The Raider (A Highland Guard Novel) Read online

  His voice didn’t sound like his own. He hadn’t known it was possible for him to speak so…tenderly.

  Her tiny chin trembled and for a heart-wrenching instant, he thought she might fall apart. If she had, he knew he would have pulled her into his arms. He wouldn’t have been able to stop himself.

  But she took a deep breath and held her emotions in check. “I heard a man crying for help, and when we came in to help him, Malcolm got stuck when a beam fell on us.”

  It was strange how a heart that was pounding so fast could suddenly come to a dead stop. He waited a beat or two for it to start again. He wouldn’t think of her lying under that beam crushed. He wouldn’t. But he started to get a sick, twisted feeling in his gut anyway. He felt something he’d never felt before: weak-kneed.

  “Captain? Is that you?”

  Malcolm’s voice brought him back. “Aye, lad. I’ll have you free in a minute.”

  She looked behind him. “Did no one else come with you?” Her voice shot up in panic. “We aren’t going to be able to move it in time.”

  Obviously, she’d been trying to do just that.

  “Move back.” He quickly took stock of the situation and realized he needed to have care. One wrong move and the entire pile of rock and beams would come down on Malcolm, crushing him instantly.

  Turning his back to the beam, he grabbed the squared edge and using his legs, started to lift. But damn, the thing was heavy, even for him. “See if you can scoot out from under it,” he said from between clenched teeth, every muscle straining.

  “Almost,” Malcolm said. “Another inch or two.”

  Robbie clenched harder and lifted. His arms burned against the weight. But Malcolm was able to slither his way out. Very carefully, Robbie lowered the beam back into place.

  And not a moment too soon. The flames were only a few feet away now. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “But what about the man?” Rosalin said. “We can’t just leave him.”

  Robbie clenched his fists, fighting the anger and fear that made him want to lash out. “Where?” he said tightly.

  “Behind that wall.” She pointed to a space that had obviously been built into the wall as a hiding place. Suspecting for what, and exactly why the man was there, Robbie was tempted to leave him for being so reckless. But a few moments later, he’d moved the debris out of the way enough to drag him out. Not wanting to tell her that it was too late, he lifted the dead man over his shoulder with one arm, and with the other wrapped around her waist tucking her up tightly against him—trying not to notice how good she felt—he led them out of the burning trap.

  As soon as they hit the fresh air, Malcolm collapsed on the ground coughing. Rosalin stayed on her feet but bent over to do the same, while Robbie let his arm slide from her waist and dropped the body of the villager, then grabbed on to the nearest tree so he didn’t topple over. His lungs and arms were on fire.

  Seton, Fraser, Callum, and two more of his men were almost on them. The lad had obviously managed to alert them to the danger. Seton immediately rushed forward to assist Lady Rosalin, as did Callum with Malcolm. “What happened?” his partner asked.

  For once, Robbie wasn’t annoyed by his solicitousness. The lass needed tending, and he could barely stand.

  It took a few stops and starts for the story to come out. But between Malcolm, Roger, and Rosalin, the details began to emerge. It was hard enough to believe she’d raced in to try to help someone she didn’t know, but when Lady Rosalin reached the point where Malcolm became stuck behind the debris, the men looked at each other in astonishment.

  Robbie voiced what all of them were thinking. “You could have left him there and escaped.”

  She met his gaze. “He would have died,” she said, as if the explanation were obvious.

  For her, he realized it was. She wouldn’t leave a man behind to die, not even an enemy. He should know that better than anyone. Something inside his chest shifted. It was as if a big rock had been pushed out of the way, revealing a small opening.

  Callum looked at him as if the world had just been declared round. “But she’s English,” he said in Gaelic.

  “I know.” Robbie was at just as much of a loss for an explanation. It didn’t make any sense to him either. This one small lass seemed have more honor in her than the entire English army put together.

  Yet the more he watched her, the more he believed it wasn’t an act. She was just as sweet and kind as she looked. He’d noticed how she’d distracted her nephew earlier to keep his spirits up and her natural friendliness toward his men—even in the face of their brusqueness (in most cases, outright rudeness). When she’d demanded to come see what could be done in the village, he thought it was a trick. But it wasn’t. It had obviously been motivated by honest concern. For Scots. She’d run into that burning building to help someone who was her enemy.

  It defied belief.

  But it was more than that. Beneath the sweetness he detected a fierce sense of right and wrong that reminded him of someone, although he couldn’t put his finger on who.

  When she reached the part where he arrived, he tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t let him. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “I don’t know how you lifted that by yourself.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d heard admiration and awe in a lass’s voice, but it was the first time he felt his face growing hot. Bloody hell, he was blushing!

  “You should see him at the Highland Games, my lady,” Malcolm offered. “The captain can throw a stone three times as heavy as anyone else. No one has ever come close to beating him. Why, he can defeat ten Englishmen using just his hands—”

  “That’s enough, Malcolm,” he said sharply. “The lady doesn’t want to hear about all that.”

  She looked like she was about to disagree, when she glanced to the man lying on the ground at his feet. Her eyes filled with tears. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  He nodded.

  She looked up at him. “Why would he have done something so dangerous?”

  Robbie reached down and pulled a purse from the man’s clenched fingers. “For this. He had it hidden in a space in the wall, along with some grain and other goods. He’d probably put it there when the English came and then tried to get to it once he thought it was safe.”

  “All this for a few coins and some grain?” she asked incredulously.

  Robbie’s jaw hardened. “Aye, it was foolish, but it was probably all he had to feed his family. These people will have nothing left.”

  The realization affected her. There was no denying the real compassion and sadness in those too expressive eyes of hers.

  “But you saved some of them,” she said. “The fires are almost out.”

  The way she was looking at him…

  For a minute, he felt like he’d donned some of Seton’s shining armor.

  Bloody hell.

  Robbie glanced over to where the rest of his men and the villagers were throwing the final buckets of water. But she was right. They had.

  Something had changed. Rosalin didn’t know what, but over the next hour, while Robbie and his men helped the villagers put out the last of the fires and see what could be salvaged from the rest, she detected a difference in the men’s attitude toward her.

  Once they’d stopped staring at her as if she had suddenly grown a second head, they actually spoke to her. And not just in grunts and unintelligible words in Gaelic. Men who she didn’t think knew a word of English were suddenly addressing her as “my lady.”

  Even Callum. Well, perhaps especially Callum. Just as personally as he’d taken her tricking of Malcolm, it seemed he’d seen her refusal to leave his son in the burning building as the establishment of some kind of bond between them. She couldn’t tell whether he was pleased about it or not, but he’d taken his son’s place in guarding her and seemed to have nominated himself as her protector.

  When some village children cautiously approached