Page 53 of A Highland Healer Captured
“Aye.” She finished the knot and smoothed the bandage with her thumb, feeling the rough rasp of hair at his wrist. The nearness did something treacherous to her breath. “For Grayson.”
“Aye,” he said, and for the first time since she’d spoken the wordpoisonshe saw something relax in him, some inner muscle unclench. It made him look younger. It made her angrier. “We’ll do it yer way.”
She handed him another strip of linen. “Wrap it tighter. Ye’ll burst those stitches on the wall again.”
“Only if the wall lies to me,” he said, and the faintest crooked smile pulled his mouth. It should not have eased her. It did.
She turned away, because she needed the distance, because the look in his eyes when he wasn’t braced for war felt like an arm around her waist tugging her closer than her sense permitted.
“Then go,” she said to the door, to the night, to the next terrible hour. “Wait with him. Tell Katie what we’re looking for without telling her we’re looking. I’ll be in the surgery for ten minutes.I need charcoal properly done, not bread smashed with temper. I’ll send for Cora.”
She felt Zander behind her hesitate, as if he wanted to say something that would make a different kind of vow and didn’t trust the shape of it. “Skylar.”
He had made to open her chamber door, but then closed it again. The latch falling right as Skylar turned to look back at him.
He didn’t look apologetic. Not because he wasn’t sorry, for some part of him clearly was, but because an apology wasn’t the right coin for what he’d asked.
He set his shoulders as if to carry her answer however heavy it came.
“We keep him close,” he said, voice measured. “We keep sayin’ he’s sick, and we let the rumor do our hunting. Whoever has been dosing him will have patterns: the hour they prefer, the cup they trust, the way they carry their kindness. We’ll watch the pattern while the keep watches Grayson.”
“Then we’ll set a snare in it,” Skylar said, mind already ordering lures. “A decoy cup. Two honey jars and a third that never leaves me hand. Ye’ll start bringing him bread yerself, so the kitchen has to learn how to spare ye rather than how to try to spare him. We’ll see who chafes.”
“Aye.” He took a breath as if the air had decided to leave with his courage and he had to wrestle it back. “Stay. Until we find the hand.”
Reluctance rose like a tide in her. It was real and powerful, and it brought Ariella’s name with it like driftwood. It met another tide head-on, Grayson’s face in sleep, the way his small fingers sought hers as if the body knew how to be grateful before children learned to say it. The collision made a complicated sea inside her.
He bowed his head once, the gesture spare and strangely elegant, like a man accepting terms of surrender and grateful to be held to honor by them. When he lifted his gaze, the hard light had softened at the edges.
“Thank ye,” he said, and it wasn’t laird to healer; it was man to woman. “For staying.”
It ought to have been a simple exchange.
It wasn’t.
He crossed the small space between them slowly, as if approaching a wild thing he didn’t want to startle, and lifted his bandaged hand to her face.
The linen was rough against her cheek, the heat of him steady beneath it. His thumb brushed just in front of her ear, a smallstroke that had no claim in it, only awe and a strange, careful wonder.
She’d meant to pull back, but she couldn’t. The day had skinned her raw, and there was no room for smart replies or safe distances.
She stood there and let him touch her, and when he leaned in and kissed her, she opened to it like a door on a well-oiled hinge.
No fumbling. No performance. Just hunger that had lost its shame and found its purpose.
Zander kissed her, then, as if he’d learned restraint from war and decided not to waste it here. His mouth was warm and sure, his breath steady.
He didn’t devour.
The man built.
Brick by brick, kiss by kiss, until the height of it made her a little dizzy. When his bandaged hand slipped from her cheek to the nape of her neck, she felt the weight of the day drop through her like chain and then vanish, drowned in the warmth gathering low and slow in her belly.
Her thoughts tried to line up with warnings. They didn’t hold. Sensation replaced them as the scrape of his stubble travelled along her jaw, and his lips coaxed hers to give and then take, andthe soft sound she made when he angled her head and deepened the kiss because he’d discovered how she liked it and went there again, as if memory were a gift he intended to use.
“Skylar,” he hummed against her mouth, and the sound of her name with his breath in it turned her knees inattentive.
She caught his shoulders and felt the breadth of him, the strength held back for her sake. The kindness in that restraint undid her as surely as the heat.
