Page 15 of Here in Your Arms (Far From Home: A Scottish Time-Travel Romance #10)
“Ye’re in luck, lass,” Brody said. “He’ll nae die today.”
A hand appeared in her periphery, and Tiernan’s fingers slid away from hers as he clasped Brody’s, who helped him to his feet.
Being as she was nearly on top of him, Rose scrambled to get out of the way.
Tiernan grunted but shoved himself upright with a grimace, swaying only slightly. Holding the hand of Tiernan’s uninjured arm, Brody braced him as he gained his feet.
“Lass said the trouble started back at the narrow pass,” Brody remarked, the two lairds standing close, talking low. “A rockslide?”
“Aye,” Tiernan responded. “The recent rains abetted those bandits we were hunting.”
“What did ye ken of them?” Brody asked, his gaze sweeping over the arrowhead poking through below Tiernan’s shoulder, his expression scarcely changing so that Rose imagined it wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before, better or worse.
Tiernan shrugged, grimacing a bit as he shifted his feet. “Nae much. The dust blinded us. Three down, they are, but from how many I canna say. I expect more bodies’ll be found near the pass.”
Brody nodded grimly, neither man saying aloud that they might well find MacRae bodies, too.
“Ye and Rose get on to Dunmara,” Brody suggested. “Take half dozen with ye. Me and the others will ride that way, see what we can find.”
Tiernan nodded, cautioning Brody, “They ken the area well, though I dinna ken how.”
“Made themselves comfortable while we were gone over the winter?” Brody guessed.
“Could be.”
“Go on, then. Rory will take ye.”
“Aye.”
Those who had dismounted began to mount again. A horse was walked forward to Tiernan.
“You shouldn’t ride,” Rose objected. “I asked that a cart be brought—”
“I’ll nae take to the cart, lass,’ Tiernan informed her, “nae so long as I can ride.”
Rose slapped her hands on her hips. “An hour ago, you could barely walk,” she reminded him.
Taking the reins from one of Brody’s men, Tiernan threw a pale glance her way. “Rest seems to have done me guid.”
“Or the loss of blood has made you delirious,” she grumbled. Rose glared at him, deciding that arguing further was fruitless. With Brody’s help, Tiernan was already pulling himself into the saddle, his jaw locked against the pain.
She turned, wondering who she might ride with, now that Brody would be headed in the opposite direction.
“Rose,” Tiernan called her, turning her around again. “Ye have the dagger?”
She nodded and then stepped forward as Tiernan held out his hand, pulling the leather sheath and knife from her waistband. Tiernan took it and tucked it into his belt and then reached his hand down again to her.
“What?” Rose asked, confused. She didn’t have any other things that belonged to him.
“Ye ride with me, Rose,” he instructed.
“I can’t ride with you—your shoulder. What if I bump it or—”
“Ye’ll bring nae more harm than was already done,” he told her.
She didn’t waver, didn’t want to cause him any more pain, even accidentally. “There’s plenty with whom I can hitch a ride.”
“Ye ride with me, Rose,” he repeated, his tone advising he would have it no other way.
Still hesitating, Rose glanced at the cluster of men preparing to ride, waiting on her and Tiernan. Though no one offered her a seat on their horse, none of them seemed particularly alarmed by the prospect of her joining them—no quickly averted glances, no half-hidden frowns or glaring suspicion like she’d grown used to at Druimlach. The MacIntyre men weren’t shaken by her resemblance to Margaret, at least not outwardly.
Rose faced Tiernan again, wondering if he was trying to spare her feelings. “You’re afraid no one wants to ride with a ghost,” she guessed quietly, finally putting her hand in his, not quite willing to find out if it might be true.
Tiernan gave a low snort and rolled his eyes as he backed up in the saddle. Rose set her foot to his boot and bounced up and he pulled, sliding her leg over the saddle in front of him. Though she was cognizant and careful regarding the gruesome wound at his shoulder, she plopped down rather roughly, though Tiernan’s arm secured her swiftly enough.
“Or maybe you want me here to keep yourself upright?” She suggested, a small grin emerging—funny how even now, when everything should still feel uncertain, it suddenly didn’t. Now that Tiernan was recovered, now that he was lucid and strong enough to ride and now surrounded by allies and so close to Dunmara, where Tiernan would receive medical care, the weight of anxiety and the acute concern lifted, and a lightness rose in her chest. “Maybe you want a little ballast to keep you from tipping over?”
At first he only gave her a “hmph,” as he urged the horse into motion, following the smaller party making for Dunmara. After a moment, Tiernan’s breath came warm against her ear as he leaned in. “Wounded or nae, lass, I trust nae one but myself to keep ye safe.”
