Highlander's Rage: A Scottish Medieval Historical Romance (Unbroken Highland Spirits Book 2)

by Alisa Adams

He didn't touch her once the flap of the tent was secured down over the door. He didn't speak with her nor look at her. And he certainly didn't throw her down upon the bed as he had before. In fact, he seemed to barely register her existence, as he undressed for bed and gave her only the passing courtesy of waiting for her to curl up in her nest of blankets before blowing out the candles.

  There, in the dark, Aoide was left confused, hungry, and altogether buzzing on a tension that would not see release that night. Despite the energy that zipped through her bloodstream, she was also aching and utterly exhausted, which made her grouchy and uncomfortable as she fought with her blankets and finally fell asleep only through sheer force of will.

  An irritable sleep was a light one.

  Used to running for her life or being forced to defend herself through the night from surprise witch hunts, Aoide had always slept shallowly. The fact that Lachlan had managed to shackle her that one morning, while she slept, was a testament to the extreme tiredness she had held or to his skill in stealth. Generally, Aoide was the first to wake, and she was quick to be roused to conscious thought. When made to sleep with tension in every muscle in her body, it was hard to fall into the deeper realms of slumber that even she might have been lost to once in a while.

  Instead, Aoide's eyes flew open the moment she heard a sound outside of the tent.

  It was soft and quiet, a single footfall that was hovering outside as if to sense for danger within. There was a gentle scuffle or shift of something and then another footfall, this time inside the tent. The shift had been the untying of the flap door.

  Aoide was careful to keep herself still.

  She had fallen asleep with her face towards the door. She had only to open her eyes to see what was happening, but alerting them to her state of wakefulness might force their hand. And she had no weapon.

  With a wistful consideration for her rock dagger, Aoide kept her muscles still and her breathing even. She could hear the gentle rise and fall of Lachlan's deep sleep and felt a moment of panic enter her heart.

  Was this intruder simply a soldier needing some supply? Was he a man ready to wake Lachlan and warn him of danger? Or was he the spy, ready to murder in the dark of the night?

  But why would he? Why now? Why Lachlan?

  Keeping her breathing even, Aoide played dumb and shifted a little on the ground. She mumbled and made her movements clumsy and languid as if she were rolling over in her sleep or yawning. There was no sound of movement for a moment and then another footfall. This one was further away from her.

  Closer to the bed.

  With her face now mostly hidden in shadow, Aoide was able to open her eyes without reflecting a gleaming gaze back at the intruder. She looked through the shield of her hair, peering as best she could at the figure ahead of her.

  He was tall—too tall to be one of the younger soldiers. His hair was dark, even in the shadows of the middle of the night. And he held a blade. Unsheathed, the metal gleamed as the assailant altered his grip.

  Her heart pounding, her breath turning frigid in her chest, Aoide realized immediately what was happening. This was the spy! In his failure to get the chest and the tax money, this man was taking on the responsibility of killing the man who had seen it safely to Scone. Why, Aoide didn't know, but no man wielded a knife like that without the intention of using it.

  Not thinking through her next movements, Aoide quietly curled her feet up under herself, paused for two heartbeats, and then charged at the enemy.

  Leaping into the air, she wrapped herself around the back of the traitor, her legs wrapping around his waist, her arms about his neck. She had no weapon but the element of surprise and the ability to stay his hand long enough for Lachlan to wake up. She had added a war cry as she had jumped onto the soldier's back, her hand reaching for his wrist and the knife he held in it. She couldn't see if Lachlan was awake. She couldn't see anything at all! It was too dark; she was too sleepy and dull in her vision. She only knew that she needed to stop that blade and the man who carried it.

  As soon as she had latched onto the spy, his body shook and flailed with surprise and defense. He twisted under her grip, fighting against the wrist she held firm and the arm she had around his neck. He spun and flexed beneath her, but Aoide wouldn't let go. She crossed her ankles and tightened her hold. She knew that if she relinquished her control, she would be dead in a second, Lachlan the second after.

  In battle, however, the element of surprise will only see one so far.

