“There, now, lad. Try to lie quietly. You’ll tear open that wound.”
“But they are coming for us! They will hang us for traitors. We must away!”
“Whisht now, Danny lad, you are safe. Did I no’ promise to keep you safe?” The tenderness in Finnan MacAllister’s voice, so much at odds with anything Jeannie had heard from him, went straight to her heart. Oh, but he had a beautiful voice when he did not threaten or beguile.
But Danny, if he heard, took no comfort. “They will put us all to death! Cut out my heart…”
“Easy, Danny. You know I will fight to the very death for you.”
An avenging highland angel was he, standing between this lad and all harm with a drawn sword? Cursed if Jeannie was not convinced. She stirred in the doorway, and Finnan’s senses, ever alert, detected the movement. He looked at her and straightened from the bed.
“Mistress, I hope we did not disturb your rest.”
Jeannie answered with another question. “What is it, is he worse?”
“Fever has set in; he is out of his head.” Slowly, moving with that powerful grace, Finnan approached her. “It often happens with this kind of wound, but I confess I hoped for better.”
“Of what does he speak? Whom does he fear?”
Finnan gave a wry smile. “Whom does a man not fear when caught in a fever? I have bathed his head and done my best to reassure him, but I do no’ think he hears.”
“Perhaps willow tea.”
“Have you any?”
“I will brew some.”
Jeannie turned away to the fire and expected Finnan to remain at Danny’s side, but he followed her instead.
“I apologize again for this intrusion,” he murmured. “I have turned your life on its head.”
She glanced at him as she took the jar of willow bark from the shelf, trying to measure his mood. She began to suspect she could take at face value nothing this man presented.
“It cannot be helped,” she returned. But yes, he had turned her world upside down, and yes, she found it difficult even to think clearly in his presence.
“I would like to say we will clear out of here come morning, but I cannot make that promise, with Danny this way.”
“And, as you say, you always keep your promises?”
“Always.” He spoke the word passionately, an absolute.
Jeannie nodded toward the lad in the other room. “Has Danny been with you a long while?”
“Ever since Culloden.” Finnan fell silent for a moment, and his expression turned bleak. “He never should ha’ been there, a mere lad. I found him lying beneath a number of his fellows, all dead, bleeding from the wound where his arm had been. I only heard him because he sobbed for his ma.”
Jeannie’s throat tightened. So Finnan MacAllister truly did have a heart beneath all those tattoos.
“Given such a dire injury, however did you keep him alive?”
Finnan shook his head. “Last evening was not the first time I ha’ stitched him up. Thought sure we’d lose him after Culloden. Geordie and I…” He stopped speaking abruptly.
Jeannie, curious, looked into his face. It had closed as if a shutter had come down.
Yes, and that matched the look she remembered seeing in Geordie’s eyes whenever that battle came up: tight, arrested, fierce with pain.
Finnan sucked in a breath. “But, mistress, I will not sully your ears with such talk. ’Tis not something I would inflict on my worst enemy.”
Secrets, Jeannie decided, lay behind those tawny brown eyes—some she did not want to know.