The words settled over her like a cloak against the cold, warming her in a way nothing else in this century had managed to do. But she’d be a fool to read anything into it, she decided quickly enough. He was, after all, escorting her to Dunmara today, removing her from Druimlach, away from him, likely pleased to be washing his hands of her.
“I think you insult the capabilities of the MacIntyre men,” Rose said instead, her grin evaporating.
“I dinna. I say nae more than what is true. These lads are green—Brody’d be the first to tell ye. He’s only just begun rebuilding his army in the last year or so. Some of these lads have nae a drop of bluid on their blades.”
They rode in silence for a bit until Rose felt him shift behind her. Worrying the he was weakening again, she laid her hand over his at her waist. “Are you all right?”
“Aye,” was his brief answer.
“Does it...does it hurt terribly? It looks like it would.” She wasn’t sure how he wasn’t passed out or much weaker at this point.
There was a pause, and then a faint exhale through his nose, not quite a scoff. “It willna kill me,” he said. “More than once now, in your company, I’ve been impaled by something sharp and unwelcome.”
Her lips parted with surprise. She wasn’t entirely sure how to respond. The statement lingered in the air between them, quiet and strangely charged. She told herself he meant the obvious, the arrow today and several days ago when she’d found him thrown from his horse, bleeding with a broken branch lodged in his arm. Those were facts. Tangible wounds. And yet... she couldn’t help but wonder if he meant something else entirely.
Something sharp and unwelcome.
Was that her?
Did he mean her presence? Her resemblance to Margaret? The memories she awakened? Had she somehow wounded him simply by existing—by arriving in his world?
She didn’t ask. She told herself she didn’t care. Tiernan was injured but would be fine. He might return to Druimlach this very day or the next. Whatever tumult her presence had caused would be done. Possibly, she would never see him again.
The silence stretched again, and Rose felt no need to fill it. She only shifted slightly, allowing her hand to slide away from his.
***
Tiernan MacRae was, without question, a terrible patient.
From the moment he was laid in the bed at Dunmara, bloodied, pale, and weakened again from the ride, to the moment he insisted he could get up and walk on his own despite an arrow having just been extracted from his body, it was clear to everyone in the keep that the laird of Druimlach had no intention of being coddled, and that he intended to question the methods of Dunmara’s household staff.
He argued with Maud before she even touched him, objecting to the very notion that she would remove the arrow by pulling it through the way it had gone in. His voice, hoarse but stubborn, filled the chamber with sharp rebukes and gritted-out instructions, as though he imagined himself the expert on such things.
But Maud, not so easily intimidated, did not waver. She barely blinked as she gathered her tools, muttering under her breath about "stubborn Highlanders who think their manhood's tied to their wounds." Then, more loudly: “I’ll nae be snapping it off and withdrawing it both ways, as if I’ve nae business being anywhere near a wound. It’ll come out cleanly, yanked from the front in the same direction it traveled—and ye can piss and moan all ye want, laird, but ye’ll sit through it all the same, if ye want it done right.”
He scowled but yielded, albeit grudgingly.
Then came the cauterization debate. He argued for burning the wound shut, claiming it was faster, more effective. Maud countered that it was messier, riskier, and that if he didn’t want to lose the use of that arm entirely, he’d stop flapping his jaw and let her stitch the flesh properly. She won that round too.
When offered something to ease the pain, to dull the sharp edge of the withdrawal of the broken missile and the needle, he refused it outright.
“I’ll nae have my brain muddled,” he said, jaw clenched, sweat already gathering at his temples. He flinched while Maud worked to eject the arrow, his hands gripping the furs beneath him so tightly his knuckles went white, and still he refused Agnes’s subsequent offering for something that might soften the experience.
When it was done, he then refused to rest as both Maud and Agnes suggested, causing both of them to thin their lips when he sat up in the bed and put his feet on the floor.
“It’s midday,” he muttered darkly. “I’ll nae be sleeping.”
Rose lingered near the hearth, not quite close enough to be in the way, but near enough that she could watch—though she kept telling herself it was only out of concern. The truth was messier. Her stomach was in knots, tight with anxiety, her thoughts locked on the images of the arrow jutting from Tiernan’s shoulder, and the way he had looked when they found him: pale, bleeding, too still.
Now, he sat on the edge of the bed, stripped of his tunic and breacan, the fabric lying in a bloodied heap nearby. The wound had been cleaned, though it still looked terrible—angry, raw, ringed in bruising and dried blood. She winced just looking at it, her hands worrying the folds of her skirts. She had never seen so much blood before. Not like this. Not in real life.