  After stunning her prey into a flail of panic, it took only a few seconds for his training to come to the surface and his strength as a soldier to overpower her. With a heavy wrench upon his wrist, he had freed his blade hand from her grip. A moment later, he was using it to his advantage with deadly precision and no hesitation.

  Aoide didn't know which way to look or which wound to cry out from. They all happened so quickly she barely had time to react to each in turn. One moment, the spy had flung his hand back over his shoulder, and there had been a spark of pain at her neck. The next, her arm had burned hot and finally her thigh. None were bad enough to see her scream, but the collective assault on her senses had her gasp, cry out, and fall from his back, unable to regain her strength.

  What followed was a noise that Aoide wasn't sure had ever been produced by a human being. She feared a bear or a wolf had just entered the tent, determined to kill them all. It was a roar unlike anything she'd heard, and if her head wasn't so worried about the sharp sensations of pain all over her body, not to mention the bash to the head she had taken when she hit the floor, she might have recognized the voice as Lachlan's.

  Maybe.

  In the darkness, Aoide could barely see what was happening. She knew enough to curl her legs up and out of the way of large feet and was able to scuttle across the floor to avoid the fight. But the details of the conflict were lost on her. There were noises of pain, roars of rage, the keening sound of metal on metal. Finally, the gurgling, defeatist groan of a man at death's door curdled the air, and one of the shadowy masses had fallen to the floor.

  It didn't move again.

  Not sure who had been which shadow and how the fight had ended, Aoide felt her heart race and her wounds sting, and her eyes fill with both panic and tears. She didn’t dare scream a name, should it be the wrong one. With no means of defending herself, she used her good arm to pull herself across the floor, felt the blankets that constituted her bed crumple behind the small of her back, and watched as the victor of the fight reached for a means of lighting the lamps.

  She didn't breathe until she could see the face illuminated by candlelight.

  It was Lachlan's.

  He felt sick.

  It was rare for Lachlan's emotions to be powerful enough to come to the surface, let alone carve so deeply beneath it that it twisted his stomach into knots. Yet, here he was, fearing that he might actually throw up there in his tent.

  Aoide was hurt, and it didn't matter that he had dispatched her attacker without mercy, nor that the man was now dead and unable to harm her again. It made no difference that he had barked for bandages, clean water, and any other provisions the unit had in its possession, the second that light had filled the tent. Nor that he had no experience in tending to wounds that were not his own.

  The only thing that was serving to cool the murderous energy that bubbled in his gut was sitting here beside his bed, taking care of the little redhead that had willingly placed her life in danger for the sake of saving his own.

  "That's everything, Captain. Will it serve purpose?"

  Translation: Did he need to send a man back to Scone in order to find some poultices or tonics that might serve better?

  In truth, he did not know.

  Harris was at his side, as Lachlan looked blindly over the water, cleaning cloths, the fresh linen for bandages, and a few herbal salves that Dennis Moyer's mother had procured for him and insisted that he take on his journey. The boy had been only too happy to turn t
hem over when he had discovered the patient that needed them to be Aoide.

  Lachlan had no understanding of whether the supplies would be enough, but he also couldn't lose face before his lieutenant. The man had already begun to stare at him with an odd look in his eye as if his captain were at risk of losing his mind. Or perhaps that was just the puffiness of disturbed sleep, making Harris's scruffy face appear lopsided.

  "It'll do," Lachlan accepted, unable to do little else. "Just get that shit out of here."

  The “shit” in question was the body that Lachlan kicked with the heel of his boot. Unwin's body was still lying prostrate in the arms of death, bleeding out on the tent floor. Lachlan had barely given two glances his way, too preoccupied with taking Aoide into his arms and depositing her upon his cot. He was too big to tend to her on the ground.

  Grabbing the soldier’s limp arms, Harris gave a pull and a yank and dragged the body away. The heels of Unwin’s boots made a hushing noise against the fabric until they hit the grass and bounced over the uneven ground. Lachlan paid it no mind. What comfort did a traitor deserve in death? None.

