Page 26 of A Highland Healer Captured (Scottish Daddies #3)

S kylar tied her cloak close at the throat the next morning, and glanced down the passage to be sure Katie had settled with Grayson’s slate and bird book. “An hour,” she’d said. “Nay more. If he stirs, send for the laird. I’ll just be out past the gardens to the market wagons.”

“Aye, I ken,” Katie had answered, eyes kind and sharp in the same breath. “Go get yer bits. I’ll mind the wee hawk.”

Now the yard caught Skylar’s face with cold and color, and Cora fell in at her side as if she’d been waiting there all morning. The lass had a small basket hooked in her elbow and a list pinned under her thumb with the care of a clerk.

“Ye’re nae searchin’ for anything too expensive, are ye?” Cora asked, tone light, eyes measuring. “The laird said ye might want vinegar and lint, but I reckon ye’ll come back with half the hedge.”

“I like hedges,” Skylar said. “They save bairns more than saints do.”

Cora’s mouth ticked.

They crossed beneath the gate arch and onto the lane that ran toward the lower crofts.

Two of Mason’s men pretended to be discussing a broken strap thirty paces back; neither of the women pretended not to notice.

A milk cart rattled by; the driver lifted fingers from the reins without quite bowing—a courtesy to a stranger under the laird’s wing.

“How is he?” Cora asked, too casually. “I’m barred, like the rest. Feels queer to be shut from the solar when me nettles have lived there all this time.”

Skylar’s throat tightened around the answer she’d rehearsed.

Lie, she told herself. Lie for the sake of the game that saves him.

“He’s… nae better. Maybe worse,” she muttered, her tongue thick.

“Nights are rough. His chest catches.” She shrugged too sharply, a healer’s gesture turned into a lie, and hated herself for how clumsy it felt.

Cora’s eyes slid sideways, quick as a swallow. “Aye?” Her tone said she did not buy goods by the first price offered. “He laughed yesterday when I stood out in the courtyard, under the window and asked Katie for a thread color through the glass. Laughter is a poor companion to dyin’.”

Skylar kept walking. “Laughter has kept more folk alive than any tincture has,” she returned, and left it there. Guilt pricked under her cloak like a twig. She could not tell the lass that the keep was a snare now, baited with cups and honey.

She also couldn’t tell her that the boy was improving faster than ever, because he’s not really ill, but was being poisoned.

They reached the croft strip where market wagons stopped on their way to the village green—half-stalls open to the wind, the smell of yeast and peat smoke, a woman turning oatcakes on a girdle, a boy calling out about onions as if he were selling jewels.

“Vinegar first,” Skylar said, claiming the small practicals before she could be stolen by bigger thoughts. She tested the bite with her nose, chose the sharper cask, and paid with coin. “For burns an’ boasters,” she told Cora, who nodded solemnly at the joke as if it were a law.

A stall of auld herbs came next—witch hazel tied in neat bundles, yarrow dried pale, a ragged heap of Iceland moss that looked like poor men’s lace. Skylar sank her fingers into it, lifted, and let it fall. “It’ll do,” she said. “If ye rinse it thrice.”

“Like gossip,” Cora said.

“Gossip rinsed thrice is still gossip,” Skylar returned, but her mouth twitched.

They moved between stalls—lint, a bolt of coarse cloth for slings, a pinch of gentian root wrapped tight in paper.

Cora pointed out a peddler with needles cheap as sin; Skylar refused, buying better ones from a woman who did no business on lies.

“Needles touch blood,” she said. “Buy the ones that daenae break when the hand trembles.”

“Aye,” Cora murmured. “Ye’d scold the pope, I dare say.”

“I would, but I’d still set his bones,” Skylar said.

They reached a barrow of jars then—honey, preserves, treacle, cordials with sprigs of this and that caught like memories in amber.

Skylar’s stomach… shifted. Not with hunger.

With an old echo—the faint, unpleasant sweetness she’d sworn she’d only imagined the other night.

She put her hand to a jar, lifted, sniffed.

Honey. Only honey. Her heart eased and then scolded itself for being daft.

“Fine stuff,” said a voice smooth as cream.

Skylar looked up.

The man who owned the voice stood too near; strangers always did. His cloak was decent, boots muddied from honest travel, beard trimmed better than most men bothered. Not tall; but there was a way he filled the space that argued he wished he were.

“Aye,” Skylar said, stepping to make enough room to breathe. “Quite.”

“From the south hives,” he went on, as if she’d asked. “Wildflower. Keeps a child sweet in a bad night.”

“A spoon of honey keeps a child awake,” Skylar answered, a smile tucked in where it could excuse the edge. “Ye’re sellin’ or sayin’?”

