Chapter Eleven

Lillian woke slowly with the gray dawn. She’d been dreaming about warmth and the fragrance of pine and a decidedly masculine scent.

Reality suddenly broke through the gauzy dream and she bolted upright as if the very ground had burned her.

Exhaling a shaky breath, she realized she was alone. MacLeod must have already risen.

She thanked God she hadn’t woken by his side. Her bone-weariness had been a boon, for it had meant she hadn’t had the energy last night to fret over the fact that his large, warm form had been so close to her. But if she woke this morning to find herself underneath the cloak with him—or worse, touching him in some familiar, relaxed way—she would have burned clear through with embarrassment.

She had never lain intimately with any man other than her late husband. Her marriage bed hadn’t been so different than when she’d shared a cot with her younger brother as a child. Except for the few times each month that Richard reasoned it their duty to God to attempt to make offspring, she and her husband rarely touched as they slept. Their sheets were companionably warm, but never hot with the flames of passion.

How different it had been next to MacLeod, even in the few moments she remembered before exhaustion had pulled her under. He’d been all heat and hardness and earthy, masculine scents.

The thought sent hot shame into her face. It was not only an insult to her late husband, but also to herself to feel aught but hatred and disgust for the man who held her captive. Yet the twisting knot in the pit of her stomach was neither hatred nor disgust, but something entirely…new.

Propping herself up, Lillian’s gaze swept over the now-dead fire he’d made last night, then across to where his horse stood tethered by the creek.

And then her eyes fell on him.

He was crouched in front of the creek, his back turned to her. And his tunic was on the ground next to him.

He was splashing water over his face and chest and hadn’t seemed to notice that she’d woken. As she took in the sight of his broad, muscular back, that strange, tight heat swept across her skin again.

Richard had been formed well enough. He’d stood a hand-span taller than Lillian, which put him at eye level with most men in England. He did not bear any scars or deformities, his limbs were even, and his flesh was mostly firm .

But this man made Richard look like a boy hardly grown into manhood. There wasn’t a spare pinch of flesh around his waist, which narrowed from his broad, muscle-stacked shoulders. His lower half was covered by his breeches, but even crouched, she could make out the power there as well in the gray morning light.

Each time he cupped his hands and splashed water over himself, his muscles bunched and twitched, hypnotizing her. Richard’s body had never done that to her.

She gasped at her own thoughts. How could she betray Richard’s memory and her own sense of pride like that? How could her enemy make her heart pound not in terror but with something she feared to name?

He must have heard her sharp intake of breath, for like lightning, he spun on his heels and rose to his feet in one fluid movement.

Though he was several paces away, it felt as though he loomed over her from her position on the ground. Involuntarily, her gaze darted over his exposed chest. His leanness revealed every powerful cord of muscle banding his chest and stomach. Water dripped in little trails over those muscles like little brushing fingertips.

Lillian clenched her hands automatically, as if her fingers might have dared to trace where the water trickled down his torso. She felt her mouth go dry and gooseflesh raise across her chest.

“Ye’re awake,” he said, then frowned. “Obviously. ”

“Aye,” she replied, feeling like a fool.

He bent and scooped up his tunic. He used it to wipe away the droplets of water clinging to the dark scruff on his jawline, then ran it down his torso before slipping his arms in the sleeves and pulling the garment over his head.

“Ready yerself to depart.”

The terse command was spoken in that same low, rough brogue. If Will had been right that an Englishman had tortured her husband for information and had now sent someone after her as well, why send a Scot? And why would a Scot work for an English bounty hunter organization?

MacLeod had claimed it was for money—a delivery of goods in exchange for coin, naught more. But why did she sense something else lurking behind those pale blue eyes?

She shook off the disconcerting line of questions as she untangled herself from MacLeod’s cloak. She would drive herself crazy thinking in circles like this. Her life was in danger, and she had to find a way to—

As Lillian rose to her feet, her weight came down on her right ankle. The breath whooshed from her lungs. Pain hit her like a hammer, then continued to vibrate through her as if she were a struck bell.

She wobbled on the ankle as she tried to take her weight off it. Suddenly MacLeod was there before her, his arms snaking around her waist and his large, warm chest providing a wall of stability against which she leaned.

Lillian sucked in another breath, but this time it wasn’t from pain. Nay, it was from MacLeod’s sudden, overpowering nearness. She felt as though she’d stared down a well and grown dizzy, or peered over a mountain ledge and felt her stomach drop even while she remained rooted in place.

“Easy,” he murmured, his fingers sinking into her hips.

“It…it must have stiffened overnight,” she said lamely, her gaze fluttering up to meet his.

“Do ye need help…er…seeing to yerself?”

Heat flooded her cheeks. It was bad enough to be completely at this man’s mercy. She refused to become so helpless that she couldn’t even tend to her own needs.

“Nay,” she said firmly. She had to grit her teeth against the discomfort, but she managed to put weight onto her ankle and step back awkwardly out of his hold.

She hobbled out of his line of sight and found a bush behind which to relieve herself, then made her way slowly to the stream to wash her hands and face and take a long drink.

