Page 43 of A Highland Healer Captured
“It doesnae seem right… it’s like he’s regressing.”
Katie kept a steady stream of water and cloths, but was otherwise silent. Somewhere in the small hours of the morning, Skylar’s own breath went rusty from holding it.
“I should have found it by now,” she told the floorboards under her breath. “I should have named it.”
Zander had appeared at the threshold as the sun started turning the sky pinks and yellows and blues. Skylar didn’t look at him. She just nodded toward the chair, and he took it, hands loose on his knees, the tension in his body leashed.
“Where’s Katie gone to?” she heard him ask the otherwise empty room.
“Went to sleep some time ago,” Skylar muttered, then busied herself with the steam once more.
“Yeshould have slept,” Zander said from the chair, and when Skylar looked up sharply she saw the worry making a map of the lines around his mouth, exhaustion in his eyes, his knuckles white where he’d remembered to keep his hands still.
She laughed, a soft, cracked thing. “That makes two of us.”
Before he could answer, Grayson stirred. “Da?” He angled his face without lifting it from the pillow, looking toward the chair with something like apology in his eyes for being awake and in need. “Da, can we… go outside?”
Skylar froze. The air in the room changed as surely as if someone had opened a door.
Zander didn’t speak at first. He leaned forward, forearms on his knees, and Skylar watched the battle go through him—rage at the idea of wind on a weak chest, at the world’s cold; the deeper rage at denying joy to a child who had so little of it to choose from.
“We can have a picnic,” he said at last, voice a shade rougher than usual. “When the sun’s up. We’ll take bread and cheese and sit under a tree and ye’ll tell me which birds the book lied about. Mayhap I’ll even sketch them properly for ye.”
Grayson’s thin face lit like someone had set a candle behind his skin. “Truly?”
“Truly.” Zander then looked to Skylar then, and there was a question in his eyes, and something else beneath it that made her face hot in a way that had nothing to do with the fire.
“It’ll be good for him,” she said, rendered, for once, to plain truth. “If he goes slow. If he sits more than he walks. If the air’s nae sharp.”
Zander nodded. The night’s fatigue had stripped him to the man under the laird. Skylar liked this version more than was probably safe. “We’ll make it so.”
He’d entered and she had taken care to not look at him, but now she couldn’t seem to stop. He held her gaze the way he held a sword—firm and intent. Hunger moved through the look like a shadow, and she hated the way her body answered it, the way a string plucked resonates in its instrument.
Grayson saved them both. “She should come too,” he said, already turning his head back toward Skylar. “Lady Skylar. Please?”
“I’m nay lady,” she said, flustered, then rallied. “But I’ll come if yer da thinks he can survivetwostubborn souls at once.”
“She needs sleep,” Zander said automatically, and then saw something in Skylar’s expression that made him rephrase. “Ye need sleep.”
“Aye,” she said, decisive because decisiveness was safer than softness. “An hour. That’s all. I’ll wash me face, change out of this—” she plucked at her stained apron “—and fetch the draught in case he needs it outside.”
Zander tipped his head, formal as a knight making treaty. “We’ll meet ye under the tree,” he said, and pointed without needing to look toward the window and the rough bark where notches climbed like a ladder—Grayson’s would-be perch. “The old elm.”
“I ken the one.” She gathered her skirts and her satchel, patting Grayson’s blanket once more. “Ye’ll wait for me,” she said to the lad.
“I always wait for ye,” he said solemnly, and the loyalty in it cut her more cleanly than any insult she’d ever received.
She paused at the threshold. Zander had stood to see her go, as if he didn’t trust his body not to follow without permission. “An hour,” she reminded, and heard how her voice curled around the promise like a ribbon.
“An hour,” he echoed.
She left on that echo, letting the corridor’s chill pull the heat from her cheeks, walking fast because if she didn’t, she might turn back and put her hand in the middle of his chest and ask him?—
What, exactly?
To be the man he’d been for the last fifteen minutes, and not the one who’d stolen her from a road?
To keep reading about hawks with his son until the sun rose?
