Page 7 of A Highland Healer Captured (Scottish Daddies #3)

H eat still clung to the stones when Skylar woke, aching, warm, and confused. For a moment she didn’t know where she was. The ceiling above her was a tangle of blackened rafters and ivy, not the familiar beams of her room at MacLennan Keep. The scent of peat was replaced by damp moss and smoke.

“Hello?” she tried, her throat like barbs, reminding her of her incessant talking the night before.

Someone, blast him, had draped a heavy cloak over her while she slept. The wool smelled faintly of leather and rain and a spice she wasn’t familiar with. Beneath it, a sleeping mat cushioned her hip bones.

Close by, the fire still burned steady, banked but hot, with a wooden bucket brimming beside it as if inviting her to douse it when she pleased. On a makeshift line above the flames, her gown and shift hung dry, neatly arranged, the steam long since fled.

There were also three small pieces of bannock waiting on a flat stone. Skylar stared at them a beat, affronted and ravenous at once. She meant to scorn the offering, then demolished all three in short order.

The ruined chamber was empty. So was the doorway beyond. The murmur of masculine voices was missing, replaced by wind humming in the fractured arrow slits and the distant caw of crows.

Must still be asleep…

She sat up, every muscle complaining, and reached for the line.

Her clothes were indeed dry, warm from the last of the fire.

It felt indecent to accept the care of a captor.

Still, she tugged on stockings that someone else had hung for her, and buttoned up a bodice that a brute stranger had thought to place within arm’s reach.

She changed quickly, turned her back to the door out of habit, and scrubbed her face in the cold water from the bucket. The shock woke her fully, scouring the grit of fear from behind her eyes. She braided her hair tight and quick and knotted the end with a frayed thread she pulled from her sleeve.

Then she took stock of everything like the healer she was.

Cloak: Serviceable, if far too big.

Mat: Rollable.

Satchel: Where I’d stashed it. Nay vials missing.

Fire: Alive but obedient, ready to be darkened.

Bucket: Stubbornly full.

Skylar gathered the mat and cloak over one arm, lifted the bucket with the other, and swallowed hard. She doused the fire in a careful circle, the steam lifting in a hiss, and then she snatched up her satchel, cinched the cloak, and stepped into the corridor.

Silence met her again.

If this was a trick, she’d look the fool. If it wasn’t, she’d be daft not to take the opening.

It’s… empty?

Her heart thudded once, hard. Then twice, with sudden wild hope. Had they truly left her? Had Zander Harrison, devil of Strathcairn, kidnapper, and brute, simply gone?

“Not likely,” she muttered, but her feet were already moving.

Daisy stood where she’d been tethered last night, reins coiled neatly around a shattered column. The mare’s ears pricked as Skylar approached. “Good lass,” Skylar breathed, stroking the velvety nose. “We’re away, ye and I. Quiet now.”

She loosed the reins and set her boot to the stirrup in one swift, practiced motion, muscles singing with relief as she swung up. They could make for Edinburgh as they must only be half a day’s ride from —

An arrow hissed past Daisy’s ears, and Skylar flinched so hard she nearly tumbled over Daisy’s rump. The shaft split a fissure in the keep’s broken wall and quivered there, like a small, proud flag.

“Mornin’, mistress,” called a cheerful voice. One of Zander’s men melted out of the shadows by a tumble of stone, bow in hand and a grin like a fox. He wiggled the fingers of his free hand in a jaunty wave. “Mind the masonry.”

Skylar’s jaw dropped. Her fury rose like the tide.

She turned Daisy in a sharp circle and found that the previously empty courtyard now brimmed with men.

Two lounged on the fallen lintel like cats.

Another leaned against a half-collapsed buttress, picking his teeth with a sliver of wood.

Someone atop the wall lifted a hand in lazy salute.

And straight ahead, as Daisy came about, her reins went taut in a fist.

