Page 10 of The Laird's Masked Passion

This time his laugh was brief, unwilling, and gone almost as soon as it had come. It startled her more than his coldness. Laughter belonged to men with firesides, with brothers, with dogs sleeping at their boots, not to this severe creature who had looked upon a priest and made him finish a marriage while swords cried out beyond the nave.

Elspeth wished she had not made him laugh. She also wished she had not liked the sound.

The town thinned behind them. Stone gave way to damp fields, low walls, wet grass shining beneath the unsettled June sky. The air grew cleaner and wilder. St Andrews became a pale memory swallowed by road and distance. Still Colin did not slow. His body moved with the horse as if man and beast shared one intention, and Elspeth, trapped between them, began to feel each movement not merely as motion but as knowledge.

When the horse surged uphill, she was pressed back. When it descended, his arm braced her. When it turned, his thigh heldher steady. Her veil had torn, one pin in her hair scraped her scalp and beneath all this discomfort stirred something far more alarming than fear.

Awareness.

Her body had become traitorous in its attention. It knew where he touched her. It knew when his breath warmed her ear. It knew that his hand, though firm, did not wander.

“Ye said ye arenae certain,” she spoke again, feeling safer in noise than in the silence of her own thoughts. “Then tell me who ye suspect.”

For a moment she thought he would refuse. The road stretched ahead, silvered by recent rain. The wind pressed her torn veil against her cheek, and behind her Colin’s heart beat steady and hard, a rhythm she had no right to feel and no means of escaping.

“Robert Munro,” he said at last.

The name meant little to her, though the way he spoke it gave it weight enough.

“Who is Robert Munro?”

“An old enemy.”

“Yers?”

“Mine. Me family’s. Me faither’s before me.” His hand flexed once at the reins. “Munro’s hatred is old. The attack fits him.”

“Old hatred,” she repeated. “How very noble. Men dae adore keeping hatred alive and calling it inheritance.”

He made no answer. That troubled her more than any retort. She had wanted another sharp exchange, something against which she could set her anger and feel justified. Instead, he was silent, and in that silence she heard the horse’s breathing, the slap of hooves through shallow mud, the distant sea fading behind them, and the quick, treacherous pulse beneath her own skin.

A drop of rain struck her cheek. Then another. Colin glanced up, then urged the horse onward with fresh urgency.

Elspeth stiffened. “Must we go faster?”

“We need distance before the weather turns.”

“From St Andrews? From Munro? From me faither? Or from yer conscience?”

That earned no laugh.

His mouth was close to her ear when he spoke. “From men who may still be hunting us.”

The words should have chilled her. They did. Yet they were spoken so near, in a voice roughened by wind and command, that a shiver moved through her which was not entirely fear.

Another mile passed. Time lost its civilized shape on the open road. Elspeth’s anger did not fade, but it grew tired at the edges. Her arms ached from holding herself rigid, and the place where his arm crossed her waist seemed branded by pressure and heat.

“We cannae stay on the open road,” he suddenly spoke. “Nae much longer.”

“Where are ye taking me?”

“Somewhere they willnae look first.”

The trees drew nearer. Rain jeweled the horse’s mane. Elspeth’s hands were cold now, but the rest of her remained shamefully aware of the man behind her. She was angry, frightened, humiliated, and unwillingly alive to every inch of contact between them.

She had been married by force, carried from danger, and set upon a road that seemed to lead nowhere she had chosen. Yet as the horse plunged beneath the shadow of the trees and Colin bent over her to shield her from a low branch, Elspeth had the dreadful conviction that the most dangerous thing pursuing her was not Robert Munro, nor armed men, nor even the father who had sold her.

It was the treason of her own body, learning the shape of her husband before her heart had decided whether to hate him.