But despite the queasiness in her gut and the biting concern for his well-being, her eyes lingered, drawn against her better judgment to the expanse of his chest. It was absurd, really, that she could feel both revulsion and fascination in the same breath. The scarred skin of his shoulder stretched taut, the muscles beneath shifting as he reached for something, the lines of his torso a study in hard-earned strength. His chest rose and fell with deliberate slowness, as though each breath was measured and weighed before being taken. Even injured, there was something so undeniably... male and magnificent about him. Not just his size, but his stillness. His control.
She hadn’t realized how noticeably she’d been staring until a dry voice cut through the quiet.
“Never seen so much bluid, lass?” Agnes asked, gathering clumps of bloodied linen strips. “That what has yer jaw gaping?”
Rose jumped, heat flooding her face so quickly it made her dizzy. She blinked, snapping her gaze away as if she’d been caught spying through a keyhole. Her mouth opened in protest, but nothing came out except a mortified little breath.
Tiernan’s head turned slowly toward her, his eyes narrowing, his gaze briefly speculative.
Rose felt the heat of a flush creep all the way down her neck, blooming across her collarbone. She wouldn’t be surprised if Tiernan could read her thoughts, if he could know it wasn’t only the sight of his injury that attracted her ardent attention. She busied her hands with the edge of her cloak, suddenly very interested in the floorboards.
“I wasn’t—” she began, then stopped. Possibly it was best to have it believed the sight of blood had been what held her faithful gaze and flustered her now.
When Maud had finished and Tiernan stood, donning the same bloody tunic he’d only removed a quarter hour ago, and while Maud and Agnes renewed their arguments for him to rest, Rose quietly slipped from the chamber, easing the heavy oak door closed behind her. The image of Tiernan’s bare chest—scarred, solid, alive—was seared behind her eyes, as vivid as the rasp of his voice when he argued with Maud and Agnes about resting. He was so clearly miserable, gritting his teeth against their fussing, half-naked and glowering, yet too worn down by blood loss to put much fire behind it. Rose felt as if she needed to escape that room before the way she looked at him became obvious to more than just Agnes.
She reached the top of the stairs just as Emmy came bounding up from the lower landing, skirts hitched and eyes wide.
“There you are!” Emmy exclaimed, her arms thrown open as though she’d half-feared Rose might vanish again before her eyes. She stopped abruptly at the top, her expression shifting from relief to scrutiny. “Holy hell, Rose. You look like shit.”
Rose let out a breath that was half a laugh, half a sigh of exhaustion. “That’s... not surprising,” she said, brushing her hair back from her face. She probably looked every bit as awful as she felt—dirt still streaked her sleeves and skirts, her hair was tangled and caked with dust, Tiernan’s blood spotted her right hand, and her nerves were frayed nearly to breaking.
Emmy stepped forward and took her hand without ceremony, pulling her away from the hall. “Come on. You’re telling me everything. I’m so sorry I missed you earlier when you came for Brody. I was in the village with Mildred, who just gave birth to her fourth son.”
Rose didn’t protest. She let herself be led through the corridors and into Emmy’s solar—an airy room on the west side of the keep with a high arched window and a scattering of medieval comforts, fur throws, a cluster of fat pillar candles, and a thick wool rug. The light outside had dimmed, but a fire burned warmly in the grate, casting the room in soft amber.
“Sit,” Emmy ordered, guiding her into a cushioned chair near the hearth. “Talk. What the hell happened? Why were you even coming here in the first place?”
Rose stared into the fire for a moment, mesmerized by the small flames. “Because I didn’t belong at Druimlach,” she said quietly. “Because the situation there was becoming... impossible.” Her voice was steady, but her fingers curled into the fabric covering her knees. “I didn’t know what else to do. I just knew I couldn’t stay.”
Emmy sat down across from her, her expression sober now. “Did something happen?”
Rose nodded slowly. “Kind of. Margaret’s father publicly called me a ghost. A wound that would never heal. So that was awkward. I just... I don’t belong there.” She paused, swallowing thickly. “I was going to send you a message, begging you—or Brody, actually—to come get me. Tiernan obviously agreed with me, that I didn’t belong. He said he would escort me. But there were bandits in this narrow section, a pathway between two large cliffs. They caused a rockslide, ambushed us. We were separated from the escort and Tiernan...” Her voice faltered. “He fought them all. Killed them.” She shook her head, hoping Emmy didn’t ask her to recount that. “But Tiernan was shot—Emmy, he was shot by an arrow and then killed the third reiver. With an arrow sticking out of him.”
Though her expression revealed her surprise at the tale, Emmy nodded as if this last part was expected. “They’re built differently in this time,” she said, with a half-hearted laugh.
