“Did they hurt ye?” he asked, stepping close, scanning her face, her arms, her cheek where the soldier’s slap had bloomed into a bruise. “Tell me true, lass.”
Fiona swallowed. “I’m all right.”
Harris’s jaw flexed. “Yer not.”
They stood in silence for a beat.
“God help me… it was the only thing that’d make those bastards back off,” Harris said, breath unsteady, voice still shaking with leftover fury. “A woman alone is sport to men like that. But a wife wi’ her husband at her back…” He shook his head once. “Different rules. Even redcoats mind a husband’s claim.”
My wife.
The words still thrummed in the air between them: too bold, too reckless, too intimate for two people who barely knew each other.
Fiona stepped closer before she meant to.
Harris didn’t move.
Not an inch.
He only watched her, chest rising hard, knuckles scraped raw, jaw tight with the adrenaline of killing or being killed. A stranger who had thrown himself into a fight he couldn’t win… for her.
“You came back,” she said quietly.
His gaze flicked away, as if the truth embarrassed him. “Aye.”
“Why?”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. He looked anywhere but her face.
“The hills aren’t safe for anyone alone.”
Then, softer—almost grudging:
“Least of all a lass who thinks she’s made of iron.”
She bristled. “I am plenty capable.”
“I saw that,” he said, glancing at the bruise on her cheek. “But three English bastards outweigh yer courage every time.”
Heat flared in her chest a maelstrom of anger, pride, something wilder. “So you came crashing in like some knight out of a bard’s tale?” she retorted.
His mouth actually twitched, just barely. “I dinnae do rescuin’. I do what needs doin’. And you were outnumbered.”
She should have snapped back. Should have told him she didn’t need him.
But the truth sat between them, heavy and undeniable—
She might’ve been dead without him.
And he’d known that.
And he’d come anyway.
Even though she was a stranger.
Even though it should’ve been none of his concern.
Harris dragged a hand through his hair, breath still ragged.
