Page 38 of A Highland Healer Captured (Scottish Daddies #3)

O utside, voices rose and fell, the keep settling into the shape of a house that had survived being tested. Inside, the laird breathed. She counted the beats that said he belonged to the living: in, two, three; out, two.

She wiped his brow, the blood from his beard, the smear along his jaw where Marcus’s knuckles had kissed him. Her thumb lingered a fraction too long at the corner of his mouth. She swallowed and pulled it away.

“Ye’ve a gift for choosing the worst possible timing,” she told the ceiling, because looking at his mouth while saying it would unravel her.

“Ye find me in a storm. Ye steal me like a cursed brigand. Ye make me stay when I’d sworn to go.

And now ye fall when I’ve more to say than any decent woman ought. ”

She set a clean cloth to catch the seep under the stitches and tied it with sure knots. His breath rasped once; her body sprang toward him without asking, palm to his chest. The rise and fall steadied again. She sagged back onto the low stool.

“All right then,” she said under her breath, as if they were in the small kitchen at Dunlop Keep, as if she were scolding him for leaving boots in the entry. “If ye willnae wake, I’ll speak for both of us, and ye can argue later.”

She poured water, wiped her hands, and began the foolish work of talking sense into air.

“First, thank ye for the bloody letter.” She huffed in a low voice to mimic what Zander sounded like. “I kent ye’d just leave me with goodbye in a letter instead of tellin’ me… coward.”

She set her elbows on her knees, hands laced, chin bowed over them. “Coward!” she replied, to herself. “I’ve mended ye just now. Daenae test me, I’ll sew ye shut with nettle fibre and make ye itch ‘til spring.”

He didn’t smile. He didn’t do anything but breathe. She decided that she was right. A smile spread across her own face.

Then, she went on, softer, “I meant it. I’m stayin’. Now I have to because ye’ve gotten yerself all sliced up like a Kirn pie.”

Her own words scraped her throat thin. She poured herself a swallow of ale gone flat and swallowed it anyway.

His lashes flickered. Only that. She watched the small movement as if it were an oath.

She checked the shoulder again: the edges didn’t gape, the seep moderate, the skin warm but not angry. She rolled him just enough to see the ribs; he groaned, and she soothed without thinking. “Aye, I ken, poor beast. Ye’ll live to be cross about it.”

She took a clean strip and wiped dried blood from his forearm, then another for his hands.

She held the right in both of hers a long moment, eyes tracing the nicks and scars of a life spent holding steel and people together.

“Ye could’ve died,” she told the fingers.

“And I would’ve had to carry that out of here on me own back. ”

The room answered with the small pop of a sap pocket in the hearth.

“Right,” she said briskly. “Let’s practice, then.

I’ll say my piece, and ye’ll say what ye’d say if ye were a sensible man with the sense to be awake.

” She straightened her shoulders, smoothed her skirt, and pitched her voice wry.

“Laird, I’ve decided ye’re the most exasperatin’, pride-struck, mule-stubborn man God ever threw into a glen. ”

She made his answer again in a gravel that was not his but tried for it. “‘Aye, lass. But I’m here.’”

“Barely,” she retorted. “Bleeding on me nice clean bandages as if linen grew on broom.”

“‘Ye’ll scold me after ye look at me mouth again,’” she had him say, and then she clapped a hand over her own face and hissed, “Och, shut up , Skylar.” A ragged laugh shook loose. “Ye see what ye make me do? I’m chattin’ like a madwoman to a slab of a man who kens fine and well I’m soft for him.”

A floorboard creaked. She spun, heart slamming her throat.

Mason leaned against the jamb— When had the door unbarred? It must have been when I’d sent for more cloth. She chastised herself for the lapse—and the big man lifted both hands in a peaceable gesture.

“Daenae mind me,” he said, voice gentled in a way she’d never heard from him in the yard. “Just a wall with ears.”

“How much of that did ye hear?” she demanded, mortified heat climbing her neck.

“Oh, only the part where ye promised to itch him with nettles,” Mason said, mouth tilting. “I like that one. Puts fear in a man.”

She folded her arms and arched a brow, daring him to make a jest of sorrow. He didn’t. His gaze flicked from Zander to her and back, something like fondness and fatigue both softening the crags of his face.

“Ye ken,” he said at last, quiet, “if he were awake, he’d be tellin’ ye the exact same.”

She snorted before she could stop it. “Och, aye? And how in God’s name would ye ken what he’d say?”

