Page 94 of The Laird's Masked Passion

Then, her eyes returned to Colin. “Why have ye been distant with me?”

The question left her more softly than she intended. Colin went still. He looked like a man struck somewhere he did not permit others to touch.

Elspeth regretted it at once and did not regret it at all.

His gaze moved over her face with such quiet intensity that the sounds of the feast seemed to retreat. For one suspended moment, there was only the scent of grass and smoke, thewarmth of sun upon her cheek, and Colin looking at her as if the answer might cost him more than a wound.

He opened his mouth, but at that very moment, something hissed through the air. Colin moved before Elspeth understood the sound.

One instant, he stood facing her. The next, he seized her and turned, driving her behind his body with such force that breath left her lungs. She heard the wet, hard impact before she saw the arrow.

Colin jerked. His hand closed on her arm, his whole body changed, the force of him catching around pain. The arrow stood from his shoulder.

For one heartbeat, Elspeth could not understand what she was seeing. The shaft quivered near the dark leather of his doublet, fletching bright in the sun. A red stain began to spread around it, slow and then terribly fast.

“Colin,” she whispered.

His face was pale beneath its iron composure. “Down.”

Then the meadow broke. A scream tore from somewhere near the tables. Another arrow struck a trestle and sent a bowl of berries bursting across the cloth like spilled jewels. Horses thundered beyond the trees. Men shouted from three directions at once.

“Munro!”

The name cracked across the feast like lightning. Robert’s soldiers came out of the edges of the world. They were not many at first, dark figures spilling from the rowan line, from the low ridge near the heather, from behind the stone wall wherethe path bent toward the village. But surprise made a few look like an army. Women screamed and children froze. Cups fell, while the fiddler’s music broke into one last tortured note and stopped.

Colin shoved Elspeth behind a cart as an arrow snapped past the place her head had been.

“Stay down.”

“Ye are hit!”

His eyes cut to her. “Stay. Down.”

It was not a request. It was command sharpened by terror and fury together. Then he drew his sword with his uninjured arm and turned toward the first man rushing them.

Elspeth had seen Colin fight before. She had seen steel in a cathedral and blood upon stone. But never like this, never with an arrow buried in his shoulder and his face emptied of everything except purpose.

The attacker lunged. Colin killed him. There was no flourish in it, no grand story for songs, only a brutal economy of movement that made Elspeth’s stomach twist and her heart seize. Another man came from the side, with his blade raised, aiming not for Colin but for the space behind him.

For her.

Colin saw it. He stepped into the blow, took it on his sword, and drove the man back with such force that the attacker stumbled over a fallen bench. Colin followed, wounded shoulder useless but rage making a weapon of the rest of him.

“Elspeth!” Skye’s voice cut through the chaos.

Elspeth turned. Skye stood near the tables with a child in her arms and two more clinging to her skirts. Her face was white, but her eyes were steady.

“The women!” Skye shouted. “The children!”

For a moment, Elspeth’s whole body rebelled against leaving Colin. He was bleeding. He was fighting because of her. Every instinct in her screamed to reach him, to press her hands against the wound, to demand that the world stop until he could be tended to.

Then an arrow struck the ground a foot from the sleeping child who had earlier rested against her skirts. Elspeth moved. She gathered the little girl up so swiftly the child began crying only after she was already in Elspeth’s arms.

“Tae the lower wall!” Elspeth shouted, though she did not know when she had decided she had the right to command anyone. “Behind the carts! Move!”

Some heard her. Some were too frightened. An older woman stood frozen beside a fallen bench, staring at the fighting as if her mind had left her body to escape before the flesh could follow.

Elspeth seized her hand. “Now.”