She glanced behind her and he pointedly looked back without blinking. Let her think what she wanted. She looked coldly into his face before turning away.
She clearly wasn’t interested in him and that irritated him for a reason he couldn’t really explain. He should have been glad. Scratch that, he was glad.
“No,” she said at last, looking back again. “No men in my life. What about you?”
“No men in my life either.”
She laughed out of nowhere and the sound lightened him. “That was another joke,” she said. “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”
“If you’ve no men tae go back to and you dinnae like your job, why do you care about going back?”
“Because of my mom.”
“Are you no old enough to survive without her?”
“Says the man who wants to do this to get his father out of a dungeon.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Is your mother chained up in the dark being fed nothing but bread and water?”
She shook her head, glancing back at him again, her lips pursed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“It disnae matter.”
“I need to get back to look after her. She bought your old house and she’s been doing it up as a kind of memorial to you, but we ran out of money.”
She fell silent, her shoulders visibly sagging.
“What?” Tavish asked. “What ails ye?”
“Where are you going to hide the locket. If I can tell mom where it is when we get back, we can sell it and make enough to do the house back up. I wasn’t going to say anything but darn it, you just have a way of getting these things out of me.”
“I havenae hidden the locket. I carry it still.”
“But you have to hide it. All the history books say you hid it. It’s somewhere in the house but no one knows where.”
“Why do you want to fix my house anyway?”
“I don’t but mom does. I want to help her. You must understand that.”
He glanced further down the road, noticing too late that a group of men on horseback was approaching. He cursed himself for getting distracted by their conversation. “Haud on,” he said, reaching past her to tap the horse on the side of its neck.
With a kick to its flanks at the same time, it understood what was needed, turning at once and darting into the trees.
“Keep quiet,” he whispered, pushing branches out of the way as they rode deeper. He should have been paying attention to the road, not to her. If they were to have any chance of surviving this, he needed to concentrate better.
When they were unable to move any deeper into the trees he stopped, climbing down from the horse and edging back toward the road, listening hard.
There had been three of them, all dressed in the tartan of the Sinclairs. He could only hope they thought he was a bandit and not worth chasing. He only had his sword and it had been a long time since he’d used it in anger.
Slipping from one tree trunk to another he reached the road and took a deep breath before peering out. There was no one there. He was about to step back when he felt the tip of a sword blade at the base of his neck.
“Dinnae move,” a voice said.
The man was good. No one could sneak up on him unless he’d trained them himself.
