Page 124 of A Highland Bride Disciplined
Her fingers faltered briefly. “I — said a great many foolish things.”
“Nay.” He caught one hand where it lay at the last buckle, warm and still stained with a touch of someone else’s fear. “Nae foolish.”
She looked up. Whatever was in her eyes would have stopped a stampede. “I thought I’d made ye hate me.”
“Never.” The word came without thought, without calculation. It was as true as the bruises on his ribs. “I’ve wanted to shake ye, aye. To pin ye to the nearest wall ’til ye listen. But hate? Nay.”
Her mouth twitched like she might laugh at the image if she weren’t this close to crying again. “I’ve been afraid,” she said, the fact of it small and clean and devastating in the space between them. “That I was nae made for this. Nae clever enough or kind enough to be a maither. Nae safe enough to be by yer side.”
“That fear lies,” he said at once. It came out a command. He didn’t soften it. “It’s lied to ye every day that ye’ve held that bairn and every night ye’ve watched her breathe. And it lies now.”
Her chin trembled. “I nearly gave her away.”
“We’ll nae carve today’s guilt into bone,” he said. “We’ll learn from it. Together.”
Her breath went ragged with relief she was still too proud to name. “Together,” she whispered.
“Help me more,” he said softly, because if he didn’t pull her forward into something ordinary and intimate, he’d pull her forward into bed still wearing half his kit.
She finished the last buckle, and he shrugged out of the cuirass. It hit the floor with a thud he felt in his feet. She swept the ruined shirt from his shoulders, and he let her see the map of the night’s work. He was covered in dried sweat and blood, bruises, a deep healing scrape on his shoulder, and several old scars that he barely remembered getting.
The tub steamed behind him like an invitation. He finally moved to it, and when he slid into the heat, a groan climbed out of him he’d sooner have died than let even Tam hear. Scarlett’s mouth curved. She rolled her sleeves to the elbow, knelt at the tub’s edge, wrung a cloth, and set to rinsing the stain from his forearm.
He watched her. Not calculating. Not planning. Just… watching. The word he wanted was on his tongue, shockingly simple and bigger than any oath he’d ever spoken. He could feel it burning to be said.
“Scarlett,” he started.
She glanced up, cloth stilled. “Aye?”
“After —” He couldn’t say it while he was covered with someone else’s blood and the last of the battle’s crackle. He wanted to be clean when he said it. “I’ll tell ye after I’m nae stinkin’ like a smithy.”
Her smile ghosted across her face again. “Then I’ll scrub ye ’til ye shine, Laird Crawford.”
The water went from hot to merely warm, steam thinning to a gentle breath in the air. Scarlett’s hands were steady now, sure with the cloth, sure with the small tasks that make a world whole again. The wringing, rinsing, passing soap, smoothing lather across his shoulder where a bruise bloomed like ink beneath skin.
“Turn,” she murmured, and he did, and her knuckles traced the ridge of muscle along his back as if that might erase the way it had tightened around a sword hilt for hours. He felt himself loosening in places he hadn’t let loosen since he was a boy who still believed problems could be solved by outlasting them.
“What ye said,” he tried again, when the last of the stain swirled away toward the tub’s rim. “In the nursery.”
Scarlett set the cloth aside and rested her forearms on the copper’s edge, close enough that the steam lifted tiny curls near her temple. She looked a little sad now, a little fierce, and a little like a woman who’d finally stopped fighting herself. “I thought I was goin’ to lose Eliseandye tonight,” she said. “I let you believe that I wanted ye to give me space. When perhaps the safest place to be was the opposite. I —” She swallowed. “I’ve wondered if I deserve to be at yer side. Or Elise’s even.”
He moved before the thought fully finished, water sloshing as he stood. She made a startled sound and looked away on a gasp, backing away from the tub. Color flooded her throat and creptup to her cheeks, to her ears. He reached for the towel, dragged it over skin in quick, economical streaks, then stepped from the tub and crossed the plank floor to her with water still chasing a path across his chest.
“Ye’ll never speak that nonsense in me hearing again,” he said, and this time the command didn’t need iron because it carried on breath and thudding heart. He took her face in his wet hands. “Ye belong here. With me. With her. There is nay world in which ye are nae enough.”
She dragged in a breath that shivered. “I’m sorry if if it seemed like all I wanted was children without ye.”
“I willnae hear an apology.” His thumb smoothed the place where a tear would have been if she’d let it fall. “I thought ye wanted this marriage to be one of convenience. That ye meant our bed for duty alone. I told meself that I preferred that. It kept things tidy.”
“And?” The smallest smile. “Do ye like tidy, Kian?”
“In the ledgers, aye.” He dipped his head, his mouth touching hers once, light as breath. “Nae here.”
The kiss deepened, unhurried but inevitable. It wasn’t the rough need of surviving or the defiant collision of two proud tempers. It was a claiming that asked, an answer that gave, a soft opening to something they’d both barricaded for the sake of not breaking. Her hands slid up his chest wanting, and he felt the ‘aye’ of herunder his palms, the ‘aye’ of her mouth, the ‘aye’ of her body leaning into the long, clean line of him.
He let his hands roam. They travelled over her jaw, the nape of her neck, the slope of her shoulders freed of the ruined gown, the strong line of her back. She was trembling with an emotion that matched the one surging under his ribs.
He drew back only far enough to see her eyes.
