“Yet ye wear a promise ring?”
Alana’s gut pinched again, her wild plans to save her mother flying forefront in her mind. “Yes,” she said softly as she led them back toward her tent, bypassing the small group of Campbells talking in a tight circle near the fires. “It is a promise ring. A promise to my mother.”
Chapter Three
Shaw’s head brushed the ceiling of the large tent erected for the Campbell women. He’d seen only one man with them, a young warrior who hadn’t the strength to hold her dog. Did he sleep inside with the women? Shaw shut his mouth before the question tumbled out, for there were more important matters at hand.
Alana moved about the shadow-filled space with a bowl of milk that she’d quickly warmed in the coals of their fire outside. Shaw had signaled Logan and Alistair as he’d followed the Campbell lass back to her tent, but they would stay hidden, listening. His men had been keeping watch for any English soldiers throughout the day. The courier had said that the bastard, Major Dixon, was hot on the trail of the wee bairn.
Alana mashed up bits of bread in the milk-filled bowl until the bread was so small that it would dissolve on the bairn’s tongue. “Do you have a pap boat or vessel for the babe?” she asked but waved the question off, obviously knowing the answer if he had been trying to make the bairn suck milk off a rag.
She squatted down before a trunk, the bowl by her side, and rummaged around inside. Her back slightly bent over her task, the bottom half of her hair that was in a braid fell over one shoulder while the rest of it was coiled up on top of her head. It was beautiful, dark golden hair; he remembered it being full of shine from the afternoon sun. He could see the soft, pale bit of skin at her nape over the edge of her bodice and looked away. There were much more important details on which to focus. Not the soft neck of a Sinclair enemy. An enemy who right now is possibly your savior.
The bairn cried, a long, weak sound. He brought the feather-light bundle around to look in its face. Large eyes squeezed closed. It was the look of hunger and hopelessness. “I need to feed it now,” he said, beginning the deep knee-bends again.
“The babe is a she, not an it,” Alana said, spinning around with a white glove in her hand. “It is leather and will hold the pap and milk.” She drew a dagger from her boot and poked a hole in the tip of one digit, then filled the glove with the warm mixture from the bowl. “Stop throwing her up and down.”
“I am rocking her. Logan said bairns like to be rocked. It soothes them.”
The lass raised an eyebrow. “You are thrusting her up and down, not rocking her.”
Shaw stopped. With the bairn held pressed against him, he dropped his chest forward and then lifted back up, rocking the bairn forward and back instead of up and down. Was there some magical dance that mothers knew to calm bairns? A secret they kept to themselves? He frowned as the bairn still fussed.
The lass huffed, shaking her head. “Stop. Just…hold her against ye,” she said.
“I am.” But the bairn still gave a low wail.
“Let her hear your heartbeat, her ear against your warm chest,” she said, indicating his tunic.
“Ye want me to take off my shirt?”
“Skin-to-skin contact is good for a babe, especially one so fresh to the world. It is warm and soft like the mother. The heartbeat reminds her of being inside her womb, safe and warm. She needs to calm down to eat.”
She frowned when he didn’t move. “Here, I will hold her.” She tried to take the bairn again, but he just turned, setting the well-wrapped bundle on the table while he threw his shirt up over his head, whipping it off. “I do not think my skin is very soft,” he murmured as he settled the infant against his hard, naked chest.
Alana paused behind him, and he wondered if she would mention the wide swath of scars across his back. After a moment, she came around to his front, her voice higher as if she forced a lightness into it. “She will get used to the feel of her father, too.” Alana held the glove, pinched closed at the wrist. “Cradle her now in your arm.” She held the poked digit so that milk wouldn’t flow out and released a drop of warm milk to brush against the bairn’s open lips. “Is that pigment, on your arm, permanent?”
“Aye, and I am not her father,” he said. The little face turned toward the digit, and Alana released the end, so the milk would flow gently from the tiny hole. The bairn sucked the glove into her mouth, greedily working the full digit as if it were a mother’s nipple. Shaw inhaled, and relief uncoiled the knot in his gut as he watched the newborn feed, anxious for the chance to live.
