

She took as much as he gave greedily. She had never felt anything similar to it before, and she wanted so much more. It startled a rough laugh out of him, when she let the word slip from her lips, and he answered by giving more.

“More, lass?”

“More…” she moaned, and he pulsed another finger inside of her, the rhythm gathering more and more speed and depth.

The world narrowed to pulse and breath and the drag of his mouth where she was most sensitive, to the rhythm he found and kept, to the way her body learned that rhythm like a song and sang it back to him in the small, helpless sounds she tried and failed to swallow.

Her fingers curled in his hair, then gentled, then curled again just as his curled inside of her.

Heat gathered, coiled, brightened. She felt the slow climb and an impossible tightening as he said, “I have ye, lass. Let go,”

The relief that was already a promise as she let the earth slip from under her feet.

“Zander—” she breathed, half warning, half plea.

The crest came like a wave she hadn’t seen until she was already riding it. It was as powerful as tide, and yet gentle as a puddle as it spent itself through her.

She rode it shaking, breath catching, one hand covering her own mouth to keep from making a sound loud enough to summon saints or gossip. He held her tightly through it, his grip never faltering as he supported her weight in full.

Zander pressed a soft kiss against her lips, and then the base of her neck before he pulled her in, an arm secure at her back, his mouth soft against her temple while she knit herself back together. Her heart hammered. His was steadier, a drum she found herself matching.

“This is madness,” she whispered at last, though there was no heat in it now, only awe and a thin thread of fear.

“Aye,” he said, and she felt the smile against her hair.

He eased back just enough to see her face, and his expression made something warm settle beneath her ribs.

But Skylar felt the sense of duty thread back through her desire then, as it must. She drew a long breath, and another, and then found the ground again.

“We should stay with him tonight,” she said, voice low. “Wake Katie by turns. I’ll go to the surgery and finish what the bread couldnae. In the morning, we start the watching.”

He brushed a stray curl back behind her ear with a tenderness that felt indecent after the way they’d kissed.

“Go, healer,” he said quietly. “I’ll keep the world off ye as long as I can.”

She nodded, lifted her mouth to his once more because she could, because it was the kind of kiss that didn’t steal anything from the day to come, and then slipped away, gathering her apron, her sense, her purpose.

Outside in the corridor, the keep had gone to that hour when secrets travel light. Skylar moved through it with the taste of him still on her lips and the vow she’d made to a small boy steadying her steps.