Page 9 of Promised to the Forbidden Laird

He pushed the torn sleeve carefully above the cut, but she flinched.

“Did I hurt ye?” Roy asked, his hands stopping.

“Nae.”

It was not a convincing answer. Her breath caught before he touched the wound. Pouring water over the cut, Donaldina drew in sharply through her teeth but did not pull away. The water ran pink over her skin and fell in bright drops upon the black stone. Roy cleaned away the remaining blood with his thumb, using less pressure than he would have believed his hands remembered how to employ.

They were not gentle hands. The knuckles bore scars from sword hilts, winter marches and battles whose names men in Edinburgh would never learn. He used those hands to drag wounded soldiers from mud, to close the eyes of the dead, to hold his own body together until a surgeon could make a poorer attempt of it.

Donaldina’s wrist seemed impossibly slender within them. He was conscious of the beat of her pulse beneath his fingers. It was fast and frantic, his own was no better.

Roy released her long enough to open the fastening at his collar. He pulled a strip from the linen shirt beneath his soaked tunic, tearing the fabric with a short, sharp sound.

Donaldina looked down at the linen. “Ye need not ruin yer clothing.”

“I have other shirts.”

“That is reassuring.”

“I thought it might comfort ye.”

To his surprise, the corner of her mouth moved. It was not a smile; she was far too sensible to offer one under the circumstances. However, the potential for it had been present, and Roy sensed it as a dangerous shift in the atmosphere.

He wrapped the linen around her forearm. When he passed the strip beneath her wrist, his fingers brushed the sensitive skin there. She flinched again, though this time he had not touched the cut.

Their eyes met.

The waves crashed against the cliffs, and the mist veiled everything, making it feel as though only the small space between them existed.

Roy became aware that he still held her hand. She became aware of it in the same instant. Neither moved.

Her eyes were not soft. There was suspicion in them, pride, grief and the lingering shadow of fear. Yet there was something else now, something uncertain that had not been present when he entered her brother’s hall. He had no right to seek its meaning.

Roy tied the bandage and withdrew his hands. Donaldina lowered her arm slowly. Behind them, one of the MacNicol men cleared his throat, then appeared to regret having done so when Roy looked in his direction.

The funeral procession remained gathered near the lower gate. Lachlan’s bier stood unmoving beneath the gray sky while Father Maol waited beside it, his dark robes snapping in the wind.

Roy’s chest tightened. Lachlan had once asked him, during a rain-soaked night beside a miserable campaign fire, what manner of woman Roy expected to find waiting at Dun Ard. Roy had answered that he expected no woman to wait eight years for a stranger, to which he had laughed and told him Donaldina had never waited obediently for anything in her life. Roy had understood the words as a brother’s fond exaggeration. He understood them better now.

“Can ye walk?” he asked.

Donaldina looked toward her brother’s bier. Her face was momentarily filled with such raw grief that Roy felt embarrassed to have seen it.

“Aye,” she said, her spine straightening.

Roy offered his arm. She regarded it with the same caution another woman might have reserved for a drawn blade. At last, she placed her hand upon his sleeve; the contact was light and formal, yet Roy felt it through wool, leather and every discipline he brought home from the war.

Together, they turned toward Dun Ard. The MacNicol men fell in behind them. No one spoke. The mist curled along the path, closing over the place where Cormac had vanished, while the sea continued its assault upon the rocks below as if treachery, rescue and the near loss of a life were all too small to interrupt it.

Roy kept Donaldina on the inner side of the path. He told himself it was merely sensible. He did not examine why, even after the cliff widened and the danger passed, he did not ask her to release his arm.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dun Ard appeared through the fading mist, as if it had been conjured from within her. Donaldina was intimately familiar with every aspect of the castle's walls, having known them since she was a child. She knew the aging western tower, which became a nesting place for gulls in the spring. She also knew the damaged crenellation that Lachlan had promised to repair but never did, and the narrow windows that would capture the final rays of sunlight from the ocean. Yet, as she approached upon Roy MacIver’s arm, the castle no longer appeared familiar.

The gates were barred.

Men stood upon the walls with bows in hand. Spears rose behind the parapet. Along the gatehouse, faces Donaldina had known all her life watched her return as if she were an approaching army rather than the mistress of the home beneath their feet.