wedding soon. You’re a child yet.”
“I’m no child,” Sileas said, folding her arms. “I’m thirteen.”
“Well, you’ve got no breasts,” Ian said, “and no man is going to want to marry ye until ye do—
Sileas fought against the sting in her eyes. After all that had happened to her today, this was hard to bear— especially coming from the man she planned to marry.
“If ye won’t help me, Ian MacDonald, I’ll walk.”
When she tried to slide down off the horse, Ian caught and held her. He took her face in his hand and rubbed his thumb lightly across her cheek—which made it devilishly difficult not to cry.
“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, little one,” he said. “Ye can’t go off on your own. It’s a long way to the next house, and it’s near dark.”
“I’m no going back to the castle,” she said.
“I suppose if I take ye back, you’ll just sneak out the secret passageway again?”
“I will,” she said.
Ian sighed and turned his horse. “Then we’d best move fast. But if I’m hung for kidnapping, it’ll be on your head.”
Ian stopped to make camp when it grew too dark to see. If he didn’t have Sileas with him, he’d be tempted to continue. But his family’s home was a fair distance yet, and it was risky to ride in the black of night.
He handed Sileas half of his oatcakes and cheese, and they ate in silence. There would be hell to pay for this, all because she let that imagination of hers run wild again.
He glanced sideways at her. Poor Sil. Her beautiful name, pronounced with a soft “Shh,” like a whisper in the ear, mocked her. She was a pathetic, scrawny thing with teeth too big for her and unruly red hair so bright it hurt the eyes. Even once she had breasts, no man was going to wed her for her looks.
At least she’d washed the mud off her face.
Ian rolled out his blanket and gave her a warning look. “Lie down and don’t say a word.”
“ ’Tis no my fault—”
“It is,” he said, “though ye know verra well no one is going to blame you.”
Sileas scrunched herself into a ball on one side of the blanket and tucked her feet under her cloak.
Ian lay down with his back to her and wrapped his plaid around himself. It had been a long day of travel, and he was tired.
Just as he was drifting off to sleep, Sileas shook his shoulder. “I hear something.”
Ian grabbed his claymore and sat up to listen.
“I think it’s a wild boar,” she whispered. “Or a verra large bear.”
Ian flopped back down with a groan. “ ’Tis only the wind blowing the trees. Have ye not tortured me enough for one day?”
He couldn’t go back to sleep with the wee lass shivering beside him. She had no meat on her bones to keep her warm.
“Sil, are ye cold?” he asked.
“I am near death with it,” she said in a weak, mournful voice.
With a sigh, he rolled onto his back and spread his plaid over both of them.
Now he was wide awake. After staring at the tree branches whipping in the wind above him for a long while, he whispered, “Sil, are ye awake?”
“Aye.”
“I’m going to be married soon,” he said, and couldn’t help grinning to himself. “I met her at court in Stirling. I’ve come home to tell my parents.”
He felt Sileas stiffen beside him.
“I’m as surprised as you,” he said. “I didn’t plan to wed for a few years yet, but when a man meets the right woman… Ah, Sil, she is everything I want.”
Sileas was quiet for a long time, then she asked in that funny, hoarse voice of hers, “What makes ye know she is right for ye?”
“Philippa is a rare beauty, I tell ye. She’s got sparkling eyes and silky, fair hair—and curves to make a man forget to breathe.”
“Hmmph. Is there nothing but her looks ye can say about this Philippa?”
“She’s as graceful as a faerie queen,” he said. “And she has a lovely, tinkling laugh.”
“And that is why ye want to marry her?”
Ian chuckled at Sileas’s skeptical tone. “I shouldn’t tell ye this, little one. But there are women a man can have without marriage, and women he cannot. This one is of the second kind, and I want her verra, verra badly.”
He dropped an arm across Sileas’s shoulder and drifted toward sleep with a smile on his face.
He must have slept like the dead, for he remembered nothing until he awoke to the sound of horses. In an instant, he threw off his plaid and stood with his claymore in his hands as three horsemen rode into their camp and
