The Rogue’s Stolen Bride

Chapter Fourteen: First Camp

Kaida

Although I was a proficient rider, there was no day I had ever ridden for endless hours at such a grueling pace. It felt like the skin of my inner thighs had completely rubbed off. I couldn’t tell if the slick I felt was sweat or blood. And my muscles. My back was screaming no matter how I tried to shift my weight, and my legs… parts of my body were aching that I didn’t even know existed until today. Behind me, I knew Maggie was also suffering. She was leaning heavily against my back, and every time Gerald the horse took a rough step, she moaned.

“We’ll stop here for the night,” Blackwood announced, pulling his horse to a halt inside a grove of young birch trees. It was a good spot, well hidden from the road, sheltered from the wind, and there was a small spring fed stream nearby. It would have been idyllic if I wasn’t in so much pain.

Maggie slid to the ground with a grunt. I remained stuck in the saddle, unable to move my legs. I was aware that my skirt had ridden up my thighs and bunched around my hips during the ride, but no amount of squirming in the saddle could fix it.

A few paces away, Jace Blackwood dismounted with easy grace. Clearly he was well conditioned for long hours in the saddle. He cast me a look that was somewhere between mildly amused and mildly annoyed. “Do you require assistance, Miss Hawkins?” There was something mocking in his tone.

I lifted my chin defiantly. “I can manage myself,” I informed him stoutly. And then I forced my legs into action. It was neither graceful, nor elegant. Thankfully Gerald was a calm and patient horse. He stood still and quiet while I dragged one bare leg over his rump and then slid down his side like a dead thing. When my feet hit the ground my knees buckled. Only my death grip on the stirrup leathers kept me upright.

“Your skirt!” Maggie squeaked, and she hurried to tug the green wool back into place. I stole a glance over at Jace, but he was focused on removing the saddle from his own horse. If he saw my embarrassing dismount, he politely pretended not to.

“I’ll see to the horses,” he said gruffly after he placed his saddle and pads on the ground. “You two start a fire, and fetch some water.” He extended his flint and gave me a doubtful look. “Do you know how to start a fire?”

I swiped the flint from his hand, and ignored the tingly feeling when our fingers brushed together. “I know,” I said, and deliberately turned my back on him, and forced my stiff legs to walk, so I could gather up fallen branches for firewood.

Maggie was already crouched by the stream, splashing cold water on her face with the single minded focus of a woman in genuine distress. She looked up as I hobbled toward her with my armload of branches.

“I can’t feel my legs,” she announced.

“I can feel mine,” I said. “I wish I couldn’t.”

She made a sound of deep and heartfelt agreement.

I gathered enough wood to build a small fire, arranged it the way my brothers had taught me years ago — tinder in the center, smaller branches over that, the bigger pieces on top — and struck the flint. It took three attempts. My hands were stiff and my fingers clumsy, and I was intensely aware that Jace was somewhere behind me, tending to the horses with that quiet competent ease that was already beginning to irritate me unreasonably.

The fire caught on the fourth strike.

I sat back on my heels and felt a small, private surge of satisfaction.

“Well done,” Maggie said, from beside me, in a tone that suggested she had been watching for signs of failure and was mildly disappointed not to find any.

I filled the small pot from the stream and hung it over the fire and lowered myself to the ground with all the grace of a much older woman. Every muscle below my waist registered its protest simultaneously. I pressed my lips together and said nothing.

Jace settled across the fire from me, his long legs stretched out, his expression unreadable in the flickering light. He had produced dried meat, hard bread, and a small cloth sack of oats from his saddle pack, which he divided without ceremony and passed around.

Maggie looked at her portion. She looked at him. She looked back at her portion.

“This is supper,” she said.

“This is supper,” he confirmed.

She ate it without further comment, which I suspected cost her considerably.

I added the oats to the pot when the water began to move, and stirred with a stick because we had nothing else, and watched the fire rather than watch him. It didn’t entirely work. He was in my peripheral vision no matter where I looked — the breadth of his shoulders, the easy way he held himself even after a day that had left me half destroyed. He wasn’t untouched by it. There was road dust in his dark hair and a tiredness around his eyes he probably didn’t know showed. I noticed it the way I always noticed things — the small unguarded details people didn’t realize they were broadcasting. I’d done it my whole life without knowing why, reading the things people tried to keep off their faces, finding the truth underneath the performance.

Jace Blackwood was not performing anything. That was the problem. There was nothing underneath to find — or if there was, it was buried somewhere I couldn’t reach, and the trying was making me uncomfortably aware of how much I was looking at him.

The fire popped and settled. The birch trees whispered around us in the evening wind. Somewhere nearby an owl called once and went silent.

“How long have you been a rogue?” I asked, because the silence was beginning to have a quality to it that I didn’t trust.

He looked at me across the fire. Midnight blue eyes, steady and unreadable. “Long enough,” he said.

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he agreed. “It’s not.”

I stirred the porridge and let the silence stretch back out between us. He didn’t fill it. Most people filled silences — with excuses, with deflections, with noise. He simply sat with it like it didn’t cost him anything, and I found that more unsettling than anything he might have said. I was used to getting beneath the surface of people without really trying. He had no surface I could find. Just depth, and the firelight moving across his face, and those eyes that gave me nothing at all.

“You’re not going to tell me anything useful, are you,” I said. It wasn’t really a question.

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. “Not tonight,” he said.

I looked back at the fire. My pulse was doing something I chose not to examine.

“The porridge is ready,” I said.