Her brothers surged ahead of her at once, drawn toward the low hurdles set along the pens, rough rails lashed together for the shearing, just tall enough to hold the sheep once they were driven down from the hills.
“Look at the auld scrapper,” Alexander shouted, pointing as a dog cut hard across the flock’s path, sending the sheep bunching and spilling neatly toward the open pens.
“Bending 'em to his will,” Michael said, laughing, stretching on his toes as he tried to see over the press of bodies.
Elena bounced on the balls of her feet, but the ground sloped away and the sheep were already too close. Wool filled her view while the taller folk crowded in around the rails.
“I canna see,” she complained, tugging uselessly at Michael’s sleeve. “You’re in the way.”
Her brothers paid her no mind.
She tried standing on her toes, then hopping as high as she could, but little did that help. The sheep pressed closer, the crowd thickened, and the dogs vanished again into the moving mass. Frustration welled in her chest.. She had waited all morning for this, wanting to see the dogs in action.
“I canna see,” she said again, louder this time, petulant, crossing her arms over her chest.
A pair of hands closed around her waist, startling her.
She was lifted cleanly off the ground, the world shifting abruptly as her feet left the earth. She let out a small, surprised sound and grabbed instinctively for what was closest—Jacob Jamison’s shoulder.
He carried her away from her brothers and placed her on a low stone further down along the rails, his hands steady at her sides until she found her balance.
“There,” Jacob said, calm as anything. “Look now.”
She gasped, delighted, but suddenly not with the dogs and their herding skills. She stared at Jacob, his face so close to hers. Atop the stone, she was now almost but not quite the same height as him. Jacob’s face was right there, close enough that she could see the faint scatter of freckles across his nose and the pale line of an old scrape along his jaw. His hair, dark andforever in his eyes, had gone lighter at the edges where the sun caught it, and she noticed that one of his front teeth overlapped the other ever so slightly. He smelled faintly of leather and grass, and was warm as if he’d been in the sun all morning.
Jacob, aware of her perusal, stepped back just enough to give her space, but not so far as to leave her altogether. “Better, then?” he asked.
“Aye,” she said, and remembered herself, and what she’d been after initially. She turned her attention to the sheep and the dogs, watching as the latter raced low and fast, their coats flashing as they worked the sheep with sharp barks and quick turns.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “I see them—Jacob, look, that one’s running sideways!”
“Aye,” he said, smiling a little as he leaned his weight against the rail beside her. “That’s the clever one. Watch how it keeps them from breaking.”
She watched, rapt, her earlier frustration forgotten entirely. The noise no longer felt overwhelming but thrilling, the chaos purposeful and alive. From somewhere nearby, she heard her father’s voice, steady and authoritative, and the answering calls of the shepherds as the pens filled and the work took shape.
When the dogs finally disappeared again into the press of sheep and the crowd shifted, Jacob lifted her down as easily as he had set her up. “There ye are.”
Before she could dart off, he caught the loose laces of her mantle, fingers working quickly beneath her chin. “Ye never bother to tie this,” he said mildly, not scolding so much as stating a fact, tightening the knot quickly.
Chapter Seven
By late afternoon the forest had begun to thin, the dense pines giving way to pale birch trunks and low swaths of early spring ferns pushing through last year’s decay. Jacob felt the change in the land as much as he saw it—the way the ground began to rise with more purpose, the path narrowing until it was little more than a path used by the red deer, a good place to obscure their trail.
They rode in near silence. Jacob spoke only when needed—quiet murmurs to guide the mare around bog-soft earth or across stone-strewn rises where a misstep would send them both tumbling.
