Page 93 of A Highland Healer Captured
It was the only answer.
But it made her feel as if the floor had shifted without moving at all.
“Ye were distant,” she heard herself say, the stupidity of the admission making heat lick at her ears. “I thought… I thought ye’d gone cold to me.”
He studied her, not unkindly. “I went to war on me steps and sent for a faither I’d wronged. If I was cold, it was to leave room for me men to be hot.”
She wanted to take the words and fold them into something that didn’t scrape. She wanted to tell him she’d have warmed him if he’d let her. Instead she set her jaw and nodded once. “I’ll gather me things.”
He didn’t flinch. “I’ll walk ye to him.”
“I can walk meself.”
“I ken.” A beat. “I’ll still walk ye.”
She looked down at the map to escape his eyes. Someone—Mason, likely—had made a crude ink X on the courtyard where the spike stood, as if to make sure history remembered the geography. She looked back up. “Do ye mean to be laird now to me, or man?”
“Both, lass,” he said, and somehow that hurt more than either answer alone.
“Fine,” she said, and was grateful her mouth still obeyed orders.
He shifted the paper he’d been reading. She saw the first line and recognized her own hand—last night’s farewell she’d left on the desk. He had not unfolded it. Or perhaps he had and put it back the way it was to spare them both a second ripping.
“Yer father waits,” he said, voice even. “I’ll nae keep him.”
She stepped back from the table so fast the legs rasped the rushes. She wanted to ask himWhat am I to ye?, but she already knew his answer.
Free.
It was the right answer; it was the wrong one; it was the only one she could carry out under her own power.
“Let’s go, then,” she said, and made herself turn before she could ask for another night.
He followed, which was its own kind of kindness.
The courtyard was all edges—shadows with armor in them, the spike’s dark lesson, the west gate flung open under guard. Beyond it, the glen shone with the cold light of a day already fraying. Hamish MacLennan sat straight on a horse that had seen better oats, the MacLennan banner lifting and falling once, twice in the mild wind.
Skylar’s steps slowed at the sight of him, and then she was running without remembering how her body had decided to do it. “Faither,” she called, and Hamish’s head swung, his hand out, the old grin breaking his beard even before she reached him.
He lifted her cleanly off her feet the way he had when she was small and had scraped knees and had no notion men carried wars in their pockets. “Sky,” he said into her hair, voice thick and hoarse, “are ye whole?”
“Aye.” She pulled back to show him the proof of it. “I’m whole.”
His eyes raked her face the way a father’s do—counting bruises, making saints’ bargains behind his teeth. Then his gaze cut past her to Zander, and the welcome in his mouth died into something flinty. Hamish said nothing, which was worse than curses.
Zander stopped a measured distance away, one hand on Grayson’s shoulder. The boy leaned hard into him, eyes red-rimmed and swollen in the way children get when they have kept themselves quiet too long and see at last the person who will allow them to be loud.
“Ye’re leavin’ us,” Grayson blurted, and the words tore her in two.
“Aye,” she said, and her smile broke. “It is time for me to take me leave, little hawk.”
He stepped out from under his father’s hand and flung himself against her skirts, arms tight around her waist. “Da says ye have to,” he said into the wool, the words thick with fear and fury both. “Tell him nay.”
Her hands found his head. She bent and pressed her cheek to his hair. “Oh, me heart.” She could not make promises she couldn’t keep. She could not lie to a child and call it mercy. She stroked once, twice, enough for memory. “I have to go, Gray. But I?—”
He tore free and glared up at Zander, tears streaking clean lines through the grime on his face. “Da, daenae let her go.”
Zander’s jaw worked. For a heartbeat she saw the man who had kissed her like he was drowning and the father who would drown for this boy. Then the laird put both hands on his son’s shoulders and knelt, bringing his face level with the child’s.
