Page 6 of Highlander's Sinless Nymph
Charlotte squirmed slightly. However, she may just as well have tried to squirm out of an iron shackle, so strong was he. He was not hurting her, but she was loath to let a stranger take hold of her. Thanks to her father, she did not trust men easily.
“It’s nae far,” he told her, raising his scarred eyebrow at her wriggling.
“That,sir, is not the point,” Charlotte said, trying to sound affronted, though it was hard under that penetrating stare. “What if I do not want to come with you?”
The Scot snorted. “And what will ye do? Stay out here amongst the prowlin’ wild things? I must say, it’d probably make fer some fine entertainment for an onlooker, but it has nae gone very well fer ye so far.”
Charlotte narrowed her yes at him, but ceased to struggle. As soon as she stopped trying to get away from him, the man produced a length of rough fabric from his cloak and wound it about her arm to help stop the bleeding.
“I have some herbs and other bits that I might make a poultice fer ye,” the Scotsman said, in a slightly gentler voice.
“You know how to make poultices?” Charlotte asked.
The man looked a little taken aback at the change of conversational tack.
“That’s right,” he said.
In an instant, Charlotte decided to go along with this man.
After all, the alternative is to head back to my father at the camp.
Charlotte had been told, on many occasions by her father, that all Scots were savages––little better than the beasts. She did harbor a slight suspicion as to what it was that a Scotsman was up to in a wood on the English side of the border, but she pushed this doubt aside for the moment.
She extended her good hand out to the Highlander.
“My name is Charlotte,” she said, simply and shyly. “And if you could help me with my injury, I would be much in your debt.”
The handsome, rugged Scotsman looked even more bemused than he had at any other point in their talk. However, he slowly extended one of his own arms and took Charlotte’s dainty hand in his rough one.
Charlotte could not help but notice how warm it was.
“Edward,” he said, his voice gruff. “Me name is Edward.”
* * *
Edward led the young woman––Charlotte, he reminded himself––away from the river, where the mist was thicker and up a slight incline. Despite his offer, she would not give up the hold that she had on her basket.
His legs were a great deal longer than Charlotte’s and he had to keep reminding himself to slow his pace so that she could keep up. She was also looking quite pale, which might have had something to do with the wound, but Edward thought more likely to do with the fact that she was allowing herself to be led through an unfamiliar wood by a man she had met only a little time before.
As if she were privy to his musings, Charlotte suddenly asked him, “Tell me, are you a trustworthy man, Edward?”
Edward stopped for a moment. He stepped over a fallen log and waited for Charlotte to catch up with him. He offered his hand to her.
“I think,” he said, slowly, “that the surest way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him. There’s nay other way that I can see to see if he is true or nae.”
“That could be quite a risk for a young lady, don’t you think?”
“Maybe. I’m nae sayin’ that trustin’ always pays off. Ye do not always get what ye’re after. Sometimes ye can turn yer life into a nightmare. That said though, fer me, the risk of trustin’ wrongly is always outweighed by the fear of not doin’ anythin’ at all.”
Charlotte gave him a look from under her long lashes, some of her dark curly hair falling over her face as she stepped over the fallen tree trunk. Edward caught himself staring at her for longer than would probably be considered right or proper.
All jestin’ aside, she is one of the bonniest lasses that I think I have ever set me eyes upon. As fair and sparkling as the freshest spring mornin’.
Quickly, he realized that he had been staring and dropped the woman’s hand before she reprimanded him. It was clear to him, from their initial conversation, that she thought about as highly of Scotsmen as she did about animals that mauled her.
They carried on walking through the beech wood, making their way up the slight gradient. They skirted a natural wall of blackthorn shrubs, the plants’ impenetrable, close-knit branches and sharp thorns making it impossible to walk through.
Edward knew that the young woman was not hurt badly––a fox cub is capable of only so much after all––and so he took the opportunity to check a few more of the snares that he had set up near to his camp. In two of the simple noose traps he had set he found rabbits, and he pulled these free. One of the animals was still alive.
