Page 40 of A Highland Healer Captured (Scottish Daddies #3)

S kylar’s skirts swiped at her shins, boots hitting hard.

“Skylar!” her father roared behind her. It was the old thunder that once stopped a whole brood of daughters at the stair.

But she didn’t stop.

Her satchel slipped from her shoulder and thumped into the dust, forgotten.

She ran.

Legs burning. Tears stinging her eyes.

Zander moved the instant she did, as if his body had been strung to the same wire as hers. He left the shadow of the gate—broad, blood-banded, unyielding—and came at her at a long, ground-eating stride.

They met where the divots from carriage wheels crossed the flat of the yard, and he caught her up without a word, arms banding tight around her waist, lifting her clean off her feet. Her hands went to his shoulders; her brow met his; the world steadied.

“I couldnae—” she gasped, breathless with the run and the rightness, “I couldnae go. Nae like that. Nae?—”

“What changed?” His voice was rough as new-cut timber, but there was hope in it, fierce and terrified.

“Ariella,” she said, breath hitching into laughter that was near a sob.

“She’s well. She healed. I swore I’d go for her, but she doesnae need me now.

And I—Zander, I was comin’ back anyway. I was.

I swear it. I left the letter because I had to, but I meant to return.

I—” She swallowed, pulled back enough to see him. “I love ye.”

The words shocked them both with how clean they rang. She felt the tremor rip through him as if it were her own.

His hands framed her face, thumbs rough on her cheeks, eyes searching as if the right answer could be found among freckles and windburn. “Say it again,” he demanded softly, and she did, first on a breath, then on a fuller voice that didn’t shake: “I love ye.”

“I love ye,” he answered, no hesitation, no guard, nothing left to hide behind. “God keep me, I do. I tried nae—” He swallowed, jaw working. “I failed.”

She laughed, water bright. “Good. Then we’ll both be failures.”

Hamish’s boots hit the dirt behind her; Skylar turned, breath still fast. Her father stood five paces off, hands on hips, eyes hot beneath the iron-gray thatched over his brow.

But his mouth twitched, and that was all the permission she needed. “Ye done?” he asked, gruff and fond and ready to swing if needed.

“Nay,” Zander said, not looking away from Skylar, “but we’ll say for now .”

Hamish snorted. “Ye’ll nae ruin me daughter’s reputation in this yard. Ye hear? We’ll discuss this, as men do—” his eyes landed on his daughter, then. “And we will exchange words as well, lass.”

He lifted a hand in a short salute at Zander—respect offered without ceremony—and turned to bellow orders at the MacLennans and the Strathcairn men alike.

In the space of a few breaths, the yard shifted from spectacle to work: horses watered, barrels rolled, benches dragged back from the press of bodies.

Within the hour, Zander had sent for water and bread and made a place of honor for Hamish at the long board.

There was no lavish Kirn cheer yet—just the grateful, weary food of survivors—but Skylar watched the set of Zander’s shoulders ease at the sight of her father eating in his hall.

She slipped a hand under the table to squeeze his knee; he covered her fingers with his big palm and left them there.

The talk she dreaded was put on hold.

Fergus announced from the doorsill that the council stood ready to proceed with the trial, and the hall shifted again—tables shoved back, benches lined along the walls, a cleared space by the hearth for judgment.

Cora was brought up from the cellars, pale as paper, hair tangled, wrists tied in front so she wouldn’t shame herself by stumbling. Skylar’s belly tightened at the sight of the wee bundle of a lass who had threaded poison through a home with the gullibility that follows love.

Zander stood. “We’ll hear her,” he said, not loud, not soft. Hamish watched, arms folded, a laird measuring another.

Cora tried to speak and failed. Her mouth worked, but sound would not come. She shook, small, miserable, eyes darting to Skylar, to Zander, to the empty space where Marcus’s shadow still seemed to stand.

Skylar moved before anyone else could. “May I?” she asked Zander under her breath, and when he gave a grim nod, she crossed the cleared patch of rushes and knelt, so her eyes were level with Cora’s.

“Lass,” she said, gentle, “look at me.”

Cora’s gaze jerked to hers.

“Ye’re breathin’. Ye’re here. That matters. We’ll get through the tellin’. One sentence at a time.” She reached to take the girl’s bound hands; when the guard began to object, Zander’s quiet “Leave them” froze him silent.

“I…” Cora swallowed hard. “I thought he was right. I thought blood meant right.” Her eyes bloomed wet, but her voice steadied the way a bridge steadies once you trust your weight to it.

“I was wrong. I kent it the first night I watched the bairn sleep after I’d done what I’d done.

” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m sorry. ”

The hall listened. What else could it do? Zander’s men had bled beside her. Katie, bandaged and wan, had bled because of her. Grayson’s name was a soft current shifting through the room without being spoken.

“Ye poisoned him,” Fergus said, not cruel, just true.

“Aye,” Cora whispered. “Because he bade me, and I was weak enough to obey. I would take it back. I would take it all back with me own blood if I could.”

Skylar squeezed her hands once. Zander’s voice rang out, “And last night?”

“I meant to run with him,” Cora blurted.

“Marcus said he would storm the yard and cut anythin’ that stood in his way.

He was meant to kill Grayson. I thought if I stole the boy first, I could save him.

It was daft.” Her lip trembled. “But it was the only good notion I had left in a head I’d filled with bad ones. ”

There was a silence.

Then Zander nodded once, the slightest dip of a man who had shouldered more weight than even he was built to carry. “I believe ye,” he said.

Murmurs. A hissed “Laird,” from Tamhas. A twitch from Fergus that might have been agreement or pain.

Zander lifted a hand and the hall quieted. “Believin’ is not forgivin’ the deed,” he went on. “It’s acknowledgin’ the truth as it stands in the mouth that speaks it.”

He looked to Katie. “Do ye speak?”

Katie swayed but lifted her chin. “She was at the boy’s bed, aye. But when it came to it, she didnae have the blade to him. She was lifting him out of the bed when I came in. And I’m still standin’ because of Lady Skylar. I’ll nae feed the gallows with a lass who finally chose right.”

All eyes swung to Grayson, who clung to Mason’s hand at the back of the hall. The boy swallowed, small chest puffing with the effort of being brave in public. “I daenae want her in the kitchens,” he said bluntly, “and I daenae want her by me bed. But I daenae want her dead.”

Hamish blew out a breath and nodded to himself, as if a verdict had just been delivered by the only judge who mattered. “Well said, laddie.”

Zander turned back to Cora. “Hear me,” he said. “Ye will nae hang in me yard. Nor will yer head be on a spike next to yer braither’s. Ye will nae bleed for Marcus’s sins. But ye cannae stay here.” Cora flinched, and Skylar braced her hands more firmly over the girl’s.

Zander’s voice gentled, not in pardon, but in pity. “This house will never be safe for ye again. Nor ye for it. I banish ye from Strathcairn lands. I’ll see ye given a small purse and a place on a cart headin’ south at dawn. Ye’ll nae turn north again while I live.”

Cora’s face crumpled—relief and grief, both too big for one body. “Aye,” she whispered. “Thank ye.” Then, to Skylar, raw with sincerity: “I’m sorry.”

“I ken it,” Skylar said. She rose and, because she could, because grace costs less than blood and buys more, she folded the lass into a brief, fierce hug. “Be better than the men who raised ye.”

Cora nodded into her shoulder, then let herself be led away.

The trial broke like a storm that never quite struck—low thunder, flashes of temper, then quiet. Men drifted to work that had waited all day—horses to rub down, children to find, messes to scrub with sand and vinegar.

Hamish clapped Zander’s shoulder, hard enough to make Skylar wince for the stitches beneath the clean shirt. “We’ll speak at supper,” he said. “But for now—ye’ve a keep that’s still standin’, man. That’s plain work well done.”

“Aye,” Zander said, voice low and worn.

Skylar slid her hand into his again. He looked down at their joined fingers as if they were a thing made by two craftsmen who’d never met and somehow cut their dovetails to the same measure. His sigh hitched in the middle and came out as the beginning of a laugh.

“Stay,” she said softly, the smallest smile tugging at her mouth. “I mean me. I’m stayin’.”

“Aye,” he said, voice breaking into warmth for the first time since the gate. “Aye, lass.” He lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles in front of everyone. The hall pretended not to see, which is another way of giving a blessing.

They saw Hamish watching, eyes like a man tracking weather he cannot change but might yet live through. They saw Katie tilt her head and wipe a tear with the heel of her palm. They saw Grayson grin, the kind that bruises healers’ hearts because it is so pure.

“Right,” Zander said a little louder, squeezing Skylar’s fingers once before letting go. “We’ve a Kirn supper to finish, a head on a spike to keep the crows honest, and a glen to show that men who think themselves storms are only weather. To work.”

And the keep, battered and breathing, went on.

Kirn supper swelled like a tide that refused to be turned back by blood.

The long boards went up again. Barrels thumped open.

Trenchers steamed with meat and neeps. Someone found the piper and someone else found their feet.

Children slept under benches, the safest tents in the world.

Men who had spent the day as wolves remembered how to be men again.