Page 103 of The Laird's Masked Passion

Colin’s gaze sharpened faintly despite the potion. Heat rose in Elspeth’s face. He rose too quickly and nearly proved every objection against him correct.

Elspeth caught his good arm. Skye reached for her at once, and Fionn muttered something about married fools being the heaviest burden on any healer’s soul.

Colin allowed himself to be guided, which told Elspeth more about the potion than any explanation could have done. He leaned only slightly, and perhaps no one else would have called it leaning at all. But she felt it. She felt the weight he tried not to give her. She felt the heat of him beside her, the careful way he kept from pressing against her wounded side even while his own steps had grown less certain.

By the time they reached the chamber, Colin’s strength was leaving him in visible degrees, though he still tried to hide each one. Skye drew the curtains. Fionn gave instructions. The fire was built high. Elspeth changed only enough for her torn gown to be removed without disturbing her bandage, and she let Skye wrap her in a loose robe because she had no strength left to argue over modesty.

Colin lay upon the bed with an expression of grave suspicion, as if the mattress had been sent by Munro.

“Ye may stop glaring at the ceiling,” Elspeth said, sitting beside him. “It didnae shoot ye.”

His eyes closed despite him. Elspeth watched the hard lines of his face ease by almost nothing, watched the pain remain even under the drag of the potion, watched this impossible man who stood between her and an arrow without hesitation and then argued over a cup meant to save him from tearing himself open again.

A tenderness she had not invited rose in her throat. She reached out before she could stop herself and brushed the hair from his forehead. His hand lay upon the bed near hers.

It was a warrior’s hands, a laird’s hand, and a hand that had covered her mouth, held her steady, protected her, teased her, and taught her things she could not yet think of without blushing.

Elspeth lowered her voice until it was barely more than breath. “Ye frightened me.”

Colin’s lashes stirred. For one moment she thought he might answer. His mouth parted slightly, and something strained beneath the potion’s hold, as if words were trying to fight their way through sleep.

But the draught took him. His breathing deepened. His face turned toward her by the smallest measure.

Elspeth remained beside him, her fingers still near his temple, and told herself she stayed because he might wake in pain, because the healer asked that he be watched, because Skye wastired and the castle was in chaos and someone sensible ought to make certain Colin MacKenzie did not rise from bed to interrogate prisoners while half-unconscious.

All those reasons were excellent. None of them explained why, when his hand shifted in sleep and came to rest beside hers, she did not move away.

Elspeth looked at Colin MacKenzie not as the man who bought her, nor as the laird who commanded her, nor even as the husband who unsettled her body beyond repair. She looked at him as a man who could bleed, a man who could fall, a man she was not at all certain she knew how to lose.

So she stayed, listening to the fire and his breathing, with her hand beside his on the bed and her heart behaving as if it had been struck by an arrow, too.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Colin woke to the disagreeable discovery that being alive was not the same thing as being well.

His shoulder announced itself first. It throbbed with a deep, ugly insistence, as though the arrow had not been removed at all but merely changed its mind and settled inside the bone. His head felt heavy with the remains of Fionn’s vile potion.

For several moments, he remained still and let the room return to him by degrees. Breac was seated near the wall with his arms folded and one boot braced against a stool. Murdoch was standing by the window, looking down into the courtyard as if he expected Robert Munro to climb the stones out of spite.

And Elspeth.

Colin’s breath stopped. She was asleep in the chair nearest his bed, curled in an attitude that could not possibly be comfortable and therefore was entirely like her. A blanket slipped from one shoulder. Even in sleep, there was a stubborn line between her brows, as if her dreams offended her and would be corrected upon waking.

Her face was too pale. The bandage beneath her robe showed when she shifted, a white glimpse at her ribs that sent a hard, cold memory through him: blood on green cloth, her hand red against her side, her knees giving way in the ruined meadow.

Colin began to sit up. Pain struck so quickly and so savagely that his vision went white at the edges again.

Breac was on his feet at once. “Dinnae be a fool.”

“I am sitting.”

“Aye. I had gathered that from the foolishness.”

Murdoch turned from the window. “Fionn said ye werenae tae rise.”

“Fionn says many things.”

“Most of them are cleverer than what ye are about tae dae.”