“Shaw Sinclair,” Alana said, her voice soft, and he raised his gaze. “Did you steal this babe?”
He certainly didn’t need to answer her. She’d asked once before, and he thought he’d deflected it. His mission was a secret, to keep the bairn safe in order to regain what his weak uncle had lost. Girnigoe Castle and the honor and survival of the Sinclair clan were at stake.
Shaw met Alana’s piercing stare. “Nay. The infant was given to me for safekeeping as she journeys to St. Andrews. I will sacrifice my life to keep her alive. She is my responsibility.”
Alana’s features softened, and she stepped closer as if drawn by his determination. “You are very noble to be protecting a babe that is not even yours.” Her empty hand rested on his bare arm, the warmth of it penetrating the thick layers of muscle there.
She smelled of some sort of flower, and her skin looked soft all over. If he weren’t completely entrenched in this plan to save his clan, and didn’t have a bairn suckling hungrily between them, he’d be tempted to draw her in and kiss those lush, expressive lips. He didn’t give a damn that she was a Campbell since she came from the south, although she was distantly related to the devil, Edgar Campbell.
Alana. Her name even drew him. She had changed out of the trousers he’d seen her in earlier. A shame, for the skirts covered much of her form, although the stays lifted her ample breasts high, their soft roundness sitting above the lace edge of her smock.
“But unless you suddenly start producing milk,” she said, “you cannot take care of the babe. She needs constant warmth and feeding to survive, and a rough Highland warrior is not equipped to do so on his own. Your men will have to help you. Keep the milk fresh and warm. You can make more pap or a mix of mashed grain with broth, which is called panada, but you need to find a true bottle. The glove will become tainted and could make her ill if you cannot keep it clean.”
Alana released his arm while continuing to rattle off directions. She spoke quickly, her instructions unclear, as if she spoke in a language he only halfway understood. The boulder of worry reformed in his gut. Bloody hell. He was a warrior, not a nursemaid. He had no experience or knowledge in the ways of bairns. He’d only ever held animal newborns before, never a human one. And this one must live.
He glanced between the little face, so intent on sucking from the pricked hole, and the woman as she held the makeshift bottle. “Ye will help me,” he said, making her pause in her list of required provisions.
“I…I will help you find a bottle, although I have not seen anyone bring their babes to the festival, only older children. And if they did bring their babes, the mother would be nursing them, so there would be no need for a bottle.” She huffed, blowing a loose strand of her hair upward. It looked soft, like her skin, silky, and he itched to slide his finger down it. With a silent sigh, the worry in his gut turned into remorse.
“Maybe we could find a hollowed drinking horn,” she said. “My grandmother had one she fed to babes who lost their mothers in the birthing. Or a leather flask, which you will have to wash every day. I can write down the ingredients to make her meals. You can read?”
“Aye,” he said, watching her carefully. The woman could write. She was beautiful and intelligent.
“I will cut up a blanket for you to use for her breech cloths. You must change the cloths whenever you can tell she has fouled them.” The woman was talking without pause. “Just wash the dirty ones out in the stre
ams you come across and hang them overnight to dry.” He picked up a hint of worry in the quickness of her words. Aye, the lass was intelligent enough to grasp her jeopardy in standing alone with a warrior who she realized required her help in keeping the bairn alive. Alone and without anyone knowing her current whereabouts. Not even her giant dog named after a French explorer.
He met her gaze over the bairn’s slack face, its lips relaxing in sleep, letting the nipple release, a drop of milk left on its lip. “Ye, Alana Campbell, will help me keep this very important bairn alive.”
Alana’s mouth dropped open, and she backed away. “I will do what I can here in the camp.”
He shook his head slowly, stalking forward, holding her gaze. “Ye will journey with me to keep her safe.”
Alana shook her head, pulling the sgian dubh she’d replaced in the holster on her boot and dropped the nearly empty glove. He wouldn’t risk the bairn, grabbing Alana, but then again, he didn’t have to. Without a sound, Logan stepped into the tent, followed by Alistair and Rabbie.
