Page 96 of The Laird's Masked Passion

The feast lay ruined. Tables were overturned. Food was trampled. Music was silenced. Smoke was drifting where sunlight had been golden only moments before.

Elspeth stood among the women and children, with one hand pressed tight against her ribs, and the other still gripping a little girl’s shoulder. Her breath came shallowly because deeper breaths hurt. The world had grown strangely sharp at its edgeswith the copper smell of blood, the crushed sweetness of berries beneath her shoe, and the rough wool of Skye’s sleeve against her arm.

Colin was coming toward her. He moved too quickly for a man with an arrow in his shoulder and too grimly for anyone sensible to stand in his path. His face was pale, his eyes fixed only on her.

“Elspeth.”

There was too much in the way he said it. She meant to be brave. She meant to tell him she was not badly hurt, to demand he sit before he collapsed, to scold him for being struck by arrows as if the matter were merely poor manners.

Instead, when he reached her, the strength she borrowed from terror began to leave. She looked down at her red hand, then back at him.

“I think,” she said, with as much dignity as a woman bleeding at a ruined feast could command, “that Robert Munro is a very poor guest.”

Colin caught her just as her knees gave way.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Colin caught Elspeth before she struck the ground, and for one terrible moment the whole world narrowed to the weight of her in his arms.

Her head fell briefly against his chest. Her lashes fluttered. Her face, still flushed from battle and pain, had gone too pale beneath the color. One hand remained pressed to her side, and through her fingers blood showed dark and wet against the torn fabric of her gown.

Colin forgot how to breathe.

“Elspeth.”

Her eyes opened at once, though not quite properly. They tried for sharpness and found only a stubborn blur.

“I didnae faint,” she managed to whisper.

His arm tightened beneath her knees. “Nay?”

“I just decided tae sit.”

Breac appeared at his side, with his sword still drawn, and his face grim beneath a streak of blood that was not his. “Me laird, yer shoulder?—”

“Elspeth is hurt.”

“Aye, and ye have an arrow in ye.”

Colin looked at him. Breac shut his mouth. It was wise of him.

“Clear the road,” Colin ordered. “Get the women and bairns in first. Double the men at the lower gate. Nay one leaves the castle and nay one enters unless I ken their face.”

Murdoch came from the left, breathing hard. His blade was red. His gaze fell to Elspeth, then to Colin’s shoulder, and his expression tightened in that way of men who had bad news and insufficient courage to offer it.

“Three dead,” Murdoch said. “Five wounded that I have seen. We drove them off before they reached the lower wall.”

“Prisoners?”

“One. Breathing fer now.”

“Keep him that way.”

Elspeth stirred in Colin’s arms. “Dinnae kill him before asking whether Robert teaches manners tae all his guests.”

Murdoch blinked. Breac, despite the blood and smoke, smiled.

Colin looked down at his wife. “Be silent.”