Page 71 of Here in Your Arms
Rose crossed the room slowly, hoping not to disturb him. She stopped at the foot of the bed and watched him, her hands tucked inside the wool of the plaid. He was asleep, stretched out across the bed where Maud and Agnes had tended him earlier. The heavy furs had slipped halfway down his chest, revealing the broad slope of his shoulders and a linen bandage darkened by a small spot of blood that had seeped through.
It amazed her—how someone could look so strong even in sleep. Even now, unconscious and still, he didn’t look vulnerable. Nothing about him was soft—there was no gentleness in the line of his mouth, no ease in the set of his brow, and no peace in the lines of his face. He looked like a man ready to wake swinging. It was as if he didn’t know how to let go, not even when sleeping.
Late in the afternoon while helping to set up a bath in Rose’s chamber, Agnes had muttered to Rose in passing about her concern of fever, how it could settle quick, often in the night, and how it killed more men than the blade ever did.She’d said it almost casually, unthinking, distracted maybe, but it had unsettled Rose more than she’d expected. The thought of Tiernan’s body failing him, of the wound turning worse by morning, stirred something low and anxious in her chest.
She stepped forward and gently lifted the edge of the fur, drawing it higher over his shoulder. She dared to lay her hand against his forehead, determining with a frown that he was warm, but not dangerously so; he wasn’t burning up. Not yet. Worried that it might worsen, that he might yet come down with a fever, Rose thought to linger silently for a while, and approached the hearth.
The fire was growing dim, the light beginning to retreat into the coals. Rose took a moment to shift a few logs, nudging the embers with the iron poker until the heat began to gather again and new flames licked at unburnt edges of the wood. She didn’t want the room to get cold. She didn’t want him to wake to chill or discomfort.
Settling back into the deep upholstered chair in front of the fire, she pulled her knees up and wrapped the plaid tighter around herself.
Her gaze drifted back to Tiernan, and her thoughts, ultimately, to the events of this morning.
This wasn’t what she had come to Scotland for. She had boarded the plane in Wisconsin, had taken a connecting flight in New York to Edinburgh armed with textbooks, plans, a research proposal focused on fourteenth-century Scottish culture and political life. She had packed boots for hiking ruins and notebooks for sketches. She had prepared for weather, for language, and for history that lived in moss-covered stone. She had crossed an ocean and an entire century’s worth of expectations to study people like Tiernan, not...meetthem. She had wanted to explore ancient stone ruins and sit through long-winded lectures about fealty and kinship ties. She had plannedto sketch diagrams of longhouses and scribble notes about Gaelic naming customs. Her project proposal had been all about ritual and daily life in the Middle Ages of Highland society.
She hadn’t meant to live it.
Weeks ago—God, had it really only been weeks?—she had grumbled to a colleague that she hadn’t done enough sightseeing. That she had come all the way to Scotland and spent most of her time buried in books and conference halls. “I’ve seen more maps than mountains,” she’d joked. At the time, it had felt like a legitimate complaint.
Now she wanted to laugh at herself. Her life before felt thin now, too clean, too clinical, but far safer, so much less dramatic. She had wantedhistory—but this wasn’t what she’d meant. And while many would argue thatthiswas so much better—while indeed she’d entertained that idea herself only days ago— Rose understood that it was not. Not the sweat and blood of it. Not standing frozen while men died in front of her. Not kneeling beside Tiernan’s broken body, praying he’d draw another breath.
And yet here she was, elbow-deep in it, caught in the middle of something that made no sense.
With her head leaning against the tall arm of the chair, she watched the slow rise and fall of his chest and told herself she wasn’t cut out for this life, for this century.
And not even her inexplicable, maddening fascination with this enigmatic man was enough to make her want to stay.
Rose leaned forward now and rested her arms on her knees, watching the man in the bed as the storm continued to hammer the world outside. She clung to what she’d told Emmy earlier, that it no longer mattered why she’d been brought here, that it was time to stop chasing answers that probably she wasn’t meant to find. She didn’t belong here—not really. The sooner shefound a way to return, the better. It was the only logical thing to do. The only safe thing.
And yet, as she watched Tiernan’s chest rise again, steady and slow, she couldn’t pretend she didn’t care about what happened to him. She couldn’t pretend that the idea of leaving him behind didn’t feel, just a little, like abandoning something unfinished.
She drew her knees tighter beneath the plaid and turned her face toward the fire, getting lost in the golden flames.
***
Tiernan stirred beneath the weight of thick furs, consciousness returning slowly, as if he were rising from deep water. The ache in his shoulder was the first thing he registered, a dull throb that pulsed with every beat of his heart, though it was not nearly as sharp as it had been earlier. That was something. His head felt heavy, his limbs leaden, but there was a strange stillness to the room that pulled at his attention.
He opened his eyes, blinking into the low light. The fire had been fed recently, the heat reaching gently into the corners of the chamber. For a moment, he didn’t move, content to breathe in the warmth and quiet. Then he turned his head slightly, shifting his gaze, and held his breath.
Rose was curled in the chair nearest the fire, her legs drawn up beneath her, her chin resting on her knees. He saw that she wasn’t sleeping, but she was so still, gazing into the flames, her profile etched softly in the shifting light.
She hadn’t heard him wake.
He studied her in silence, unwilling to make a sound that might disturb the strange peace that he felt at finding her near. The wind battered the keep beyond the shuttered windows, buthere, inside, she looked calm. Thoughtful. Beautiful in a way that made his chest tighten.
He let his gaze linger on the curve of her cheek, the slope of her nose, the way the soft shadows caught the glint in her dark hair. Her scar caught his attention, that long, jagged line that cut across the right side of her face, from just beside her nose toward her ear. It should have marred her. It should have changed the way she looked to him. Strangely, the scar didn’t seem to distract from her beauty, but neither did it define her. It merely marked her as someone who had survived something, endured something, and still stood. It was, somehow, part of what made her so alluring to him, he’d begun to understand.
He closed his eyes again briefly, though he was no longer tired. The storm continued to howl beyond the walls, the old stones of Dunmara creaking as the wind pressed against them in long, sighing bursts. He supposed the violent storm meant that he should have been grateful for Brody’s insistence that he wait until morning to depart. After his shoulder had been sewn shut, front and back, Tiernan had planned to depart as soon as Brody had returned, as soon as he’d learned what his friend had discovered of the MacRae men and anything he might have learned of those outlaws.
But Brody had been gone longer than expected, which had begun to cause Tiernan consternation late this afternoon, since by then it had been half a day since Brody had been gone with dozens of men, riding hard to find answers.
Brody had knocked at the door of this chamber sometime before the supper hour, confirming some of Tiernan’s fears. Two of his men had been lost. Thomas, the youngest of today’s party, whose voice Tiernan recalled as the one to give the shout at the moment of the rockslide, had been crushed beneath it, swallowed by stone and dust.
Another, Eòghann, his logistics officer, had been lost to the reivers. Clever, competent, and careful, Eòghann was, too careful Tiernan sometimes thought. Not today, though. According to Brody’s report, Eòghann had died with his blade drawn and bloodied, and his throat slit.
They’d buried both Thomas and Eòghann beneath a cairn near the forest’s edge, Brody had said. Tiernan had simply nodded at the news, swallowing his emotion.
The other two—Ruairidh and Arailt—had survived. They’d spent the day combing the woods, trying to find their laird, their faces hollow with worry by the time Brody and his men had encountered them.
