An irresistible beacon to a man so long without a woman’s warmth and loving.
Och, nae, it was nary a one of such disasters.
It was the horrible red stain soiling one side of her uphitched skirts.
Ronan stared, at first not comprehending.
Then something inside him ripped.
The world turned as red as the spreading stain and his pain vanished.
At his elbow, young Tam was just lifting his travel cloak from Buckie’s onion creel, and a laundress stood by, her hands outstretched to take it.
Ronan almost plowed them down in his haste to reach the keep stairs.
“Suffering saints!” He pounded up the steep stone steps, catching Gelis just as she set her hand on the door’s great iron latch. “Hold, lass! Dinna you move!”
Gelis started at the loud words.
She swung around to face him, about to ask what was amiss, but he was on her in a wink. Eyes blazing and hair whipping in the wind, he swept her into his arms and kicked open the hall door.
“Someone fetch the hen wife!” he yelled, racing through the crowded, smoke-hazed hall. “My lady is injured!”
He crashed into a trestle table, near overturning it before sprinting on, knocking aside startled, wide- eyed kinsmen.
“Bring bandaging and have MacHugh send up his selfheal unguent!” he roared, bursting into the dimness of the stair tower.
“Put me down!” Gelis wriggled in his arms as he bounded up the curving steps, taking them two, sometimes three at a time. “You’ll kill us both!”
“Hush, lass.” He clapped a hand over her mouth, pressing her head against his shoulder. “You’ll weary yourself if you speak.”
“ Pah-phooey!” She squirmed, her protest muffled. “You are the one who was hurt, not me.”
“Say you?” He gained the top landing, streaked down the darkened passage. “ ’Tis you who are bleeding, no’ I,” he flashed, slamming open his bedchamber door.
He ran across the room, barely avoiding a collision with the steaming bathing tub some fool had placed in the middle of the room instead of before the hearth fire.
Then, chest heaving, he lowered her to the bed with a gentleness that belied his wild flight across the great hall and up the turnpike stair.
“Your skirts are bloodied,” he panted, stepping back now, a glossy spill of raven hair falling across his brow. Shoving it aside, he looked at her, the dread in his eyes squelching her denial.
She blinked. “My skirts?”
“Aye, yours.” He swiped at his hair again. “To be sure, and they’re no’ mine!”
His dark brows lowering, he leaned close and snatched up a fistful of her damp, red-stained gown. He shook the reddened folds at her.
Gelis pushed up on her elbows, eyeing her ruined skirts. “I am not hurt — not badly,” she insisted, only now feeling the slight sting on her thigh.
The faint but steady throbbing and the telltale trickle of warmth.
“I must’ve cut myself when I withdrew mysgian dubh.” There could be no other explanation. “ ’Tis nothing, I say you. I’ve done so before and —”
“You are bleeding worse than a Martinmas goose!”
“But unlike that unfortunate creature, I shall live to see the morrow.”
The Raven’s expression said he doubted it.
