Page 12 of The Laird's Masked Passion

“Ye have done little else since meeting me.”

Since buying ye, his conscience supplied.

The words moved through him with the cold precision of a knife. He pulled the canvas free and carried it toward the flattest patch of ground he could find. He told himself a dozen times since the cathedral that he had not known she was ignorant. Thomas Fraser had sworn the girl had been told, with the ease of a man who had long ago emptied truth of consequence.

Colin should have suspected. He should have looked past the bargain to the woman at the end of it. Instead, he had seen a debt, a Crown command, an alliance useful enough to stop old blood from spilling into new war. And then she had stood beside him at the altar, white as the gown they had trapped her in, with fury in her eyes and betrayal all around her.

He drove the first peg into the earth harder than necessary.

Elspeth watched him from several paces away. “Are there wolves?”

“Nay.”

“Bears?”

“Nay.”

“Men who purchase women and then drag them into forests?”

His hand paused on the rope. He looked up. She held his gaze with that reckless courage of hers, though her face had paled with fatigue and cold. A less careful man might have answered in anger. Colin had been raised by such a man. He knew the shape of cruelty when it wished to call itself authority.

“I willnae touch ye against yer will,” he promised.

His words struck somewhere beneath her anger, where fear had been keeping itself alive.

“I didnae ask that.”

“Aye,” he said quietly. “Ye did.”

She looked away first, which gave him no pleasure. He finished pitching the small tent with more care than speed, though the light was beginning to thin between the trees. He laid blankets inside, checked the ground, gathered what dry wood he could find beneath a slant of rock, and built a small fire where its smoke would be broken by branches.

Elspeth moved from one patch of ground to another, trying to find a place where her gown would not touch mud, moss, bark, leaves, or any other feature of the natural world. Every sound startled her. Every shadow earned suspicion. Colin, who had slept in worse places than this with a sword under his hand and blood drying on his skin, found himself watching the careful lift of her skirts over roots as if it were a matter of state.

“There are too many noises,” she declared.

“There would be more in an inn.”

“In an inn, noises have the decency tae be human.”

“Human noises tried tae kill us this morning.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. Her gaze dropped to his hand. Colin followed it and saw the blood. The cut across his knuckles had opened again, the rain having washed it thin and red down his fingers. He flexed them. Pain answered, small and unimportant.

Elspeth’s eyes sharpened. “Ye are bleeding.”

“It is all right, I have had much worse.”

She crossed the little camp as if anger alone kept her warm. “Sit down.”

He frowned.

“Sit down, Laird MacKenzie, or I shall conclude that all the terrible stories told of ye left out the most damning truth. That ye are afraid of soap and water.”

He stared at her. “Are ye ordering me?”

“I am attempting tae preserve the life of the man who has made himself inconveniently necessary tae me survival.”

He lifted an amused eyebrow. “That is almost concern.”