“Because he’s told me,” Mason said simply. “In so many words.”

“So many words?” she echoed, skeptical in spite of the sudden stupid flutter under her ribs.

“Aye.” Mason scratched his beard. “Ye ken how he is with ‘em.”

She did. Which was precisely why her knees went a little loose.

Mason tipped his head toward the bed. “He’ll keep, thanks to ye.

I’ve a rotation on the wall and a head on a spike that needs watchin’ so the fools daenae try some rite of their own.

” His mouth soured. “Should ye need anythin’, ye shout.

If any man’s slow answerin’, I’ll slow his supper for a week. ”

Skylar’s spine straightened at that, but she nodded once, gratefully. “Go,” she said. “And Mason?—”

“Aye?”

“Thank ye.” Her voice thinned on the last word; she cleared it.

Mason’s eyes warmed, and he slipped back into the corridor, drawing the door to with a quiet click.

The room seemed larger without him and smaller at once. Skylar stepped back to the bed, checked the dressings again, laid her palm on Zander’s chest and counted a hundred steady beats. She drew a blanket to his waist; the rest of him she left bare to air the bandages.

“Sleep,” she told him, just above a whisper. “I’ll hold the watch.”

She set her stool near the hearth, but she did not take her eyes off him.

When the fire sank she fed it; when the wind jogged the shutter she looked up, knife within reach.

Sometimes she spoke—nonsense, plans, the inventory she’d send boys for at dawn.

Sometimes she was quiet. Once, near morning, she let her head tip sideways to the bed and her fingers fold around his, and she slept in the space between two of his slow breaths.

When the first pale seam of light found the slit of the shutter and laid a line across the floorboards to the bed, she was awake again, stiff and grimy and oddly calm—the kind of calm a healer grew when the worst thing had been headed off and a dozen merely hard things waited their turn.

“Right,” she told the day, and squeezed Zander’s hand once before she stood. “We’ll see what shape ye wake in, laird. And then we’ll see if I’m strong enough to leave ye.”

His fingers twitched under her palm. Just that. Just enough to give her one more hour of courage.

Zander woke at noon and insisted on walking by evening.

He was a terrible patient, which Skylar had suspected and had proof of, and there was no point spending breath she’d need later.

She bound him, fed him, and set men at his elbow, and when he shook them off with a look she could not in fairness call gentle, she set another pair two paces behind to pretend they were going her way.

He was everywhere and nowhere at once after that: on the wall-walk conferring with archers; in the yard with the smith, his voice low and clipped; in the hall with Fergus and Tamhas arguing placements for the stalls in the final days of Kirn as if the world were not just now trying to set his keep alight.

Skylar told herself it was natural he would be scarce—wounded pride and wounded shoulder both required occupying—but something in his manner troubled her. He was correct with her; he was grateful; he was careful not to touch her. If she stepped near, he was already stepping away to the next duty.

Her pride said let him . Her chest said follow .

By late afternoon she chose a path that kept her from both.

She moved through the surgery, the hall, the yard with basins, salves, orders, and the kind of clean voice that steadies men more than music.

When she passed the spike in the courtyard, its prize swallowed flies and sunlight without comment.

She did not look at it more than a heartbeat.

She wished it were more; she wished it were less.

She wished the laird had left room in his day to be a man with a mouth and not just a sword.

Katie woke fully after sunset and tried to sit bolt upright, which earned her a scolding and broth. “Ye’ll live if ye don’t act daft,” Skylar told her, tears threatening to undo everything she’d tied neatly. “I’ll fetch ye a mirror tomorrow and ye can curse the swelling at leisure.”

“Daenae fetch me a mirror,” Katie mumbled. “Fetch me yer patience.”

“I’ve none left,” Skylar said, and kissed her brow again to prove it wasn’t true.

The calm cracked when a runner found her near the stair. “Lady Skylar,” he said, breathless with the kind of news boys know is bigger than they are, “the MacLennan standard… it’s at the gate.”

For a moment everything inside her fell very quiet.

Then her legs moved of their own accord.

She crossed the yard—past men mending rope, past the place where Marcus was becoming another kind of lesson—and took the inner stair two at a time, straight to Zander’s study.

He was there, of course he was, shoulder bound under clean linen, hair still wet where someone sensible had made him wash the blood off his face. He stood at the table with the map rolled half back, reading something that wasn’t the map at all.

“Ye sent for me faither,” she said without greeting, without grace, and knew as the words left her mouth she had no right to make them a charge.

Zander did not start.