  Pushing away his frustrations over a man like Unwin working beneath him for so long and holding such evil in his heart, Lachlan reminded himself that there was nothing he could do to rewrite history now.

  Instead, he focused on the girl in front of him.

  Woman, he corrected, for the sight of her was hardly that of a girl right now.

  The shirt that she had been wearing since he had known her was now so torn that it would better operate as a belt than a shirt, and only then if it was wrapped around her thrice. It hung as a dangerously loose mask upon her chest, but only if she sat in the right way. A shift in the wrong direction, and she would be as exposed as he, crouching before her in only his kilt. Her legs, he was quick to bare. Not because of a burning desire to see the long lengths of creamy skin, though he felt sure he possessed such a hunger, but to tend to the wound on her leg. The blood from the cut on her inner thigh had seen the material stick and congeal. He couldn't clean it without removing the garment.

  With a few tugs and gentle encouragement, Aoide yielded the trousers. She wore no undergarments, and Lachlan felt his heart rate jump when he spotted the soft expanse of a pale bottom, but her modesty was kept by the length of her shirt. It pooled around her hips and down between her legs with yards of the fabric still to go.

  Trying not to feel cheated and to focus on the task at hand, Lachlan felt a moment of panic as he knew not which injury to tend to first. Unwin hadn't injured her fatally, but his mad desperation to be free of her hold had seen nearly every limb a casualty of his blade. Lachlan felt each of those cuts somewhere deep in his chest.

  Deciding that the wound on her thigh was the deepest and, therefore, the priority to treat, Lachlan busied himself with the water and the clothes, ready to see it cleaned. He refused to meet Aoide's eye, barely spoke a consent when she asked if he was alright, and then a denial when she suggested she see to her own injuries.

  She had taken these hits in her efforts to save him from an assassin. He'd deserve not his title nor his life if he then allowed her to patch up her own wounds in a corner somewhere. He'd lose the right even to call himself a man.

  The fact, however, that he was just such a thing—male in all its forms—only served to be an issue as he worked over Aoide's skin. He refrained from meeting her stare; he didn't speak. He only kept his attention on the task at hand. But that didn't stop him from almost losing it when she rocked her hips back and forth to move to the edge of his bed and opened her inner thigh for his treatment.

  The scent of her, of her femininity, assailed him, and Lachlan was forced to clamp down on his muscles. He felt his body shifting and changing, but he ignored it. He summoned the kind of focus that he had used as a child, blocking out the pain and grief of his parents' passing because he knew that he had to care for Finlay. Now, he blocked out desire and need because he knew that he had to care for Aoide.

  It was the same thing, he tried to convince himself.

  Working upon the pale and toned shape of her thigh, Lachlan cleaned the wound carefully. He leaned in close to block out the rest of her and focus only on the wound as if it were a brother-in-arms that he was tending to. Only, he didn't recall Finlay or Tomas ever having such buttery soft skin. Pale and creamy, it was at complete odds to the roughness on Aoide's palms and the dark tinge her lower legs and arms had taken on as if the dirt had failed to reach that far and had not yet sunk into her skin.

  When he was done cleaning the wound and encouraged Aoide to lift her knee so he could wrap the bandage around her thigh, Lachlan was dry in the mouth and ready to assault her anew in a way that would bring absolute pleasure to them both.

  Only the sharp gasp of pain that accompanied him tying off the bandage kept him focused on the task at hand. Aoide needed care, not carnality.

  Such promises were easier thought than done.

  By the time he had finished with her arm, Lachlan was fully erect and knew that he had to be panting. He had no idea what was shining in his eyes, but when he met Aoide's stare, for the first time since the attack, he saw something heated and wild staring back at him.

  Reaching out, Lachlan forced himself only to move her hair to one side instead of claiming it in his palms. He looked at the wound on her neck with at least a little relief. Despite the danger of its location, it was the shallowest of the injuries and wouldn't need a bandage: just a good clean and a little salve.

