Page 11 of Highlander Redeemed
He was not daft enough to think she hadn’t seen it. Her retreat back into her prickly self had been evidence that the moment had made her uncomfortable.
He needed to remember his task, for if he spooked her with an errant soft feeling he’d never keep her trust. He would not let it happen again.
He paced back toward the lochan, then away, forbidding himself to think of what she was doing in that icy water. As he paced back a shout came from her, and he sprinted through the trees only to find her pulling on her kirtle as he arrived, water dropletsstill sparkling in the sunlight on her thighs. He turned his back quickly, his heart thrumming in his ears at the sight of her milky skin.
“What is it?” His words were harsher than he’d intended, but the lass tested him sorely.
“We are needed back at the caves.” She drew up close to him then, fully clothed and braiding her wet hair.
“The caves?”
“Aye. I cannot say why, but I am sure of it.” She hurried back the way they’d come, heading to the caves. “Come on, ye sluggard!”
The familiar teasing tone in her voice was a welcome clue that she had let the awkward moment pass far more easily than he had. He hurried after her, curious to find out if her instinct was right.
CHAPTER FIVE
SCOTIA SKIDDED TOa stop as she cleared the forest. Only auld Peigi was there, huddled near the cookfire as if ’twas the middle of winter rather than early summer.
“Where is everyone?” Duncan asked as he passed Scotia.
“Och, there ye be,” Peigi said, pushing herself to her feet. “Ceit’s wee lassie has wandered away. She thought the bairn was napping in the cave, but when she went to take a keek, the child was nowhere to be found. Everyone is out looking for her.”
“Maisie?” As Scotia said the child’s name she suddenly knew where the tow-headed toddler was, as if someone had placed the knowledge in her brain without her awareness. “Come with me,” she said, grabbing Duncan’s hand and pulling him after her. She kept saying the name over and over in her head, as if it were a lodestone drawing her toward the child.
“Where are we going?” Duncan asked, pulling free of her hold before her touch distracted him from their search. “Slow down, Scotia, we need to look for sign if we are to be of any help finding the child.”
“I ken where she is, Duncan.” She did not slow down, nor look back at him. She just kept climbing straight up the steep side of the ben, though her breath was already growing ragged.
“How do you ken?” he asked, right on her heels.
“That I do not understand, but when I said her name, I knew she was above the caves. She is caught in some brambles.”
They hurried up the steep benside as fast as they could. Duncan called out the toddler’s name every now and then, but they heard nothing.
“If you are wrong about this, Scotia, then we are wasting valuable daylight when we could be looking for her in a more methodical, less ... strange ... way.”
“I am not wrong. She is—” She stopped then, closed her eyes, and said the name again in her mind. “She is ...” She turned a little to her left and looked into a bramble patch, and there, just at the base of a large stone she must have fallen from, far enough into the prickly dense arching stems to be hard to see, slept the child, her thumb in her cherub mouth. Her gown was caught on the thorns, and her face and chubby little arms were scratched in many places, as if she’d tried to extricate herself from the brambles.
Duncan slipped his dirk free of its sheath and began cutting away the bramble canes just as the child’s eyes opened wide. She let out a piercing wail and reached for Scotia, then the cry changed to one of pain and she recoiled from the thorns, once more plugging her thumb into her mouth.
Scotia knelt down, and reached in as far as she could, though the thorns dug into her arm and pulled at her gown, to let Maisie grip her finger with her free hand. Her eyes were big and blue, and the tracks of dried tears stained her fat cheeks. “’Twill be all right with you, soon, Maisie. You ken braw Duncan, aye?” She saw the girl’s gaze shift from Scotia’s face to Duncan’s then back again. “He has come to free you, and I will be right here until he does.”
“Just a few more,” Duncan said as he cut another long cane, only to find it was tangled in Maisie’s gown.
“Hold still, sweetling,” Scotia said, cooing at the child to keep the increasingly fretful wean calm as Duncan freed the last of the thorns from her ripped clothing. “Ah, there now,” she said as Duncan lifted the toddler out of her nest of brambles, and handed her out to Scotia. Settled on Scotia’s hip, Maisie looked up at her,shoved her thumb back in her mouth, then burst into loud, heart-rending wails. Fat tears streamed down her face, and no matter how much Scotia swayed and patted her back, the child would not calm.
“Maisie? Maisie!” A woman’s frantic voice came from below them.
“’Tis her mother, Ceit,” Scotia said.
“We have her,” Duncan called. “She is safe. Stay there and we will bring her to you!” He took the child from Scotia and began the tricky descent down the crumbly rock face of the ben, stopping here and there to hold a hand out to Scotia to help her down. Normally Scotia would not have accepted such help, for she feared it would make her look weak, but after their morning of training followed by the fast ascent up the ben and the effort to get the girl free of the brambles, she was beginning to stumble over things she shouldn’t, and really didn’t want to lose her footing and descend the ben face first in the scree. But each time she took his help, her awareness grew of him, of his strength, of the way the child hugged his neck with both arms—not entirely calm yet but enough so that she hiccupped instead of screamed—creating an unfamiliar heaviness in her gut that rivaled the strange tightness in her chest.
As they slid down a particularly steep bit on their bums, Ceit came into sight not much further down the ben. She cried out, and called the child’s name, which only served to rouse the girl enough to take up her ear-splitting howls of fear and pain again. They hurried down the next tricky bit of the path and had barely stopped before the mother pulled her child out of Duncan’s arms and hugged her tight.
“I was so worried,mo ghaol. You are a naughty lass to wander away like that.” The child hiccupped and gave her mother a sweet open-mouth baby kiss, and Scotia could not help but smile. Not yet two summers old, and already Maisie knew how to make her mother forgive her naughtiness.
“I cannot thank you enough, Duncan,” Ceit said, as she hugged her child tight. “I thought she was gone for good.” She gave Duncan a quick kiss on his cheek. “I thank you with all my heart.”
