by Aileen Adams
Even if Ian hadn’t been the one to strike down this man’s parents, he’d most certainly displaced the eldest son and claimed the lands for the MacFarlands. That alone would be reason enough for this kindness to come to an abrupt end if Rufus learned her name.
She had to be smart. She’d been smart before, had she not? Her entire life. There was no alternative. One had no choice but to be smart when alone in a house of men the likes of her brothers.
A twinge ran through her leg and she winced, clenching her teeth. “Ye have the hands of a blacksmith,” she grunted, not thinking about the effect her words would have and immediately regretting it.
Such a comment, even made out of pain as that was, would have gotten her a slap across the mouth from one of her kin. She even flinched as if in preparation for just such a blow.
Rufus did not strike her. Instead, he laughed. A soft laugh, but a refreshing one. “I’ve never heard that one before, but I can imagine how uncomfortable this makes ye.”
Nothing of keeping her mouth shut, nothing of minding her own affairs. Ian might even have shoved her ankle just for the sake of hurting her, teaching her to stay quiet.
“Tis… fine,” she murmured. “The pain passed.”
He nodded, pressing gentle fingers to the top of her foot. “Does this hurt?”
“A bit, but not much.”
“And ye can still move your toes?”
She did so to prove it.
“Not much bruising. Good. Likely you’ll be able to walk on it in another day or two.”
“Thank ye. And thank ye for sharing some of your meal with me. I was quite hungry.” Roasted boar had never tasted so good, though she had hardly eaten it slowly enough to taste it.
He nodded, then began wrapping the ankle again. She drew a sharp breath when he pulled them a bit tighter than she would’ve liked, but it wasn’t anything she couldn’t manage.
“How long had ye been without food?”
She pressed her lips together in a thin, almost painful line before speaking of it. “Two days, I believe.”
“Two days.” It was not a question.
“I believe so. It was not easy to keep track. I slept for a long time. It was the only way to avoid the pain and hunger.” Why was she confessing? Why give him the impression of her being a wee, weak thing? She was anything but, and he ought to know it.
“I canna say I blame ye,” he grunted. “There have been a string of cool evenings as of late. Ye must have—”
“I did what I could,” she cut him off, refusing to think back on those long, lonely, frightening nights. “Moving was difficult. Slow. I managed.”
“I can only imagine how ye must have suffered. Who…” He glanced back at the fire.
The quickest glance, his eyes darting for nothing more than a moment, but she understood all. The kindness, the gentleness.
They’d sent him, and they wanted him to question her. To find out who she was and who’d left her in the woods.
Hadn’t she told herself to not let his kindness go to her head? This was why. A lifetime spent starved for kindness and attention meant the slightest bit of gentleness unsettled her so quickly, so completely. She’d almost fallen victim to his lying.
She hardened herself against him and all of them. “If your friends wish to know who I am and where I came from, they need only ask me themselves.” She glared at him, but her voice was well loud enough to be heard all around the camp.
His green eyes seemed to darken, his not-altogether-unpleasant face hardened. “What are ye gettin’ on about?”
“Ye know what I mean. Or are ye that daft, lad?” She clenched her teeth hard against a grimace when she moved her leg away from him, her ankle banging against the log and sending lightning bolts of pain from her ankle to her hip. “I’ll be bidding ye goodnight now.”
He rose, looking down at her with an expression she’d seen before. Oh, yes, he was angry.
“What are ye going to do?” she hissed, staring up at him with all the defiance she could muster. “Strike me? Would that help ye sleep more soundly tonight?”
His fists, hanging by his sides, curled as though yes, this was what he wanted to do. He wanted to take his anger out on her body, to drive his fists into her flesh until there was nothing left of her but a quivering, weeping mass.
Would it make him feel like more of a man? She was willing to wager on it. Weak men did weak things.
Yet when her eyes flicked back up to his after a pointed stare at his fists, he blinked hard. Once. Twice.
“What? Strike ye?” His shoulders sank. “Why would I do that? Are men in the habit of striking ye? I can’t say I blame them at this moment, truth be told, but I’m not in the habit of behaving that way.”
He turned his back to her then, returning to the other men. Their murmurs lingered in her ears late into the night.
Along with the question in her head, who was Rufus MacIntosh?
4
That might have gone better.
“What did ye say to her? I told ye, ye ought not have been the one to do the talking.” Drew sat back on his heels with a resigned sigh. “Now, there won’t be any getting through to her.”
“I thought it ought to be me, as I was so cruel to her on our first meeting one another. If I had a change of heart, so would she.” He ran a hand over his jaw, the short whiskers rough under his fingertips. “I was wrong. It would hardly be the first time.”
“What are we going to do with her?” Alec asked, looking around at the rest of the faces around the fire.
“Ye were the one who made me think twice about leaving her,” Rufus hissed. “I was prepared to leave her behind, because she’s a miserable, ungrateful wretch. Ye were the one who accused me of threatening her.”
“Would that I’d ever learned to keep my mouth shut,” Alec grunted.
