Page 29 of A Highland Healer Captured
But then he stepped back, his face shuttering. “Enough,” he growled, more to himself than to her.
Skylar’s hand flew to her lips, her heart hammering so violently she thought it might burst free.
What just happened?
What have I done?
She wanted to hate him. She wanted to curse him for stealing that kiss, for making her hunger for more. Instead, the memory of it already burned in her blood, hot and sweet.
Without another word, he strode to the door and yanked it open. His shoulders were tense, his fists clenched, as though he were holding himself together by sheer force of will.
The door slammed shut behind him, leaving Skylar alone in the corridor with only her ragged breathing and the pounding of her own heart.
She melted into the wall, her hot body trembling against the cold rock, her thoughts a whirl.
She had kissed him back, and the fact that she wanted to kiss him again terrified her more than anything.
If she stayed, if she let herself feel this, she would be lost. Consumed by him, undone by a man who was her captor and a brute, and who made her feel alive in a way she had never known.
She shook her head and pressed her palms to her burning cheeks. “Nay, I cannae.”
There was only one choice left.
She had to run.
Soon.
10
Skylar told herself the kiss had been a mistake.
A moment’s madness.
She told herself this so often through the afternoon that the words began to lose their shape, turning from iron to smoke every time she glanced at the door and remembered the heat of his mouth, the rough scrape of his beard, the way her own bones had gone soft with wanting.
Why would he kiss me?
Control, she decided. Manipulation dressed as hunger. A laird’s trick to keep a captive quiet. It had to be.
She kept to Grayson’s side anyway. That was the vow she could hold in both hands.
The boy dozed more than he woke, lashes dark on his too-pale cheeks, breath shallow, a faint rasp under every exhale. When he stirred, she coaxed sips of mullein-honey from a cup and told him about a swift she had watched while he slept.
“Where?” he asked weakly.
“Just there in glen. It knifed the wind so sharply that it made a line through the late-morning mist.”
Grayson smiled and hummed a sweet reply before sleep took him under again. Skylar sat there cataloging the tiny changes—color, moisture at the lips, heat at the brow—as if enough careful watching could force improvement.
It wasn’t until late afternoon that she realized they were alone in the solar. The guard usually sat a respectful distance in the passage, but still in view. Katie or Cora usually bustled around with cloths and mugs or cleaning. But now the room held only the song of the fire, the whispering scratch of her quill where she annotated her journal, and Grayson’s thin breath.
The door was not even latched.
A strange lightness touched her ribs.
Freedom?
Nae remotely.
