Page 90 of A Highland Healer Captured
Then his mouth was on hers.
It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t measured. It was hungry, desperate, a man with fire still roaring in his veins and only one place to put it. She gasped into it, the taste of blood and smoke sharp against her tongue. His lips pressed hard, as if he were giving thanks, as if the words he couldn’t force through his teeth had to come another way.
Her hands fisted in his mail, pulled tight, even as her healer’s mind screamed at her to push him back, to see to the wound before it worsened. But her heart—her heart burned.
When he broke away, breath ragged, his eyes softened just for a heartbeat. “He’s gone. Forever. Nay one will ever harm ye. Nae while I draw breath.”
“Zander—”
He didn’t let her finish. His head tipped back against the wall, eyelids dropping, shoulders sagging heavy. His hand slid from her cheek, leaving warmth and blood in its wake.
“Zander!” Skylar’s voice cut sharp, panic lacing through it. She pressed both hands to his shoulder, felt the hot rush of blood seeping between her fingers. Saints above, he was losing too much.
“Help me!” she barked at the men frozen around them. “Get me cloth, bandages, now! And clear space. He’ll nae be in the dirt like some dog.”
They scattered at her fury. Skylar bent low, pressed her forehead to his briefly, as if the nearness might hold him tethered.
“Ye’ll hold, Zander,” she whispered fiercely.
“To the small library! Nae the great hall!” she commanded, catching Mason’s weary eyes as they came into the dark keep. One nod was all she left him with. A node that conveyed:I’ve got him now.
Mason returned the gesture and turned back to the men in the hall.
“Ye’ll live because I’ve nae finished with ye yet,” she said as the men lowered him onto the table. Her hands shook as she worked, but she did not falter.
We’ve just gotten started, Zander— live!
She felt the men exit the room. It was just the two of them alone.
“Live, damnit!”
Skylar pressed and bandaged and stitched quickly and efficiently, her breath shallow, her hands slick with his blood. Each heartbeat beneath her fingers was both a curse and a prayer. The gash at his side seeped stubbornly, hot against her palm, but she would not let it win.
Live! For Grayson. For Strathcairn… For me…
She clenched her jaw, needle biting through flesh, thread pulling tight. His chest hitched beneath her hand, a ragged breath forcing its way out, and she nearly wept with relief.
“Stay with me,” she hissed, half-command, half-plea. “I daenae care if ye hate me in the morn, but ye’ll wake to tell me so.”
The firelight flickered over his pale face, every shadow carving him into something too still, too final. Skylar’s pulse thundered in her ears. She forced herself to work faster, sharper, her healer’s training fighting her own terror.
“Daenae dare let go,” she muttered, knotting off the stitch, her hands shaking even as she pressed down again to stem the flow. “If ye do, I’ll follow ye just to drag ye back, ye bull headed brute!”
Her voice cracked but her hands did not falter. Every press, every wrap of linen, was a vow hammered into his flesh:live, live, live.
28
Outside, voices rose and fell, the keep settling into the shape of a house that had survived being tested. Inside, the laird breathed. She counted the beats that said he belonged to the living: in, two, three; out, two.
She wiped his brow, the blood from his beard, the smear along his jaw where Marcus’s knuckles had kissed him. Her thumb lingered a fraction too long at the corner of his mouth. She swallowed and pulled it away.
“Ye’ve a gift for choosing the worst possible timing,” she told the ceiling, because looking at his mouth while saying it would unravel her. “Ye find me in a storm. Ye steal me like a cursed brigand. Ye make me stay when I’d sworn to go. And now ye fall when I’ve more to say than any decent woman ought.”
She set a clean cloth to catch the seep under the stitches and tied it with sure knots. His breath rasped once; her body sprang toward him without asking, palm to his chest. The rise and fall steadied again. She sagged back onto the low stool.
“All right then,” she said under her breath, as if they were in the small kitchen at Dunlop Keep, as if she were scolding him for leaving boots in the entry. “If ye willnae wake, I’ll speak for both of us, and ye can argue later.”
She poured water, wiped her hands, and began the foolish work of talking sense into air.