Zander stood there, bridle leather looped over his fingers, as steady as the ruined stones around him. He looked infuriatingly awake, infuriatingly dry, and infuriatingly pleased with himself. A shadow of a smile carved a notch at the corner of his mouth.

“If ye truly meant to escape,” he said, tugging Daisy closer until mare and man nearly touched, “ye ought to have tried it in the dead of night.”

“I did,” Skylar snapped. “Ye tackled me to the ground, remember? I’ve the bruises to prove it.”

His mouth quirked. “Then try a subtler hour next time.”

Skylar gaped at him, speechless for a heartbeat, then found her tongue. “Ye — ye bloody— yer all just bloody —” She could not choose between barbarians, demons, or oafs, so she chose all three in a scalding stream of Gaelic and Highland curses.

The trees might have blushed, but his men did not. Laughter pealed out from the stones, long and unkindly delighted.

Skylar’s ears burned scarlet. The humiliation stung worse than the lost chance. “Ye left me alone!” she accused. “Ye made it look like ye’d gone!”

“We did go,” said the archer with the fox grin. “Just… not far, Lady Skylar.”

Did they all ken who I was as well?

Zander released Daisy’s reins and he dramatically sighed as if bored, “Ye’ve two choices now,” he went on, voice even. “Ride yer own mare as part of me line. Or ride with me again.”

She blinked. She had expected taunts, not options. “Me own,” she said at once, chin tilting high. “And I swear —” She stopped herself and pasted innocence on like a veil. “I swear I’ll nae try to flee again.”

“Aye?” Zander’s eyes were half amused, half skeptical. “I prefer honest enemies to lying allies.”

“Then call me neither,” she muttered.

“Good,” he said. “Form up.”

His men did, as smoothly as water finding a riverbed.

They melted from stone and brush and ruin, falling into place with lazy competence that made her molars grind.

Daisy tossed her head once, but Skylar steadied her, set her jaw, and rode into the ring Zander left open for her.

When they moved out between the toppled gateposts, she watched for gaps like a hawk watches for mice.

There were none. Of course there were none.

They were too good at this.

She told herself she’d take the small victory anyway. Told herself that she’d won back a bit of dignity by sitting her own saddle. But the back of her neck prickled. The hair there seemed to know the difference between liberty and a longer leash.

“Keep yer eyes on the path,” Zander said quietly from a length to her left, as if he’d read the thought right off her skin. “It bites in daylight same as in dark.”

Skylar did not even deign to give him the slightest inclination that she had heard him. She fixed her gaze on the track, on the pale ribbon of road unspooling toward the west, and counted her breaths until the ruined keep shrank to a tooth against the morning sky.

She would not stop looking for a seam. Not for the rest of the ride — however long it might be.

The morning broke into afternoon as the woods opened to a vast rolling pasture, and Skylar felt her first real ache of difference. These lands were unfamiliar to her. The light looked wrong in the ruts. The birds’ calls wore peculiar notes. Even the sheep stared at her like strangers.

She swallowed it down. She would not give these savages the satisfaction of seeing her cowed.

The men rode in that infuriating dance of competence.

They never seemed to speak, but she could feel them talking with their bodies.

A lift of a chin sent one out and another in.

A twitch of reins tightened the ring around her, and a loosened hand let it breathe.

She was a fish in a net she could not even see until she swam against it.

She tested anyway. She slowed a hair until the man behind was forced to draw rein.

She pricked Daisy lightly and drifted right, as if following a bend in the track.

The outrider there closed the space without looking at her.

She drifted left, and Zander’s destrier filled that gap like a wall moving sideways, his grey gaze pretending interest in the sky.

Skylar’s teeth clicked together. “Nae even pretending ye’ll give me a chance?” she asked under her breath.

“Ye’ve had two,” Zander said dryly. “Ye’ll nae enjoy the outcome of third either, I assure ye.”

