Page 9 of Promised to the Wicked Laird

"It daesnae help anything."

She meant it to come out sharp. It came out closer to something else, and she looked away first this time, down at the rain pooling black between the cobblestones. "Ye were meant fer me sister. Instead I spent seven years thinking about a man who was already spoken fer before I ever kent his name."

"And now?"

Nandag looked back up at him, and didn't have an answer ready, which annoyed her almost as much as the question did.

"Now," Fearchar said, when she didn't fill the silence, "yer sister's gone, and by Farquharson law and royal decree both, I'm nae leaving this castle without a bride."

"That's a terrible way tae ask a woman tae marry one."

"I'm nae asking yet," Fearchar asked, his golden brow furrowing as he looked down into her hazel eyes, searching for something in her face. "So what are ye? His next key?"

"I am naebody's key," Nandag said, her voice steadying as she looked straight into the eyes of the man who had kissed her seven years ago in a palace garden, and who had just returned as a ghost to tear her world apart. "I am a daughter of Farquharson."

Fearchar studied her for a long, silent moment. The faint, crooked ghost of a smile touched the corner of his scarred mouth, gone as quickly as it came, before his face hardened back into the flint-like mask of a clan laird.

"We shall see," he said, quiet and flat, turning back toward the castle doors as his warriors burst into the courtyard with drawn steel.

CHAPTER FOUR

Fearchar carried Nandag through the postern gate himself, his warriors falling into step behind him with their swords still drawn, and did not stop when Duncan Macrae reached out to take her weight off him.

"I have her," Fearchar said, before Duncan's hands had even closed on air.

"Ye're bleeding on her dress."

"It's nae mine."

Duncan fell back without arguing further, which told Fearchar something about how he must have looked right then, though he didn't have the mind to spare on it.

Nandag's head was tucked against his shoulder, her arms looped loosely around his neck. He crossed the Great Hall past the overturned tables and the scattered wedding rushes without breaking stride, took the stairs two at a time despite the weight of her, and followed a servant to her chamber. A maid inside gasped and pressed herself flat against the wall to let him through.

"Fetch water and clean linen. Now."

The maid fled without a word.

He set Nandag down on the edge of the bed with more care than he'd handled anything all night, and it was only then, kneeling to steady her, that he saw it. The hem of her saffron skirt had gone dark and stiff on the left side, and beneath it, where the fabric had ridden up over her calf, a thin dark line of blood had dried against her skin.

"Ye're cut."

"I'm fine."

He was already reaching for the hem of her skirt, and stopped himself, hand hovering. "May I?"

Nandag's chin came up, some of the fight from the courtyard still in her, even soaked through and shaking. "Ye already carried me up two flights of stairs without asking permission. Seems late tae start now."

"That was different. Ye were nae bleeding then."

"I was bleeding then too. Ye hadnae noticed."

He didn't have an answer for that, so he pushed her skirt back instead, gently, past her knee, and found the cut. Not deep, but long, running along the outside of her calf, where she must have caught it on the sconce, or the trough, or one of the dozen things she'd nearly died on in that courtyard while he'd been three seconds too slow to stop any of it.

The maid returned with a basin of water and a stack of linen and set them down without a word, casting one long look between the two of them before slipping back out and pulling the door shut.

Fearchar dipped a cloth in the water and wrung it out.

"Ye dinnae have tae dae this," Nandag said. "Send fer Mairi. Or the healer."