As if her stirring had awakened them, a woolly brown cow began to moo and the chickens to cluck while the dozen or so sheep began to circle restlessly in their pen.
Julianna glanced back at Roger to find him awake now, too, and staring at her, which made her scramble even further away from him and wildly bunch up the straw between them.
Oddly enough, her desperate effort to construct a barrier to protect herself made him smile as if amused, but then he sobered and rose up on one elbow.
“I willna come any closer if that’s what you’re fearing, lass. I only slept so near tae awaken you from another nightmare.”
“Nightmare?” she echoed, her heart racing to see him so tousled from sleep, straw sticking in his dark hair, and yet so undeniably handsome.
As he nodded, her hand flew to her own hair, and she flushed at how disheveled she must appear to him—heaven help her, what was she thinking? It didn’t matter at all what Roger Douglas thought of her and she thought of him, the man her captor after all.
She was his prisoner…though in truth she had tried not to think about returning to England at all for the unwanted marriage it would bring her, no matter her grandfather’s well-meaning plans for her. Just as Roger had claimed, she had no doubt Charles would despise her and mayhap treat her callously—
“I’m glad tae see you looking so well-rested, Juli. May I call you by that name? You said it last night in your sleep—”
“My family called me Juli—and you’re not my family, so no.”
Julianna saw that his jaw tightened, the color of his eyes darkening, but he nodded again and rose to his feet, brushing off straw from his leather armor and gray tunic.
“I dinna wish tae offend you so Julianna it will remain. Since you slept so well in spite of your bad dream, mayhap you’ll be interested in food this morning. You ate only a few bites of stew last night—”
“What else did I say?” she broke in, rising as well to brush herself off. So vigorously, too, pulling the wrinkled skirt of her gown around to rid the back of straw that she lost her footing and toppled forward—only to have Roger catch her before she could gasp.
His muscled arms strong around her, his eyes staring into hers for so long a moment that her face flushed with warmth, a strange flip-flop in her stomach…until he shook his head as if reprimanding himself and released her.
“Take care…the barn floor right here is uneven,” he murmured, offering Julianna his hand, though she didn’t take it.
Instead, her cheeks still afire, she moved past him and away from the piles of straw where they had slept so closely together. He hadn’t yet answered her query, but she didn’t care now about what she might have said—and what did it matter? She had been so exhausted from their relentless pace, so drained of tears, so despondent that her grandfather had been buried without her standing by his grave…
“You cried out for your parents and your brother,” came Roger’s low voice behind her. “An attack of some kind—”
“Not some kind, but Highlanders likeyou!” she blurted, spinning around to face him. “Ten years ago my father and mother and older brother, Alain, were murdered. Some of William Wallace’s men, we learned later, a raid of revenge. My grandfather came from London afterward to raise me—oh, God, why am I even speaking of this to you?”
She whirled back around at the same moment the door to the barn opened and the farmer stepped inside, a burly young man with one of his arms hanging useless by his side and a cloth-covered basket slung over the other.
“Laird…and lady, I’ve some breakfast for you—”
“I’m not his lady!” Bristling that the farmer must think her Roger’s wife, she rushed on. “I’m his hostage bound for Dumbarton Castle where I must face the king—”
“Julianna,enough!”
Roger’s angry command setting the startled sheep to baaing, the cow to mooing and the chickens flapping their wings in a flutter of white feathers, she gasped at his sudden grip on her elbow as he steered her out of the barn.
“Will you endanger the man and his family with our affairs?” he said tightly under his breath. “Your betrothed is mayhap still trying tae find us—though I’ll wager he turned back two days ago rather than ride deep into Scotland and face countless enemies. I wouldna have stopped for the night if I thought it otherwise.”
“Then there is no danger to these good people,” Julianna retorted, though she did feel ashamed by her reckless outburst—only to have Roger shake her, hard.
“Any knowledge of us and our destination is a danger tae them! Have you no good sense, woman?”
He released her arm so abruptly that Julianna nearly stumbled, and this time he didn’t reach out to stop a fall. Instead he strode back into the barn and left her standing there to glance uncomfortably at the faces of the farmer’s wife and two wide-eyed young boys standing at the door of their thatched-roof house.
She could hear the rumble of Roger speaking to the man, but not what was being said. A few moments later he emerged leading their saddled mount by the reins and with a cloth bundle in his free hand.
A bundle that he thrust at her with one terse word, “Breakfast,” before he lifted her onto the sturdy, tawny-maned gelding.
She saw, too, a sword with a rusty hilt in the scabbard hanging from his belt and imagined the farmer had given him the weapon. Another farmer had given him a wicked-looking knife the day before, but thus far there had been no cause for Roger to use it. With a wince of pain, he hoisted himself up behind her.
“I only meant to make it clear I wasn’t your wife,” she murmured lamely as he veered the animal onto a dirt road leading from the farm, only to hear a low curse beside her ear.
