He laughed. Rose thought she hated him at that moment. She wanted to buck and dislodge him. But his chest already flattened her breasts and she dared not move. His faceheld no emotion, as if he could read her thoughts. “If I wanted to rape you, love, the deed would already have been done.”
Pushing away from her supine body, he stood and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. Stunned, she stared up at the black velvet sky filled with stars and took her first deep breath. But without his body heat, the night air had chilled in the fine mist. After a moment, she propped herself on her elbows. Her wet hair fell over eyes like reeds. She shoved it back with her hand and flinched. Her entire body hurt. Especially her leg.
Roxburghe was squatting in ankle-deep water rinsing mud and blood off the back of one hand. He had injured himself on the rocks as well.
He watched her from beneath half-lowered lids. After a moment’s pause, he returned to tending the cut. For a man with such large hands, he worked quickly and efficiently. He appeared to have a familiarity with cleaning wounds. Her gaze dropped to the ring on his hand before she caught herself and looked away.
“Do you always wear breeches?” he asked.
She endured the amusement she glimpsed as his eyes went over her and slowly returned to rest on her face, and accepted the question as rhetorical.
“Why were you hiding at the cemetery?” he asked.
She pressed a thumb against her temple. “I go to the cemetery often when I wish to ... pray. Everyone knows that.”
“Including those border raiders?”
She turned her head startled and alarmed. “What makes you think they were not after you?”
He propped an elbow on his knee. “Because the abbey is in the opposite direction of the border crossing. Anda conversation with the mountebank told me otherwise. No ... I suspect your man, Geddes Graham, was after you. Not to play nice, either.”
A heavy silence fell between them. If only she could think clearly. Roxburghe was right. She could never go back to the abbey. “Geddes is a weasel. He is an informant for...” She refused to saymy father. “For the king’s warden,” she said, the most hated man in all Scotland.
People would despise her, too, when they learned his daughter still lived. Her life as she had known it was forever at an end. A part of her wanted to laugh at the absurdity and utter irony.
Instead, she started to shiver from the combination of wet, cold, and pain and wrapped her arms about her torso. “Geddes and I have never got along. I took money from him that belonged to Jack.”
Wrapping a torn piece of fabric from his shirt around his palm, Roxburghe returned to her side and knelt on one knee. Hard muscles encased not just his arms but his legs. She had so desperately wanted to find a weakness in him, yet his strength overwhelmed all impressions.
“You need to dry out. We cannot remain here. Can you walk?”
He was asking if she could walk barefoot in the woods. The soles of her feet were as callused as cow’s hide. She’d grown up barefoot. But she had injured her thigh. She could feel warmth pooling against the cloth of her breeches. “Wouldn’t it be better to await your men to find us?”
“Lest you have not noticed, we are on the wrong side of the river. I doubt even you have a taste for raider company, dressed as you are.” With care, he gently tilted her chin. “I don’t want to kill anyone over you tonight, Rose.”
She pulled from his grip. Her ring on his finger, like the small earring in his ear, flickered in the moonlight.
And fueled the pace of her thoughts.
What manner of man would not be afraid of border raiders when he was but one against many? A border raider himself. The same kind of man who had let her keep her weapon—who would risk death to jump into a raging river after her.
That he had done so for the life of his brother only made her own actions and defiance less clear in her mind.
Ruark ascended the path that let away from the river, a small winding trail more suitable for goats than humans. The sound of rushing water still roared in his ears. Twice while climbing, he’d stopped to hand Rose up the slippery boulders.
The trek had been treacherous for half a mile as the crude path narrowed upward through moss-covered rocks into woods of rowan, ash, and tall pine. Barefooted, the path was even worse. He’d noted blood on one of Rose’s feet. But there was nothing to be done at this moment. It was the only trail out of the wash.
Neither of them spoke until they reached the woods and the noise of the river faded. Without asking her permission, he sat her on an old rotten log to rest and reached for the torn hem of her breeches.
She misunderstood his intent and caught his hand to stop him.
“Easy, Rose. You have to allow me to look. You are bleeding.” He sat her foot in his lap and followed the trail of blood with his fingers up the slim curvature of her calf.
She squirmed. “You do not need to touch me ...”
He noticed that about her: she disliked being touched, or perhaps only his touch disturbed her, for she seemed consumed with tenderness for others.
It was not her foot that was injured, he realized. Theblood came from a jagged gash on her thigh that he could see through a tear in her breeches. He silently swore. She had attempted to bind it with torn cloth from her shirt. He rent one of his sleeves, then rose and knelt in a shallow stream to rinse the cloth. He returned to her side. “Why didn’t you tell me you were injured?”
