Page 5 of The Merciless Laird
She exhaled.
The warrior stood with one hand on the door and his back against the frame, on the far side of the small space
"Better?" he said.
"I'm fine."
He looked at her the way people looked at things they didn't entirely believe. "Yer hands are flat on the wall."
She moved her hands. "I said I'm fine."
A beat. He let it go. "Yer leg."
"What about it?"
"Ye went down hard on it. How are ye?"
"I'm fine." She tested her weight on it carefully, kept her expression neutral when it protested. "It's naething."
He didn't argue.
He looked at her face instead. Not the way men usually looked at her face, with that careful softness she'd learned to dread. But directly, assessingly, the way you looked at something you were trying to get accurate information from.
"Are ye hurt anywhere else?"
"Nay."
"Did they touch ye before I reached ye?"
"His arm was across me chest. That's all."
He nodded once and looked back at the door, already done with it. Outside, the sounds were shifting, the sharp violence of the first wave giving way to the ragged noise of retreat, her father's guards calling patterns to each other across the yard.
She looked at him properly for the first time.
She'd expected older. The way he'd moved through that courtyard belonged to a man who had been doing it for decades.
He was sharp-jawed, lean, with light brown hair pushed back from his face and eyes that were very dark and very still and currently examining the door crack with the focused attention of someone running calculations.
"Who are ye?" she said.
"Nae important right now."
"Ye are in me home and just saved me life. I think I'll decide what's important."
His eyes moved to her face, briefly, and a for only a moment, he seemed almost amused. "Do ye now."
"Ye're nae one of me father's men." She kept her voice even. "Ye're nae Highland. Yer speech is," she stopped. Looked at him again. The cloak. The way he'd moved. The complete absence of anything resembling deference. "Ye're Norse?"
He said nothing.
"Ye're Norse," she said again, and this time it wasn't a question.
"I told ye." He straightened from the door frame, and the small space got smaller. "Nae important right now. What's important is that there are still men in this castle who came here taenight fer a reason, and standin’ in a storage room discussing me origins willnae help us."
"Ye said willnae." She looked at him steadily. "That's a Scottish construction. Ye've spent time here. Enough tae pick up the speech."
He stopped. From the way his body stiffened, she knew not many people spoke to him in that way.