“It wouldn’t have been right, leaving her there. We all know it.” Tyrone cast an unhappy look her way. “She might have come to a bad end, and there is already enough blood on my hands. I don’t need more, thank ye.”
That silenced all of them, save Clyde. He’d already been silent throughout the ordeal. Were it not for hearing him shout and grunt at Drew during their fight, Rufus would have assumed he was utterly mute.
He was not simple by any means, that much was clear. There was a shrewd intelligence to his face as he gnawed what was left of his share of roasted boar. He peered at the lass over the top of Alec’s head, his jaws moving deliberately as he chewed. Rufus would have paid a fair amount of money to know what was going on in his mind.
“Tis only a half day's ride to the next village. We can leave her there tomorrow,” Rufus decided. “We’ll have done her a service, taking her to a village which she could never have reached on her own. No guilt on our consciences.”
“Fair enough,” Drew agreed, and the relief in his voice was evident. That a man whose face still bore the bruises from brawling done only that very day could be so concerned over the welfare of a woman would have come as a surprise were the man anyone but Drew, who Rufus knew was secretly quite warm toward females. Yes, they could be a problem, but they were also to be protected. Their fathers had seen to teaching their sons that much.
Rufus settled back against his saddle, propped as it was against a tree. “I’ll sit up first,” he offered, for the notion of sleep was as far away as the moon which shone down from a clear sky, surrounded by the stars which were just as distant.
He stared up at those very stars as the others settled into sleep. Men accustomed to long stretches of rough travel were also accustomed to sleeping when they could, whenever the opportunity arose, and thus the lot of them were deep asleep in little time at all. Soon, the sounds of their breathing and snoring and even muttering to themselves were almost as loud as the breeze which rustled the trees, the grasshoppers, and frogs at a nearby stream. Their sleep sounds combined in a sort of music which he remembered after spending years sleeping among men in camps.
The difference being the woman lying across from them, her back to the fire, cloak drawn up over her shoulders as if to protect her. As though a mere piece of cloth could protect her from the likes of the men around her, should they have taken it into their heads to make it otherwise.
He’d seen more than enough women of her ilk defiled and destroyed to know there was hardly a force on earth saving the point of a dirk or a shot fired from a weapon that would stop a man once he’d set his intentions, and even then, the wound would have to be inflicted in the right place.
A cut on the arm or the leg might easily be ignored when there was so much soft, tender flesh to be ravished.
She’d not been riding alone. He simply couldn’t bring himself to believe she had. It was treacherous, rocky and steep in places, with hardly a hut or cottage anywhere within a half day's ride and any manner of vicious, immoral men lurking about. Why would she be so far from home, all on her own?
If she had a companion, that did not explain why she’d be alone when he’d found her, why no one had placed her upon their saddle and taken her to safety. How had she come to be alone for two days without anyone searching for her? She’d said nothing of a brother, a husband, or a father who might be looking. And she would, too, if only to threaten a group of strange men against doing harm to her.
She’d spoken not a word of anyone who might care about her being out in the woods, on her own, for days on end.
This bothered him more than it ought to, he was certain, but it was at least something to think about while he waited his turn to sleep.
“Must I ride with ye?” The lass arched one brow, looking him up and down. Her plump, otherwise inviting lips twisted in a snarl. “Can ye not walk alongside the horse?”
Rufus made a point of ignoring Drew’s strangled laughter. He was more than welcome to be the one to walk alongside her, if he thought the lass’s demands were so amusing.
One would think she considered herself a queen, looking over the end of her nose as she was. A half-starved queen, dirty face and all.
“Considering that we’ve already taken care of ye, fed ye, bandaged that ankle, and are now offering to take ye to the next village that ye might have a chance of surviving through the night, ye ought to be thanking us.”
She looked at her feet. So there was a way to get through her thick head, after all. That seemed to have done the trick. “I never said I did not thank ye,” she muttered. “But does that mean I wish to share a horse with ye?”
Suddenly, Clyde surprised them both, his voice the rumble of a cannon. “I’ll walk.” He took the lass about the waist and lifted her before she had the chance to protest. She was seated sideways across the saddle with a look of pure amazement on her face in no more than a blink.
“Thank ye,” she breathed with a shaky smile, and the giant merely nodded.
Tyrone and Aleck shrugged, while Drew strangled another laugh. Rufus swung himself up onto his saddle and decided that some things didn’t require questions, such as why Clyde had chosen that moment to do anything other than grunt.
The lass seemed pleased, if still a bit taken aback. “I’ve never set atop such an impressive beast before,” she confessed.
Rufus did not get the double meaning of her words until Drew snickered.
Her head snapped around, hair flying about her face, cheeks blazing with color. “Did I say something that amused ye?” she demanded in a voice that might have coated the surrounding pines in ice.
Just like that, Drew cowed before her cold fury. “N-nay,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“Why did ye laugh, then? Are ye in the habit of laughing for no reason?”
In any other circumstance, Rufus would have come to Drew’s aid. Drew was the sort who merely laughed at most of what life brought his way, likely because if he did not, he’d always be at odds with one man or another. It was either fight and scrap with everyone who came along or laugh off the least of it and put up his fists the rest of the time.