“Merely… admirin’.” His gaze went franker than she liked; she felt it touch her face and then the parcel at her elbow like a hand she’d slap away if it were touchin’ anything but air. “Marcus,” he added, offering a name like a coin tossed to a poor man. “From up Braeloch way.”

Behind her, Cora went very still.

Skylar cocked her head. “Do ye give names the way folk hand out peppermints?”

“Folk like to ken who’s admir—” He cut off, eyes shifting to Cora, who had taken one bare half-step behind Skylar’s shoulder. Not hiding. Putting herself at angle. Defensive as a cat that has decided it’ll fight if pressed.

“Ye all right, lass?” Skylar asked without looking back.

“I’m grand,” Cora said, too bright. To the man, she said firmly, “Move on.”

He smiled as if he enjoyed disobedience. “Have we met?”

“Nae if ye want yer teeth,” Cora said, and the humor in it could not hide the tiny quake in her hands where they gripped the basket.

Skylar caught the quiver and filed it where she kept things people told her bodies before their mouths did.

Afraid ?

Nay — alert.

Afraid and alert both.

The man named Marcus lifted his hands a fraction, a gesture that meant peace on some men and I’m counting exits on others.

“Nay harm meant, lassies” he said. “I like to ken who keeps the laird’s healer company these days.

” His eyes went back to her. Probing silently, curiously, and complacently in a way that made her spine lengthen. “Folk talk.”

“Folk always do,” Skylar said evenly. “They’re weary of their own houses.”

“Aye.” He took a slow step back. “Good markets to ye, mistress.”

“Good distance to ye,” Cora muttered.

He half-bowed, turned, and wandered toward the girdle cakes as if he’d never stirred a hair on a head. The basket’s bent handle creaked under Cora’s fingers.

“Ye ken him?” Skylar asked. The lane carried other voices—men arguing over fleeces, a child wailing about a dropped bannock—but her own felt loud in her head.

Cora’s mouth went small. “I ken he’s nae a regular here. Vendors here have to earn yer trust before we bring anything they’re sellin’ into the keep.”

“Kind enough,” Skylar said carefully but shrugged anyway.

“Oh, aye,” The lass looked up at her, the sharpness back in her gaze. “We’ve what we came for. Let’s be nae on his path when he circles back again.”

“Ye think he’ll circle?”

“Men like that always do,” Cora said matter-of-factly, and started walking as if she could pull the keep toward them by will.

They kept to the hedge shade returning, not running, not dawdling; just two women with a basket and a list and a feeling they did not want to feed. The guards back along the lane lifted their chins and melted from the strap-talk into motion, unseen by everyone who wasn’t meant to see.

At the gate, Cora found speech the way a woman finds a needle dropped in rushes: quick and quiet. “Daenae tell the laird I looked like a rabbit.”

“Ye looked like a cat with a notion,” Skylar said.

“Hmph.” Cora’s chin tilted. “Ye’ll nae tell him?”

Skylar considered how the day had shaped up.

All at once, she knew more than she had ever thought she would know about Zander.

She was given a dirk to protect herself, and a room to stay in.

She’s even just been asked to stay Grayson’s pulse under her fingers, the scent of the honey that had come to nothing this time, the stranger’s name stuck like a fishbone.

“I’ll tell him the things that matter to the lad’s breath,” she said. “The rest I’ll think on till it fits.”

Cora seemed to accept that, for good or ill. “I’ll put the vinegar up. The needles, too. Marcus—” She swallowed the name like bad medicine and changed it. “Mason’ll like to ken ye didnae buy cheap.”

“Aye,” Skylar said, smiling because it was easier than showing what rubbed at her. “He’d scold me worse than ye.”

Cora’s mouth softened. “Nobody scolds worse than me.”

“Except me,” Skylar said.

They descended to the surgery, unpacked in purposeful silence.

Skylar decanted the vinegar, labeled the jar herself because letters steadied her, set the good needles in a small tin, shook the moss fine and set it to rinse.

Work healed most ills—hers too. Still, as she washed her hands, she caught the scent on her skin: honey, vinegar, a hint of something new.

Star anise? Vanilla? Hmm…

“Cora,” she said, because sense and instinct had been friends longer than men had. “If ye ever meet a man twice and the second time feels worse than the first, ye come fetch me. Nae because I’m a laird’s woman. Because I’m a woman that bites.”

Cora’s smile flashed quick and real. “I’ll fetch ye,” she said. “And I like hedges, too.”

“Good,” Skylar said, and went to the solar with her basket feeling heavier than any list could explain.

Grayson slept. Katie hummed. Skylar set the clean tin and the vinegar on the small shelf by the window and breathed once, long. “We’ll do this,” she whispered, to the boy, to the honey, to the man with a borrowed name. “We’ll do it careful.”