Page 49 of Highlander of Steel
Ailis shook her head. “Nothin’. I was just wonderin’ when ye were goin’ to turn yer back so I can take off me dress.”
She heard a huff of breath that might’ve been a chuckle, but he had already turned around to give her privacy. That meant she would have to unfasten her dress alone, or swallow her pride and ask for his assistance.
Grumbling under her breath, she chose the latter. “Ye can turn around for exactly two minutes to help me undo the laces. There’s a knot at the top that I cannae undo by meself.”
As he turned back to her, she managed to rise to her feet and turn away from him. Her legs were unsteady, the bone and muscle and sinew as weak as bread dough, and she doubted that having him unfasten her gown was going to help matters at all.
He’s nay better than yer braither.He killed those men without an ounce of regret. Aye, he’s handsome, and he’s… breathtakin’, but that’s nae a reason to be swayed. If anythin’, that’s more of a reason to be wary.
“So, I’m allowed to touch ye?” he asked.
Unable to see his face, she didn’t know if he was taunting her or not. It didn’t sound like it, but then his tone was often hard to read.
“Ye’re allowed to undo the ties,” she corrected. “Ye shouldnae touch any part of me that isnae covered in fabric.”
She could almost feel his sly smile as he replied, “In that case…”
19
Ailis yelped as she heard the snap of the laces, the tension pinging apart.Somethingwas running up the back of her gown, but it wasn’t his fingertips carefully unfastening knots. Indeed, if she wasn’t mistaken, only a blade could make the laces come apart that fast.
“Did ye just… use a dagger?” she snapped, glancing over her shoulder at him.
He held the knife up. “This way, I didnae touch ye at all.”
Before she could protest or call him any number of the rude things that danced on the tip of her tongue, he whirled around. To make it all the more infuriating, she couldn’tprotest too much; he had done exactly as she had asked, even if he had done it his way.
Why are ye so angry with him?she wondered as she slowly, shakily, peeled off the sodden dress and let it drop to the floor in a sad, wet heap.Ye’d be dead if he hadnae come to ye when he did.
She swallowed past the lump of guilt in her throat. Perhaps that was exactlywhy she was so angry with him, because she couldn’t turn that anger on herself without admitting how stupid she had been.
Just dipping her feet in the water or wading in up to her waist would have been enough to shock the fear out of her head, but she had kept wading in until the water was too high. By that point, she had been forced to swim, or try to. Then, the current had gotten hold of her, threatening to drag her out to sea, and… it had taken everything she had just to keep her head above the surface. Her nightmare made real.
Shaking off the thought, she pulled on the thick, woolen shirt. It smelled a little musty, but it was warm and dry.
“I’m dressed,” she muttered, sitting back down on what she discovered to be a flat rock draped in blankets.
It was still a little exposing, having her bare legs out for him to see, so she tugged one of the blankets from underneath her and pulled it over her legs. That done, she huddled back into the delicious heat of the fleece, wrapping it tightly around her.
Only then did she realize that Killian must have been cold too; he was just bearing it better than she was. He had been in the waterwearing far less than her, and he wasstillwearing less than her, his bare chest dappled with discolored hexagons. A sure sign that he was frozen to the bone.
Pouting, she extended one end of the huge fleece. “I daenae want to be blamed for yer death, either.”
“Ye daenae mind me bein’ close to ye?” he asked, sounding sincere.
She shrugged. “Nae if it saves yer life, like ye saved mine tonight.” A contrite smile curved her numb lips. “Thank ye, by the way. I ken I havenae said it yet.”
“Ye’re welcome,” he said as he sat down beside her and folded the end of the fleece around himself.
They lapsed into awkward silence for a while, the pop and spit of the fire the only sound aside from the percussion of waves hitting the cliffs and the patter of rainfall striking the rocks outside the cave mouth. Yet, Ailis found herself relaxing against Killian’s side, the warmth of him overcoming any desire to keep a polite distance between them.
“What were ye thinkin’?” he asked a short while later. “Runnin’ away like that?”
She would be lying if she said she hadn’t been expecting that question. Meanwhile, she was curious to know how he hadlearned that she had fled in the first place. She was grateful, of course, but who had raised the alarm?
“I wasnae thinkin’,” she admitted. “I… panicked. I was standin’ there in me weddin’ gown, with flowers in me hand, and… Paisley said somethin’ about Fraser, and I started thinkin’ about him and Skye and the clans, and… I couldnae breathe. So, I ran, and I didnae stop runnin’… and then I got here, and… I remembered how the cold stopped me from thinkin’ about… me fear, and I thought it could do the same again.”
Despite her insistence on not being touched, Killian’s arm slipped around her beneath the comfort of the fleece. She didn’t shrug him off, for though he was a partial cause of her earlier panic, he was also giving her the reassurance she had been craving. Reassurance that might have stopped her from running off in the first place.
