Page 24 of Outlaw Ever After (Highland Handfasts #3)

Chap

ter Sixteen

Alex’s nose smarted painfully as he mashed his face against that sweet freckle.

She smelled like roses, deprived of him for so long that he’d begun to think he would never smell the fragrant scent again.

Like hell he’d let go because of a sore nose.

For three months he’d longed for this, woken up dreaming of this.

Yet her slender arms were rigid. Butterflies fluttered through her vein up her neck against his forehead. Her fingers lacing into his hair clenched.

He shivered with unquenched need, no regard for the open door where anyone—including her brother—could strut right in.

That sobered him. Slowly, he eased back, but he didn’t relinquish his touch. She’d thought he’d bedded her, then forsaken her for whatever battle he’d gone to fight. And she didn’t believe him. That much, he could tell.

Somehow, her brother had found out. For a noblewoman, there was no higher disgrace. “This tournament for yer hand.”

She glanced askance. “I have

to be married quickly now. I-I’m disgraced—” Jesu

he hated what she implied. “My brother needed to protect me before anyone found out…”

The whispered admission, shrouded in shame, poisoned his ears. It’s yer fault I’m in this predicament.

Christ, he’d bled onto her skin. He dragged free the hem of his tunic to wipe it off of her collarbone.

“Ye needs take this off, me thinks,” she murmured, clearing her throat, fingering the open laces of his tunic. “To have yer arm treated.”

He reached behind his neck and yanked up the collar. The garment slipped over his head in one swift move and he wadded it, casting it onto the bed. He watched her chest hitch.

Bare chested save his sheaths for his sgian achlaises beneath each arm and the pouch he kept at his heart, he sat on full display.

Wanted her eyes on him. Remembered all too well how divine it had felt to shed clothes and lay her down and nestle himself between her thighs, and feel all of her accepting all of him.

…

He came for me?

Had she doubted falsely for three months?

She stared at his chest as distrust warned her off believing him.

Aye, he’d found her lyre. But was it all a ploy now to convince her of his lie?

She followed the trail of blond dusted over his navel, took in the band tattooed around his arm.

Traced the Irish knotwork and stylized sprigs of clover, hawthorn, scythes with her gaze, like she’d once done with her touch.

“Like what ye see, lass?” he gruffed, attempting a smile, though it was weary.

She shook her head, lifting her eyes heavenward.

Aye, she remembered his teasing, too. Instead, she pulled a stool from the cobwebs that had belonged to the laddie who’d lived here, gesturing for him to sit before the now-roaring fire as she dunked a wash rag and a strip of bandaging into the pot to boil. She should ignore him—

“Yer cronish looks?”

A rusty chuckle met her back. “I’m glad to still earn yer head shakes.”

She rolled up her trumpeted sleeves, tying them with the ribbons at her elbows, when Alex picked up the stool in her periphery with a snap of his wrist, flipped it over, and twisted a leg tighter with the comfort of someone who’d done it a hundred times.

He then flipped it over and swung it between his legs, sitting down so that his knees practically met his ears like an oversized bairn.

How did he ken to do that?

“What?” he asked at her curious stare.

Snapping out a clean linen, she tied it around her waist and pulled the rag out of the water with tongs. She wrung it, the warmth a blessing on her cool fingers. She dabbed clean his eye. His nose. His lip.

“They beat ye weel.” Her lips tightened.

Tonight, Seamus had gone too far. She saturated the rag, wrung it out again. Dabbed his shoulder, wiping away the drying rivulets of blood to reveal the edges of the angry knife wound.

He hissed, his muscles jumping beneath her touch, even as he remained still.

“Jesu, this stab…had ye nay been there—”

His paw snagged her wrist, silencing her. He brought her wrist to his nose. Inhaled as if just a breath of her was bliss.

“I’ve suffered worse these past months,” he murmured hoarsely, as if alluding to something more than a physical injury.

He pressed his lips to her skin, and God, it felt so good.

The crackling in the grate, chirps of floorboards settling, and the wind outside the shutters whistling were the only sounds.

“I often think on the laddie who once lived here,” she murmured, looking about the chamber and taking in the details. “I always wondered if he survived my brother’s anger.”

She cleared her throat at his stony silence. Slipped free of his hold so she could sprinkle a sprig of dried forget-me-not, clover, and hawthorn into her mortar, then ground them with her pestle.

“I met him…once.” A glance over her shoulder told her he was gazing at her worktable and the herbs she used for blessings, healing, and protection. She was certain she felt a draft from the window. But it was closed.