She wanted to tell him she hoped he choked on his own smugness. Instead she sat tall, soothed Daisy with her knees, and kept her eyes on the silver thread of a river far off that seemed to run in the same direction they did, as if mocking the very idea of escape with its tame, obliging course.

By the time the sun crept past its highest, her shoulders ached from holding them straight. When the land finally lifted ahead in a gentle swell and a dark line of woodland spread like a collar at its base, one of the riders, she hadn’t marked, lifted a fist.

His announcement rang through the wood. “We’re back,” he said, flatly.

She jerked a look at him. The rider had a face she didn’t know well. It was a blunt jaw, rain-dark lashes, the air of a man who saw much and said little. The man touched two fingers to his brow and gave her a look that wasn’t unkind.

Dejection scraped her breastbone like a dull knife.

Helplessness flared hard enough she wanted to bite it back like bile.

She was Skylar Dunlop, daughter of Laird MacLennan, who never backed down from thunder nor from mothers’ grief nor from men’s arrogance.

She would not break because she’d lost once or even twice.

But the ache of it sat hot behind her eyes all the same.

“Head up,” came Zander’s voice, low enough only she heard. “If ye intend to vex me for years, start as ye mean to go on.”

She shot him a side glare that should have set his cloak alight and decided not to give him the satisfaction of slumping.

They crested the rise and the world changed. Stone shouldered up from the land like something grown rather than built.

Strathcairn Keep.

A murmur moved along the line of riders, a tightening of posture, a subtle ease as men came within reach of their own hearths again.

The closer they rode, the more the world filled with signs of life.

A boy with a stick drove geese, a woman drew laundry from a line strung between hawthorns, a dog ran itself mad with the joy of chasing hooves until its owner whistled it back.

The drawbridge rattled as it settled. The portcullis teeth grinned overhead. As they clattered into the shadowed throat of the gatehouse, a different sound met Skylar — the ripple of whispers.

The words blurred in unfamiliar cadences, but their interest was plain. Skylar’s jaw locked.

She’d never felt so obviously apart in her life.

Zander’s men began to spill into patterns of habit. The horses put away, gear accounted for, messages peeled off and sent toward this door or that. Zander himself turned his destrier without effort and put himself at Skylar’s knee.

“Daenae even think —,” she said before he could speak, not sure what she meant by it and meaning everything.

He only tipped his head toward a stair cut into the inner wall. “Come along, then, lass.”

She slid from Daisy, chin high, satchel tight to her side. The gravity of him pulled her forward like the waves pull a ship.

As they crossed the yard, a voice from the shadows tossed a jest in the unfamiliar, rough tongue. It made two men snort as if they’d swallowed their laughter.

Skylar shot Zander a glare. “What did he say?”

“That ye’ve hair like a saint’s painted in a chapel,” Zander lied so smoothly it sounded like truth.

She caught the flicker at the corner of his mouth and knew it was a deflection. He was grateful, she realized abruptly, that she could not understand them.

“Coward,” she muttered, and he huffed the ghost of a laugh.

He led her up a turn of steps to a door banded in iron. It swung inward onto a small chamber revealing a bed with clean linen, a chest, a hearth already kindling, a pitcher and basin, a narrow window arrow-slit widened long ago into something human.

He stepped back.

She stepped in. “A dungeon?”

The door shut between them with a finality that rattled her bones. She spun for the latch, but it did not yield. The lock clunked home. Her fists struck the oak once, twice, thrice.

“Zander Harrison! Ye tiresome brute!” she shouted, fury filling the room to its corners. “Ye open this door this instant!”

He said nothing from the passage. She heard only his tread diminishing, his voice, low and clipped, giving orders to someone waiting.

Skylar thumped her forehead once, hard, against the wood. Then she dragged in breath, squared her shoulders, and started cataloging the room as she had the ruins that morning. If she had to break out, she would. If there was a way to make a lock regret being born, she’d find it.

She needed to get to Ariella. She must. She wasn’t done fighting.

Not by half.