Her brother’s look was stern and unconvinced as he looked between Eilidh and Ciaran.
“He betrayed you, Eilidh,” he said, voice level. “That’s how we knew to come for ye. Arran saw him leave—then saw ye leave—and he sent word. And look at ye.” He raised a hand but stopped a hairsbreadth from touching her cheek, which she knew was blooming with an ugly bruise. “We barely stopped Gordon’s dog from giving ye over to the bastard.”
“No, no,” she insisted, feeling panic rising up in her. Graham’s men had paused, clearly awaiting their Laird’s order, but Ciaran looked half-dead already. There was no way he could fight off the Donaghey men if Graham did not relent.
“Look at him. They nearly killed him. He was trying to save me.”
“From a problem he created—” Graham began to argue, but Eilidh cut him off.
“I love him!” Her words were overloud, echoing through the gorge.
As the sound faded away, Eilidh turned to look at Ciaran and found him staring back at her.
She could not read the expression in his eyes.
But it didn’tmatter, she told herself stubbornly. She would make him answer her—she would make him see that, despite his doubts, hewasthe right man for her.
They just had to live through this first.
She felt Graham’s sigh of surrender more than she heard it.
“Very well,” he muttered for her ears alone, sounding weary. Then, louder for his men, he snarled, “Leave Gunn standing. Kill the rest—save one to carry my message to Gordon.” He looked every inch the laird as he surveyed the scene before him.
The Donaghey soldiers enacted their orders with ruthless efficiency. The man they left living didn’t look as though he was certain that surviving to report to Gordon was a better fate than swift death on the battlefield. Graham looked him in the eye as his men held him up.
“Tell that scunner Gordon that I am coming for him… and hell rides with me.”
With that, the man was dropped on the ground.
Graham held tight to Eilidh until the last enemy was dispatched; when only allies remained standing in the gorge, he released her and allowed her to wriggle free and drop to the ground. She shouldered roughly past the man who was guarding Ciaran, shooting him a poisonous look as she passed. The soldier likely didn’t deserve her ire—he was, after all, just acting onorders—but Eilidh found that she didn’t care. She would cut through any obstacle between her and Ciaran.
Including, it turned out, his own injuries. As she approached him, Ciaran tried to reach her, too, but he made it only one step before his legs gave out beneath him and he collapsed. Eilidh half caught him as they went down, protecting his head from striking the hard ground.
She cradled his head in her lap as his eyes, hazy and distant, fluttered closed.
“Ye are going to be all right,” she murmured to him as she put her fingertips to the pulse in his neck, relieved when she found the thrumming there to be steady and strong. “I am with ye. It is my turn to protect ye.”
Ciaran didn’t open his eyes, but his hand came up briefly to touch hers before falling back to his side.
She shoved down her desperation as she looked up at her brother. Shewouldfulfill her promise to Ciaran. No matter what.
“Take us home,” she told her brother, blinking away the tears that wanted to spill down her cheeks. “Both of us.”
20
Ciaran was getting properly bloody weary of waking up like this. He felt wakefulness greet him in a thousand tiny pricks of pain. His body ached everywhere. Breathing deeply—ow. Oh, breathing deeply wasnota good idea. He probably had at least one broken rib. He knew this pain.
It likely made him a coward, but for a moment, he refused to open his eyes. Physical pain was an old friend. He knew how to withstand it. He could already tell that his current injuries wouldn’t kill him, which meant that the pain would pass.
But there was other pain that was certain to greet him as soon as he admitted to himself that he was truly awake.
Eventually, though, there was nothing else to do but pry his lids open and wince as the light pierced his brain like a lance.
When he was finished blinking away the spots in his vision, he saw her, beautiful and perfect, even in her disarray.
Eilidh. His Eilidh. Not because he deserved her or because he would get to keep her, but because there would never be any other woman in his heart.
She paced back and forth like a caged storm as he watched her. Her fair hair was tangled as though she hadn’t touched itsince the battle. Her eyes were rimmed with red, and he ached at the thought that she had been crying over him. Her mouth was etched in a grim line that seemed to have been there for quite some time, judging by how it was carved deeply into her expression.