…

Clover. Hawthorn. Forget-me-not. It was

her.

There was no doubt anymore that his songbird was the wee lassie that had set him free and blessed him with her kiss, the first he’d ever been given. He should hate a Grant. What would be the odds of Peigi Grant being the only woman he’d ever wanted to keep?

Those fickle fae. Whose fates do they play with now?

She mixed the herbs into flour and churned it to make a paste with a ladleful of water. She packed the poultice over his wound, and the heat both bit and soothed his irritated flesh. Then she held up a needle.

“Mayhap ’tis I who’ll punish ye this time, and ’twill nay be with tone-deaf singing. Ye need stitching.”

Alex’s fattened lip quirked up, drawing a tentative smile from her. She remembers our teasing

. It might not be the glorious laughter he’d once worked hard to earn, but this smile was the first one meant for him

since coming face to face with her again.

“If yer hands are doing the ministrations, I’ll suffer the punishment. Normally I burn my wounds on a swig of whiskeybae.”

“Indeed, ye’ll want that, too. Drink heartily.”

She handed him a flagon. His fingers grazed hers as he took it. Took in her empty

ring finger again. A naked appendage that had once worn his promise.

She slipped away and the thread of teasing vanished as she rummaged through her supplies, digging out another clay pot and removing the lid.

Leeches.

Using a pair of tongs, she attached the beastie to Alex’s fattened eye. Then attached a second.

“Ye’re skilled at this for a lady, Marg… Peigi

.” She unspooled the catgut as he tested the foreign name on his lips.

The leeches’ rasping took hold and they began to gorge upon his swelling.

“I’ve had ample practice. At one point, the reaves saw us evicted by the verra laird my sister later married.” He snorted. “We quickly learned the art of stitching a wound.”

In addition to stitching piecework. No wonder her fingers were so nicked and scarred.

She wiped clean the poultice from his shoulder and threaded the catgut through the needle.

Alex took a swig from the flagon. The potent drink burned a path to his stomach, his throat bobbing as he swallowed gulp after gulp.

The burn hit his veins as he shook it away on a growl. He dragged the back of his forearm across his mouth.

“Breathe,” she whispered, as the tip of the needle rested to his shoulder. “I’m sorry—”

“Do it,” he grunted.

It punctured his skin.

“ Fok

…” he wheezed, a harsh exhale as she stitched into him, tying off the thread.

Again, she aligned it. Pierced through his skin and drew the threading out.

Groaning, he rested his head against her belly, rising and falling as she breathed.

Gripped her hip. Heard hunger pangs rumble—all that food below stairs and she’d nay eaten?

He tightened his grip as if to hold her to him so she nay vanished into the mists again.

Couldn’t believe he was here, with her, as the needle wove in and out of his skin.

He ground his forehead into her belly harder, each jab reminding him of each pang of desperation he’d felt these last three months, but now realizing how he’d wronged her.

Wronged the little girl he owed his life to, who’d become a woman who’d put her trust in him.

When she tented up the edges of the slice so she could suture again

, he blacked out.

How long it was, a few minutes or many, he finally came to as if coming out of a dream, definitely affected by the whiskybae, the sensation of fingernails scraping tenderly through his hair inducing gooseflesh. She combed it, again and again, his forehead still to her belly.

The wolfhound nudged his cheek, sniffing at the leeches.

“Sing me a song, woman,” he whispered, his hand still anchoring her hip, and he finally looked up at her to see a sadness deep in her watery brown eyes. “I’m so desperate for yer voice, for ye to remember—”

“What good is remembering when the past can nay be undone?” she breathed.

“Who says our song is already complete and nay just beginning?” he countered—

“What is this!”

Peigi yelped and jumped back at a man’s bellow. Alexander bolted to his feet, sobering, wrenching her behind him. The dog bolted up, bloodcurdling barks shaking the rafters as Alex’s rib slitters flicked loose from his wrist guards, spinning into each grip as he faced… Seamus Grant

.

Half naked in a private bedchamber with a woman wasn’t how any man who wished to keep his bollocks hoped to be found by her brother, and Alex was at the top of this man’s shite list—in more ways than one. Still, like hell the arse would charge in here searching for a fight, frightening his woman—

Nay yer woman anymore.

The dog quieted at Peigi’s touch.

“Seamus, I-I was just—” Peigi stammered, when her finger gingerly touched his back and traced the riot of crisscrosses he knew resided there.

Fok. She’d once felt his scars, but now she could see them.

“Mon Dieu, how did this happen?” she whispered.