“My apologies, lass,” Shaw said, and she whirled around to confront the Sinclair warriors. “But right now, ye are this bairn’s best chance to survive the journey.”
…
Alana held out her hand before the three huge men who had entered the tent like a silent fog. “Stop,” she said, holding her ridiculously small knife before her. Even if she was able to hit one of them with it, the others would grab her. “Do not touch me.”
“If ye stay quiet and walk with us, no one will touch ye,” said the man she recognized from the dagger-throwing field. He had a tattooed skull on one side of his forehead, his thick accent smooth and even as if confronting a fearful dog.
Alana spun back to face Shaw Sinclair. With the baby nestled against his naked chest, sleeping like the world around Alana weren’t falling apart, the man looked gentle and caring. But he wasn’t. No, the man was the Sinclair chief, a hardened warrior, and her enemy. How could she have been so stupid as to bring him into her tent without knowing his circumstances? Without signaling to anyone where she was going? The child’s need for food had numbed her self-protective instincts.
“How dare you,” she spat, her self-loathing at her stupidity adding to the fury in her tone. She should scream for help. But then the one with a skull on his own damned skull would throw a hand over her mouth. She wouldn’t be able to talk Shaw out of this. And God only knew where skull-man’s hand had been.
“I was helping you, and this is how a Sinclair repays help? No wonder it is known that Sinclairs are tricksters.”
One of the other men behind her cursed, and she glanced over her shoulder. “That’s right,” she said, her lips curled in a snarl. “Never trust a Sinclair.” She nodded, her brows raised high. “It is a well-known saying.”
She turned back to Shaw. “I will help the babe as much as I can, but I am not going with you.” She had an important mission at present, to save her mother.
Shaw kept his gaze on Alana even as one of the others walked around behind him, sliding the little girl from him. Without the child nestled trustingly against him, Shaw Sinclair looked fierce, beyond fierce to downright lethal with his mountainous half-naked frame and intense stare, the power evident in the muscles of his taut stomach and impressive biceps.
“Once the bairn reaches St. Andrews and is handed off to our contact there, we will escort ye back to Campbell land,” he said. “And on my mother’s soul, no harm will come to ye from us.”
She held her knife steady. “So says a Sinclair.”
“Who the hell says that Sinclairs are liars?” the youngest-looking of the group demanded as he held the sleeping baby, a frown etched on his smooth face. “’Tis not true. They are the liars.”
“Rabbie,” Shaw said, the warning obvious, and the lad pinched his lips tight.
Another man ducked his head inside. It was the thin man who had hopped about at the knife-throwing contest. He made a signal with his fingers but remained silent.
“We need to go,” Shaw said. “Come.”
Alana held out her palm to the two advancing Sinclairs but turned her gaze to Shaw since he was the obvious leader. “No.”
Shaw shook his head. “The bairn is too important to leave ye here.”
“I will poison her,” Alana lied, her voice rising as Shaw stepped closer.
“I will bring ye home once the bairn is delivered to St. Andrews. No one will harm ye, lass,” Shaw said, and Alana gasped as one of his men plucked her dagger from her hand, as easily as if it were a daisy taken from a child’s grasp.
She twisted back to keep Shaw in her view as he stalked closer. “Well, I will most certainly harm you,” she said. He was within arm’s reach, and she yanked her rose hair spike from the bun holding half her hair on top of her head, aimed for the largest target, his bare chest, and thrust the point forward.
“Fok,” one of his men swore as two rushed forward.
Alana stared at Shaw, who had turned at the last second, her hair stick embedded in the flesh of his upper left arm. His face hadn’t changed from his determined intensity. Not even a flicker of pain pinched his mouth. The absence of the human reaction shot a cold shiver through her.
He held up his right hand to stop his men from grabbing her. Blood dripped down from around the thin hair spike. Her heart pounded as she tried to keep the panic out of her breathing. She was now completely unarmed, and a Sinclair warrior, who seemed impervious to pain, was determined to steal her away.
