Page 100 of The Laird's Masked Passion

“She will heal,” the healer announced.

The words entered him slowly.

She will heal.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Colin bowed his head, only briefly, but Elspeth saw it.

She had begun, against all sense and better judgment, to understand that the smallest motions in him were often the loudest. He did not tremble. He did not confess fear. He did not soften where others might see it. Yet there was something in that bowed head that made her chest tighten more painfully than the cut along her ribs.

Then her gaze moved to his shoulder. The arrow was still there.

It looked monstrous now that she was permitted to notice it properly. The shaft jutted from him with brutal disregard, the torn leather around it dark with blood. His face was pale beneath that iron composure he wore, and Elspeth felt a fresh surge of anger so sharp it steadied her.

“Now him,” she ordered.

Fionn’s expression sharpened with the relief of a man finally permitted to address the more obvious disaster. “Aye. Now him.”

“I am fine,” Colin almost snarled.

Elspeth stared at him. “If I werenae bandaged, I would strike ye.”

“Rest has improved yer temper.”

Fionn pointed to the chair beside the table. “Sit, me laird.”

Colin did not move.

Elspeth’s eyes narrowed. “Sit.”

The room changed. Skye’s gaze flew to the floor. Fionn suddenly found great interest in sorting his tools. Even the air seemed to hold itself still, as if the walls themselves wished to see whether Colin MacKenzie, terror of half the Highlands and master of every grim silence he entered, would obey his wife.

He looked at her. Elspeth was painfully aware of herself then: pale, bandaged, half-covered by torn green cloth, still seated because he had carried her there, still aching beneath the healer’s careful work. But command rose in her all the same, clean and bright as a blade.

Colin sat. Her satisfaction was immediate and, she suspected, intolerable to him.

Fionn moved at once, as though fearing the laird might change his mind if given even a moment’s leisure. The healer cut away the ruined leather and linen at Colin’s shoulder, exposing blood-slicked skin and the ugly place where the arrow had gone in. Elspeth’s breath caught before she could stop it.

The shaft had not gone clean through. It had buried deep in the flesh above his shoulder blade, missing bone by God’s mercy orthe archer’s poor aim. Blood ran warm down Colin’s back, bright and terrible in the firelight.

Elspeth stood at once.

“Sit,” Colin said.

“I shallnae.”

“Yer ribs?—”

“Will remain attached whether I sit or stand.”

Fionn glanced between them. “This marriage is very good fer me practice in patience.”

Skye, who returned with a blanket to cover Elspeth’s torn gown, muttered. “It is good fer everyone’s practice in patience.”

Elspeth ignored them both and moved nearer. She had no intention of sitting meekly upon a table while her husband had an arrow dragged out of him.

Husband.