  By the time his fingers were working the poultice into Aoide's skin, Lachlan was kneeling between her legs and leaning into her body. Their faces were just a few inches apart, and he could feel the heat of her breath on his face.

  Belatedly, he realized that she had been talking to him as he had tended to her, and yet he'd heard none of it, too wrapped up in his own lustful thoughts to hear what she was saying.

  How observant of me.

  What a great leader I am.

  Unnerved by the idea that he was letting his guard down in front of the girl, allowing such things to escape his notice because he felt no need to be on edge, Lachlan tried to focus on the task at hand. But it was becoming harder to keep his awareness with each pass over her skin.

  As his fingertips worked over the pulse at the base of her neck, trailing the length of the wound, a soft moan seeped from Aoide's lips and passed over his. Swallowing, Lachlan closed his eyes, licked his lips, and summoned up his legendary control. But then she mewed in a soft little whimper of pleasure-pain that had his touch stilling on her neck altogether.

  He opened his eyes and found himself nose to nose with her.

  "Lachlan..."

  It was the first time she had ever said his name.

  It hit him somewhere deep—a tendril of desire that snuck beneath his skin. His heart raced, his lips parted.

  There was a featherlight touch upon his cheek and then Aoide had leaned in to kiss him.

  At the first brush of her lips, Lachlan felt his entire body catch fire.

  With a fearful stumble backward, Lachlan broke the connection and moved back. The image of Aoide, cross-legged on his bed, naked from the waist down and with a shirt openly begging for his hands to dive beneath, his fear was nearly overridden. He almost went stumbling back to her on his knees, desperate to touch, desperate to claim.

  But he didn't.

  He stood up, snatched a tunic from the end of his bed, pulled it down over his head, and left his tent without a backward glance.

  13

  "I am sorry."

  The voice was nervous in the same way a touch was gentle when handling something fragile.

  Dennis stood in the doorway of the tent, having arrived with new bandages. Lachlan had barely looked at him as he had dressed and stormed past him, leaving Aoide to comfort her humiliation alone. Though, not entirely so. There had been a witness to her shameful attempts at intimacy.

  "I feel like I interrupted something," Dennis offered, hi
s eyes darting to Aoide's long, bare legs.

  Aoide blushed and drew her shirt down over her knees to hide her thighs from view. The gesture then stretched the garment to expose her chest. Embarrassed, she was forced to hold everything into place with both hands. Her smile was awkward and more than a little shy as Dennis deposited the little bundle beside the bed.

  "You can hardly interrupt something that does not exist," she reassured him.

  As Lachlan had tended to her injuries, every brush of his fingers on her skin had driven her heart to thump harder, her skin to flush darker. She had lost the ability to breathe, to think, and to function. By the time he had reached her neck, she had been lost in fantasies of skin and passion and heat. Completely adrift in her own desires, she had missed the fact that they had not been mutual.

  Despite the emotion she had thought she had seen in Lachlan's eyes, he had refused to kiss her, practically falling over himself to get away from her, and had retreated from his own rooms just to be free of her presence.

  No message was ever quite that clear.

  Not only did Aoide now feel hot and bothered but foolish also. It was a combination that sat ill beneath her skin and made her itch.

  "I'll...get you some clothes."

  The words were kindly offered, but Aoide was lost in her own melancholy to the point where she reacted too slow. By the time she realized what the soldier had said and turned to tell him not to worry, he had already disappeared from the tent, upon the quest to see her decently dressed. From the glances he had shot her, and the awkward thirst in his voice, it was clear that he felt it necessary to see her skin covered.

  Well, she wondered with a sense of feminine pride that she had never really known she possessed before, at least there is one man in this camp who has some form of reaction to my nudity...

  Reaction was perhaps the wrong word, Aoide reflected the next day.

  After spending the night alone in Lachlan's tent, Aoide had woken to the sunrise and dressed in a tunic and livery supplied by Dennis. The fabric had smelled of nature from being washed in local rivers but also bore a hint of personal musk. Dennis was a clean boy—clearly taught well by his mother—so it wasn't overpowering. Just a subtle reminder of who the clothes belonged to.