With the slightest grunt, he yanked the hair spike out of his flesh, and blood welled out of the hole. Stepping forward, he grabbed her with his good hand. “Ye will sacrifice some of yer smock,” he said.
“What?” she whispered, breathless in the face of his granite composure, and then felt a tug as one of his men crouched behind her. The sound of ripping, jagged and stark over the muted sounds of laughter at the distant bonfire, proceeded after the tug. The man ripped a long strip off the bottom of her white smock. Shaw continued to hold her with his right hand while a serious-looking Sinclair with dark hair and a full beard wrapped the wound tightly.
Alana stared, her mind watching as if she weren’t part of the world but rather someone viewing a play. Shaw’s good arm snaked around her back, and she could no longer feel outside or apart from what was happening. Not with the heat of him pressed against her.
Lord, he was huge, the muscles of his arm mounding upward as he lifted her against him. His skin was hot, and he smelled of leather and campfire. She took a deep breath. “Let me go,” she said between her teeth, her anger punching through her fear. His face was right before hers, gazes connected with an intensity that wouldn’t release her. It squeezed the breath from her throat.
“I will release ye once I have Girnigoe Castle back,” he said. Before she could swallow past the constriction, her feet left the ground. Shaw set her over his left shoulder as if the wound weren’t below on his arm, soaking the cloth with his own hot blood.
“Put me down,” she yelled. Kicking her boots up behind her and twisting, she slid against the wound and heard him suck in breath. “You bastard! Put me down now!” He gripped her higher, his hand resting against the backs of her upper thighs to stop the momentum of her legs, which were already hindered by her heavy skirts. Without a word, the skull-tattooed Sinclair jumped before her, forcing a rag between her teeth. The linen wicked up any remaining moisture in her mouth, the dryness almost making her choke. The frowning skull-man tied it quickly behind her head while another of the men cursed, grabbing the back of his head as if upset. Remorse? Doubtful.
Alana continued to flex her back, pushing up against Shaw’s heavy hold on her, undulating, but the serious one with the full beard wrapped another binding around her wrists. The fool jumped up and down behind him, holding a finger to his lips like a laughing lunatic, his antics almost more terrifying than being held. If Shaw Sinclair hadn’t sworn that she’d be safe, she would be certain of her rape and probable d
ismemberment. She clung to the hope that Shaw had some honor, that his promise on his mother’s soul meant something.
With Shaw’s hand against her, very close to her arse, her hands and ankles tied, she resembled a dead goose ready to be plucked. Alana struggled against the gag in fury as they strode out into the dark Samhain night, the thickness of Shaw’s shoulder pressing into her churning stomach. But her scream only came out as a muffled curse.
…
Shaw kept the bairn wrapped in a cloth sling against his chest as he led their silent group riding through the crisp night. The infant had been handed off to him earlier that morning, sleeping in a woven basket cradle, which was now empty and tied to Logan’s pack. It wasn’t safe enough for the bairn to ride tied within it and strapped to a horse, even if she had come all the way from London that way.
He glanced back at Alana Campbell who sat her own horse. Her entire countenance exuded icy fury. Mungo had easily taken the mare from the tether lines, knowing from watching through the day which one belonged to the woman. The man might act the fool, but he noticed and heard everything. It was as if his silence allowed him to take in much more of the world around him.
Shaw had kept Alana bound and gagged, riding before him on his own stallion, Rìgh, until they’d traveled a mile away from the festival. Her body had remained straight and stiff in frigid anger. When he’d removed the gag, she hadn’t screamed, yelled, or cursed, but unhindered hatred sharpened her eyes as she spat toward the ground, hitting his boot.
She rode now directly behind his horse, his men encircling her. If she tried to break away, they would easily catch her, and then she’d have to ride with one of his men.
“Ye know, lass, ye can speak now,” Rabbie said, riding next to her. Rabbie was the youngest and the most forgiving of their group. Which made him feel that others should also forgive.
“I. Hate. You,” she said succinctly, her words cutting through the silence of the night like a sharpened knife through flesh.
The Highland Outlaw Page 4