“Obviously,” Rose concluded. “Anyway, he said we needed to keep moving, but then he really couldn’t after a while. Oh, my God, he scared the shit out of me—I thought...” she let that thought trail off, not wanting to revisit that she’d thought he might die. “He didn’t like it, but we had no choice, and I ran here to find Brody, to get help.”
“Jesus, Rose. I knew nothing about it—I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for you,” Emmy was quick to say. “I was down in the village with the farrier’s wife. I just heard now upon my return that Brody had gone out for you and Tiernan, and was now back out looking for those bandits and for Tiernan’s men.”
Rose nodded. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Rose reflected. “How he fought, how he took that hit and still kept going. I don’t even know how he walked as far as we did or stayed in the saddle to get here.” A frown of annoyance gathered over her brows. “And now he’s giving Maud and Agnes grief—he won’t rest as they insist he should. He’s the most stubborn, maddening man....”
Emmy’s eyes gleamed knowingly. A teasing smile curved her lips. “Oh, and you’re absolutely smitten with him.”
Rose did not express outright shock, and she didn’t bother trying to feign outrage at the mere suggestion. She felt, already, as if she’d resigned herself to the fact. “I’m intrigued by him, for sure. I’ve...never met or known anyone like him.” She shrugged, knowing that she wasn’t fully certain what the extent of her intrigue was. “Despite how scary he sometimes seems, he feels safe—more so after this morning. But it means nothing and doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. He thinks as I do, that I don’t belong at Druimlach, and that maybe we’ll never make sense of why I was brought here...with the whole Margaret resemblance and everything. It doesn’t matter.”
“But...do you want it to?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, how did you feel when Tiernan agreed with you?” Emmy asked. “Saying, yep, you don’t belong here, let me take you back to Dunmara .”
“I felt...relief, I guess.” She frowned though, and chewed her lip, not sure if that was the complete truth, but unwilling to investigate it now.
“But aren’t you...curious?” Emmy persisted. “About”—she waved a hand, searching— “I don’t know, about what might have been, what could be?”
Rose strenuously resisted the very idea, the possibility. “I’m more interested in how you managed to get back home at one point, to your time. I thought I...well, I thought since I was here, I should take advantage of it, immerse myself in this living history, but I think I just want to go home now.”
“Honestly, that sounds like a broken heart—or unrequited affection—talking,” Emmy dared to suggest.
Rose smiled grimly. “It is anything but,” she lied evenly.
Emmy considered her for a moment, as if trying to judge for herself the truth of Rose’s words. She inhaled and exhaled and then shrugged. “It doesn’t matter anyway—what you want. I didn’t do anything to get home. It just happened to me.”
“But you said you visited a witch—”
“I’m not sure she really was a witch,” Emmy interjected, holding up her hand. “She was creepy and definitely suspect, but I’m not sure she was an actual witch—I’m not sure such a thing exists.”
“How can you doubt such a thing, with what happened to you? To me?”
“Well, was it a witch, some powerfully magical person who moved me—us? Or was it some thing beyond our understanding? Something larger and stronger, and that we might never...know?”
While Rose stared at her, deflating a bit at such sorry news, Emmy lifted a finger and said pointedly, “Although, I must say I wished to come back here, to Brody and this time—after I’d been tossed back to the twenty-first century. I wished it fervently and constantly, and I...in my heart of hearts, I somehow knew or believed it would happen. So, part of me believes my wish was heard and answered, if that makes sense.”
Rose sighed at such a vague and unproven theory. “So, you’re saying my greatest chance to get back home is to simply wish for that above all else?”
Emmy winced. “Actually, I’m not sure. Because when I was sent back to 2019, I’m not sure I was wishing for that at the time, but then I was moved, so...”
Rose breathed a helpless laugh. “This actually doesn’t help me at all.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But it does underline how little we know and understand about what happened to us and why. Even while I believe I was brought back here because my heart was here—because that makes sense to me and, frankly, it fits my narrative—I have no idea about the who, what, where, why, or when.”
“That’s even more discouraging.”
“Again, the only thing I can say—the best advice I can give you—is to live, really live , wherever you are.”
Rose did not repeat what she thought again, that none of this was helpful. She smiled at Emmy and nodded, and decided that she had nothing to lose, that the very least she could do was to simply and clearly wish that she was sent back to the twentieth century. That was the only thing she truly wanted, the one thing she wanted most , she tried to convince herself.
“Come on, “Emmy said, interrupting her thoughts. “Let’s get you out of these clothes and into a nice, hot bath.”
Rose smiled. “That sounds like heaven.”