Page 55 of The Scot Beds His Wife
“Callum? Callum, is that ye?” Locryn’s grizzled voice contained an altitude to its register that had Gavin swallowing his own unruly heart. He could barely make out the outline of a horse and what appeared to be two riders bundled against the cold.
Panicked words tumbled out of the infamously terse Locryn with heart-rending speed. “Sam. Ye have to help Sam. I couldna keep her on her mount and I have nothing to lash her down. She bathed before supper. Her hair was still wet. I doona ken if it’s the cold, or if she’s wounded, but she willna wake. They came for us. Two of them, and if it wasna for Sam they’d have… Well, she killed them both. A right terror with that pistol she is. And now she willna wake. Oh God. And Calybrid’s guts is pouring out of him and the surgeon is miles away and I had to leave her—”
“What do ye mean, she willna wake?” Gavin demanded. “Where is she? What the fuck did ye allow to happen to her?”
“Lord Thorne?” Locryn gasped.
“My guts are all where they’re supposed to be, ye oaf, now just tell him where Sam is,” Calybrid’s voice admonished weakly.
The light from Callum’s lantern reached them, illuminating the pair of old men, hunched against the cold. Locryn sat mounted behind Calybrid, pressing a bundled-up plaid to his side with one hand, and clutching at the reins with the other. Even in the golden light, poor Calybrid’s pallor was startling.
“Who the fuck is Sam?” Gavin demanded. “Where is Alison?”
“In America, she is called Sam,” Callum explained, entirely too calmly for Gavin’s liking.
“Where is she?” Gavin roared, a murderous ire snarling forth from a dank, forgotten place. The place with the Mackenzie name. “How could ye leave her?”
“She is maybe half a mile down the way.” Locryn pointed, his rheumy dark eyes gleaming with moisture. “Around Brollachan Bend. Rowan is lashed by her on the left.”
With a savage curse, Gavin spurred Demetrius with such strength, the stallion leaped forward.
“I couldna carry them both so I came for help!” Locryn called after him. “She’s bundled in a fine cloak, and…”
The rest of the old man’s words were frozen into the air, lost to the frantic pounding of Demetrius’s hooves and Gavin’s heart.
Gavin knew this road as well as he knew the slopes and planes of his own body. He could have counted the strides to Brollachan Bend were he as blind as his mother. He knew every bog, every meadow. He’d memorized this land as though it’d become a part of him.
Once he reached the bend, Gavin leaped from Demetrius’s back before he’d completely come to a stop. He bellowed for her, for Alison, for Sam, and the answering silence ripped away a small part of his humanity.
Then he heard it, a rustle in the bushes. The soft, welcoming nicker of a horse left alone in the darkness.
There.There she was, curled beneath an ancient elm and, indeed, wrapped in a very fine cloak.
Inhiscloak.
Gavin scrambled to her, slipping on dead leaves made brittle by frost. The night had grown cold enough that he could barely feel his own hands in their fine gloves.
“Alison,” he called, snatching her into his arms, giving her a shake when she didn’t respond. “Alison. Wake up, lass.”
Running on naught but primitive instinct, he ripped hiscloak open and his gloves off, passing his trembling hands over her face, her neck, her arms, and torso. Nothing. No wound.
Had she hit her head? he wondered as he spanned her thighs and lower. Had she—
The slick moisture instantly cooled on his palm when he pulled it away from her calf. Callum approached with his lantern just in time to illuminate what Gavin already knew would be coating his hand, the crimson horror of it signifying that they were running out of time…
Or might be too late.
CHAPTERTWELVE
Pain filtered through the darkness first, and Samantha desperately tried to retreat into the warm void of oblivion in which she’d been drifting. It was too cold out there in the world. Cold enough to lock her muscles tight and stiffen her bones. Too cold to survive. Too bitter.
Too lonely.
She understood now what Locryn and Callum had meant. This was better, this dark, safe cave. One of her own making. Where she didn’t have to be afraid of her world rupturing apart at any moment.
Could she not just remain here? Here in the safe, velvet darkness where the ground was feather-soft and the walls were solid, impenetrable, and radiated with fragrant warmth that reminded her of both the forest and the sea. Of Wester Ross. The Scottish Highlands.
Of her new home.
