Page 17 of Promised to the Forbidden Laird

Roy stood in the rain until the hoofbeats faded. Only then did he lower his sword. His body became aware of itself by slow degrees: the burning in his shoulder, the tightness of an old wound beneath his ribs and the ache in his hand where Cormac’s blade had jarred against his own.

He exhaled heavily. Behind him, Donaldina approached. Her steps were careful, though she pretended otherwise.

Roy sheathed his sword and looked at the bandage upon her arm. “Ye are bleeding again.”

“It would seem I have developed the habit.”

He took her wrist before she could object and examined the linen. The cut had opened only slightly, though bruises darkened the skin above it where Cormac had seized her. Roy’s jaw tightened.

Donaldina watched his face.

“The castle is ours again,” she told him.

“Yers.”

She looked toward the courtyard, where MacIver and MacNicol men were already separating prisoners from those who had surrendered. “Ye played some small part.”

“A regrettably strenuous one.”

Rain dripped from his hair and traced down his face. He brushed it off with the back of his hand and looked toward the open gate.

“Claiming me promised wife is proving considerably more dangerous than I expected.”

The words escaped before he could consider them. Donaldina stared at him. Roy braced himself for an offense. Instead, she smiled.

It was not the restrained suggestion he had glimpsed in the passage, nor the brittle expression courtesy sometimes required. It began slowly, softening the grief and exhaustion in her face until, for one startling moment, he understood why men wrote songs about women's smiles and then died embarrassed by the quality of the verse.

“Ye have only just arrived,” she replied, “and already ye are causing trouble wherever ye go.”

Roy regarded her quietly; a laugh would have been too much. He didn’t trust men who laughed too freely, and he hadn’t yet lost enough blood to join their ranks. Nevertheless, the corner of his mouth twitched upward, and Donaldina’s smile grew wider at the sight.

Roy released her wrist more slowly than necessary.

“Aye,” he agreed. “I have been told it is a talent.”

Dun Ard was still scattered with overturned furniture, wounded men, wet stones, and the aftermath of treachery. Lachlan was still unburied, and Cormac remained at large. The King’s agreement lingered between Roy and Donaldina like an unchosen bridge, one they might refuse to cross. None of it had become less dangerous.

Yet as Donaldina stood before him in the rain, smiling despite the blood upon her sleeve, Roy felt the first quiet alteration in the day. For the first time since he entered Dun Ard, the stronghold did not seem entirely determined to reject him.

Its lady, perhaps, had not decided.

CHAPTER SIX

By evening, the blood had been washed from the stones. That did not mean the castle had forgotten it.

Dun Ard remained restless after nightfall. Cormac’s captured supporters had been confined beneath guard, while the men who claimed confusion rather than loyalty were questioned one by one before the council.

Lachlan had been carried at last to the cairn. The burial took place beneath a sky already surrendering its light, with half the proper prayers omitted and the other half spoken into a wind that allowed no dignity to remain undisturbed. Donaldina stood beside the stones until her feet became numb and the last man departed. She did not weep.

Now she sat before the fire in her chamber, dressed in a dry gown, while the bruises upon her wrist darkened by the hour. She wondered if grief might allow her to sleep when someone knocked at the door. In Dun Ard, only one man seemed to see doors as places to declare military intent.

“Enter.”

Roy entered casually. He kept the same tunic and expression he had during the fight. His dark hair was still damp at the ends, and a freshly cleaned sword hung at his side.

Donaldina looked from the weapon to his face.

“Have ye discovered another rebellion between the stairwell and me chamber?”