At any other instance, Rufus would have taken his part, as the man had truly meant no harm. Now? It was a point of much amusement, seeing him shrink back a bit under the lass’s glare.
“I am,” he admitted at last. “Tis a frightful habit which has gotten me into more trouble than it’s worth, I’m afraid.”
His good-natured reply was not what she’d expected, if the way she frowned meant anything. “Ye ought to break yourself of it if ye dinna wish to find yourself at the sharp end of a sword.”
“Och, lass, ye tell me now. I could have avoided so many brawls if only I’d had your keen advice.” He winked in his usual disarming manner.
She actually smiled—if a mere quirk of the lips could be considered a smile, which Rufus supposed was the closest a hellion such as herself could go before her face cracked.
“Ye fight quite a bit, do ye?” she asked, her tone brighter than before. Easier. They had come to an impasse which Drew had managed to bridge, and she liked him better for it. “I’d wondered about the marks on your face, and your knuckles are bruised as though you’d brawled.” She ran a finger over her knuckles, then pointed to his. An observant thing, then.
“Do I fight? Why, not a full day ago, I was just bringing this overgrown mountain of a man to his knees,” Drew grinned, nodding to Clyde.
The lass’s mouth fell open. “I cannot believe it.”
“Och, the offense,” Drew grumbled, not even half-serious. He pressed a hand to his chest as though she had wounded his heart.
The lass blushed. “I did not mean—”
“Ye mustn’t take him at his word,” Tyrone called back from his place in front of them. “He’ll twist ye up in knots until ye no longer know your own name. It would take much more than that to offend him.”
“And he did bring Clyde here to his knees,” Rufus added. “I would not have believed it unless I saw it with my own eyes.”
The lass looked to Clyde, walking slightly ahead of the horse. “And ye are still here with him now?” she asked the back of his head. “Ye do not hold a grudge against him for it?”
Clyde’s barrel shoulders moved up and down in a shrug beneath his rough homespun tunic. “Why?” he asked, and Rufus thought that single word explained a good deal about the man.
And in that respect—along with many others—they could not have been more different. His hands tightened around the reins at the very thought of Ian MacFarland and what he could be doing at that very moment. Living his life, riding, eating and drinking in peace. Caring nothing for the lives he’d ended, to say even less of the lives he’d destroyed in the process.
The rage, the disgust, the utter contempt for the man turned his stomach and hardened his heart. In his more fanciful moments, such as those spent at the campfire while the others slept and grunted and snored, he’d imagined his heart turning to stone. Hard, cold, barely beating thanks to the hatred it harbored.
And he’d wondered if it would ever be enough. Killing MacFarland, ensuring the safety of his brother’s birthright. None of it would bring back the dead.
Even so, killing the man would go a long way toward setting things to right.
“What of ye?” The lass turned to him, one brow arched in silent challenge. In the brighter light outside the thickest wood, he took note of the strands of red and gold in her auburn curls. She might actually be a bonny sort if she were clean and her hair combed free of debris and snarls. Now, she looked like nothing so much as a woodland faerie, rough and soiled and ready to bedevil them all.
“What of me?” he asked, suspicious of her intent.
“What do ye believe? Do ye hold grudges against other men? Or are ye the sort who feels there is no cause to carry such a burden?”
“A burden,” he scoffed. “What a woman might call a burden, a man knows is duty. Tis a man’s duty to set things to right.”
“That seems to me a terrible burden. Feeling as though one has the responsibility to set everything to right, when one might easily
live their life without such troubles. Would that not be simpler?”
“Simpler? Once again, lass, ye prove your womanhood. Men dinna care for that which is simple. Only for that which is right.”
She seemed to study him, her brow creasing. “Ye seem to know very much about this. Have ye dedicated your life to putting things to right, then?”
“Ye might as well know it. Aye. Though it’s no business of yours.”
Her full, wicked mouth twitched at the corners. “Aye. Ye do sound a great deal like other men, after all. Telling women to mind their business while ye mind yours, and thinking they know nothing. A shame, truly. There are times when women know a great deal.”
He snorted. “Have it your way. I’ve never known a woman who didna believe she knew more than a man.”
“Perhaps she simply believed she knew more than ye.”
Drew’s strangled laughter cut through the otherwise silent group. He was the only man who would dare make a sound just then, and he certainly was the only man in the world who Rufus would allow to live afterward. Even Tyrone, to whom he owed his very life, couldn’t have gotten away with it.
It was best to remain silent, then, for the lass had a skill for leading him into wishing he was the sort capable of striking a woman. He would not debase himself in such a manner.
“How long until we reach the village?’ she asked no one in particular. “Does anyone know? I’m terribly hungry again.”
It would be a blessing when he was free of her. She could bedevil another man and make his life miserable, as she was certainly striving to do to him.
5
Davina accepted the help of the giant man, limping to the stream at which they’d stopped to water the horses and take care of nature’s needs. He all but carried her, and with what seemed like no effort at all.
