Page 20 of Promised to the Cursed Laird

"After I told ye the bolt was yers tae use."

"It was." She lifted her chin, refusing to let the tremor in her hands reach her voice. "I used it tae leave, nae tae stay. Ye didnae specify which."

He looked like he was going to laugh and then his hand came up to her arm, careful over the place the drunk man had gripped, testing it with a gentleness that didn't match the violence she'd just watched him inflict on another man.

"Ye're shaking," he said.

"I'm nae."

"Ye are." His thumb moved once, lightly, over the mark already rising on her skin, and she felt that small, careful touch far more than she'd felt the drunk man's hand, which struck her as deeply unfair given everything she'd decided about him at supper. "That'll bruise."

"So will his jaw."

That got the almost-laugh out of him properly this time, low and short and gone almost before it arrived, and for one strange moment they simply stood there in the dark street with the kirk at her back and his hand still light on her arm, and she thought, with the clarity of a woman too rattled to lie to herself anymore tonight, I dinnae want him tae let go of my arm. That's the trouble. That's the whole trouble.

She stepped back first.

He let her.

"Ye came fast," she said, because it was easier than the other thing sitting in her chest.

"I was already awake." His voice had gone rough again, the way it had over the stew. "I heard the shutter."

"Ye were watching the window."

"I said the bolt was yers tae use." He held her eyes, steady, unapologetic. "I didnae say I'd stopped watching."

She should have been furious at that. She found, standing in the mud with her pulse still loud in her own ears and his hand having only just left her arm, that she couldn't quite locate the fury anywhere within herself tonight.

"Come," he said, quieter now, nodding back toward the inn. "Ye're cold, and I'd rather have this argument somewhere with a fire in it."

"We're having an argument?"

"We're always having an argument, Neilina." He offered his arm, not quite a request and not quite an order, occupying the space between the two that she was beginning to suspect was where he lived most comfortably. "I've simply decided this one can wait until ye're warm."

She looked at his arm. Then at the dark street behind him, empty now, the road she'd been trying to reach still there, still leading somewhere that wasn't MacKinnon land.

She did not take the road.

She took his arm instead and told herself it was only because her legs were unsteady. She did not entirely believe that either.

CHAPTER SEVEN

He didn't say much on the walk back, which she was grateful for, because she didn't trust her voice yet to hold steady over the shame sitting hot in her chest. She felt the shame of having tried and failed twice to run in one day, the shame of needing rescuing by the very man she was trying to escape.

He brought her up to the room and shut the door and turned to look at her properly for the first time since the street, and whatever he saw on her face made his jaw tighten.

"Sit," he said, nodding at the bed. "Ye're bleeding."

"I'm nae—" She looked down and found he was right, a shallow cut along the heel of her palm where she'd caught herself against the kirk wall's rough stone. She hadn't felt it happen. "It's naething."

"Sit anyway."

She sat. Mostly because her legs had reached the limit of what they intended to do for her tonight, and partly because arguing about a cut on her hand felt like more effort than the cut itself was worth.

He crossed to the small basin Grubb had left on the washstand, wet a cloth, and crouched in front of her, taking her wrist in a grip that was somehow entirely businesslike and yet far too intimate.

"This'll sting," he said.