Page 16 of The Laird's Masked Passion

Elspeth felt something inside her go cold and clear. Her father had not merely hidden the marriage. He had not merely bartered her future for alliance, advantage, or pride. He had used her to pay for blood. She had been placed upon a scale, weighed against a dead man and her father’s convenience, and found sufficient.

“And the Crown accepted,” she whispered.

“They demanded a bride in payment.”

A strange calm came over her. It frightened her more than tears would have done. Tears belonged to wounds that still expected comfort. This felt older, deeper, a door closing in a house she had once believed her own.

“Me maither kent,” she said.

Colin’s eyes returned to her.

“She kent and could dae naething. He held her wrist in the church. I saw it.” Her voice trembled then, and she despised the sound. “I said the vows because he was hurting her.”

“I saw.”

“Then why did ye nae stop it?”

The question left her like a blade. Colin took it without movement. Outside their small circle of firelight, the trees whispered in the damp wind. Water moved in the dark, cold and ceaseless, as if it had no patience for human grief.

“I didnae ken enough then,” he admitted.

“Ye kent enough tae finish the ceremony.”

His silence was answer enough. Elspeth rose, because if she remained near him she would either strike him or weep, and she preferred he be denied the satisfaction of both. The ruined silk of her gown dragged at the moss. She knew that she looked absurd, a bride in wilderness, married by force, tending the wound of the man who had taken her.

“I will never fergive ye,” she hissed through clenched teeth.

His face revealed nothing, but something in his eyes went still.

“Fer buying me, fer carrying me away, fer letting that priest call me wife when I had been told naething.” Her throat tightened, but she forced the words through. “But most of all, Colin MacKenzie, I will never forgive ye for taking me from that church before I kent if me maither was safe.”

He stood then, and his height seemed to fill the small space between fire and trees.

“I had tae get ye out.”

“And I had tae ken if she lived.”

“She was standing when we left.”

“Standing isnae safe,” Elspeth whispered. “Nae with him.”

For once, he had no answer. That should have satisfied her. It did not.

She turned away before her face could betray her, wrapping her arms around herself against the cold. Behind her, Colin remained silent, and she hated him for that, too. She hated that his silence did not feel empty, but burdened.

The bandage she had tied showed pale against his wounded hand. Elspeth wished she had made the knot tighter.

Elspeth had never before considered a tree branch to be an article of feminine defense, but necessity, she was discovering, had very poor taste.

She found it near the edge of the water, half-hidden in moss, stout enough to bruise and long enough to give her couragewhere courage was otherwise in short supply. By the time Colin entered the tent, ducking beneath the low flap with his shoulders too broad for the small space and his expression too unreadable for her comfort, she had both hands closed around it.

He stopped. His gaze travelled from her face to the branch, then back again. For several heartbeats, neither of them spoke.

“If ye even think,” she warned, lifting the branch between them, “of consummating this marriage, I shall prove ye arenae the only frightening-looking person in this tent.”

Colin looked at the branch once more. “Is that so?”

“Aye.”