By the time she straightened and limped back to their little makeshift camp, MacLeod had already saddled the horse and stood by it. He’d also donned his cloak once more, the hood pulled up over his dark head against the smattering of raindrops that had begun to fall from the overcast sky.

His cloaked head was bent, his attention fixed on some sort of leather contraption he was fastening to one wrist. As she approached, Lillian realized that it was a series of straps that held his small throwing daggers. That was how he could produce them into his hands so swiftly and smoothly with just a flick of his wrist.

Her mind darted back to Will and the others, who’d been the victims of those terrible blades.

Whatever kindness MacLeod had shown her, whatever strange heat he stirred in the pit of her stomach, she could never forget what this man was capable of—what he was planning on doing with her. He would deliver her to the men who’d tortured Richard to death without hesitation. She must hold that knowledge close, no matter the flickers of unnamed emotion she saw in his eyes.

Stiffening her spine, she hobbled toward the man who would deliver her to the Devil himself for a coin.

It was then, as she eyed the enormous beast of a horse standing next to MacLeod, that she noticed her throbbing discomfort wasn’t just coming from her ankle. Her thighs, bottom, and back all ached from the hard riding they’d done.

Lillian wasn’t particularly comfortable around horses. They were just so big and powerful. As a child in York, she’d seen a man get kicked in the head by a horse that had spooked and broken free. The man lived, but he was never right in the head again. He constantly drooled and had to be tended by his wife as if he were one of her children.

Because of that, and because she’d never had cause to ride, living within the comfortable confines of fairly large towns, she’d likely ridden on horseback more in the last two days than she had in all her twenty-four years combined.

Her trepidation and discomfort must have been evident on her face, for MacLeod’s gaze sharpened on her as he dropped his tunic sleeve in place over the leather straps holding his daggers.

“Ye arenae used to riding so much, are ye?”

“Nay,” she admitted.

“Ye are sore?”

Heat again rose to her cheeks. “Aye.”

“Come here.” Even as he spoke the curt command, he swung into the saddle. The enormous roan shifted slightly, giving her pause, but when the animal stilled, she approached cautiously.

MacLeod leaned over in the saddle, and before Lillian knew what was happening, he took her beneath the arms and lifted her clear off the ground. She gasped, but before she could form an exclamation of surprise, he was settling her side-saddle across his lap.

It was a shocking position. Her bottom was nestled against his groin, her thighs dangling over one of his steely legs. Her side bumped into the wall of his chest, sending the air rushing from her lungs once again .

It was far too intimate. Yet she couldn’t deny that her aching thighs were grateful for the respite from straddling the horse.

MacLeod took up the reins then, his forearms settling against her, one on the small of her back and the other across the tops of her thighs.

Sweet Mary . Lillian tried to slow the frantic thump of her heart with a deep inhale, but all she managed to do was breathe in MacLeod’s scent, of pine and smoke and man.

Before she realized what he was doing, he pulled his cloak around her, sheltering her from the intensifying rain and sealing them into a cocoon of warmth.

Again, she was struck by that small act of kindness. He might claim that wrapping his cloak around her was to keep her in good health, as he’d been instructed to do, but there was no reason he should accommodate her by letting her ride sidesaddle. Her thighs and bottom would scream in protest if she had to ride astride, but it wouldn’t kill her.

For all that she’d just counseled herself to hold firm and remember that MacLeod was a heartless bounty hunter, doubt now crept in. His little acts of kindness and mercy didn’t square with the rough-edged, cold mercenary he was.

Out of the misty depths of memory, a saying of Richard’s floated suddenly to the forefront of her mind.

Fallibility lies not in the stone, but in men’s hearts.

Richard had often repeated those words with a wry smile. When he’d first said the phrase to Lillian years ago, she’d asked what it meant. He’d replied that God’s creation of the earth was perfect, but men were flawed, tainted by their fall from Eden.

He liked to remind all the masons who worked under him on Berwick’s wall of the sentiment. More often than not, when an error occurred, it was not due to the quality of the rock being used, but rather a miscalculation or mistake on the part of the men’s measurements, their tools, or their execution of a skill.

Why had Richard’s saying sprung to mind as she tried to make sense of MacLeod’s strange behavior? If fallibility was to be found in men’s hearts, did that mean MacLeod the black-hearted mercenary was susceptible to kindness? Or did it imply that MacLeod had once been a good man whose fallibility led him to do evil things?

Lillian’s mind tugged at the questions in an attempt to untangle them. She struggled to understand, to anticipate MacLeod’s next move, as if they were opponents sitting across a chess board. The problem was, this was no game—her life was at stake. And unlike chess, she could not simply pick up a piece and move it. She was powerless in the face of the larger forces working against her.

Her swirling thoughts were interrupted when she felt his thighs squeeze into the horse’s flanks. The animal started into a quick walk. She would have clung onto something to steady herself at the swaying motion, but the only solid thing was MacLeod himself, and she would not stoop to that. So she had to submit to bumping into his hard chest again and again with her shoulder.

Despite the cold morning, a new heat burned within Lillian for the entire day’s journey—a heat she refused to consider, else she’d have to admit a dark secret to herself: she was drawn, inexplicably and perilously, to her captor.