The Rogue’s Stolen Bride

Chapter Twenty: Firelight

Kaida

I sat on the horse blanket and hugged my knees to my chest as Jace moved around with the practiced ease of a man who had spent more time living under the stars than sitting in fancy pack dining halls. He butchered the boar and arranged it on a spit he had quickly built from sticks. Now and then he turned it over the low flames and glowing coals. The aroma of roasting pork made my stomach growl with embarrassing hunger. Beside me, Maggie was almost drooling.

She had not said a word about the creek. She didn’t need to. The look she gave me when I came back to camp, flushed and freshly washed and carefully not looking in any particular direction, had said everything. I was still feeling it. She wordlessly handed me the green dress, and I quickly tugged it on over my clean shift.

Jace had come in behind me, set the carcass down, and got to work without a word. He had not looked at me. I had not looked at him. Between the two of us we were doing an enormous amount of not looking, and Maggie was watching all of it with the patient attention of a woman who sensed the undercurrent.

She handed him a piece of hard bread.

“You must be hungry,” she said pleasantly. “After all that exertion.”

“Thank you,” he said, and ate it without expression.

I looked at the fire and watched the fat sizzle on the wild pig as the skin browned, dripping like liquid gold into the hot coals.

The boar was ready when the stars were properly out. Jace cut it into portions, sprinkled it with coarse salt from a pouch in his saddle bags, and passed them around without ceremony. There were no plates, no cutlery. I ate mine with my fingers and didn’t care even slightly because it was the best thing I had tasted in two days and I was hungry enough to have eaten it raw.

Maggie made a sound of pure involuntary pleasure at the first bite, and greedily licked the grease and salt from her fingers.

“The man can cook,” she said, looking at the rogue with much more respect.

“I made fire and applied heat,” Jace said, shifting as though her approval made him uncomfortable. “That’s not cooking.”

“In my experience,” Maggie said serenely, “that’s exactly what cooking is.”

We ate until our stomachs were so full they were distended under our clothes, and I felt meat-drunk and sleepy. The owl that had been calling somewhere to the west went quiet. I tracked the silence automatically and caught Jace doing the same a half second later. Our eyes met across the fire for the first time since the creek.

He looked away first.

I worked the bone comb through my hair, which had long since dried.

“We lost them,” he said, after a while. Matter of fact. “Whoever was on our trail. The creek broke the scent. I backtracked while I was out and didn’t pick up anything fresh.”

“Should have broken it,” I said.

“Should have,” he agreed. He turned his knife over in his hands. “I’m not certain. I’ll stay up and keep watch tonight.”

“I’ll take a shift,” I said. I really hadn’t a clue about what keeping watch entailed, but since I had organized this kidnapping, I felt I should step out and take responsibility for it. Especially since Jace Blackwood expected another two hundred gold coins at the end of this journey.

I didn’t have it. I was bluffing when I told the rogue I would pay him double. There were only the two hundred coins in my mothers dowry. Between the two of us, Maggie and I had scraped together another thirty-seven pieces. But that money was meant to help us start a new life in Havenhill.

He looked at me. That quiet assessing look that I was beginning to recognize. “Have you held a watch before?”

A beat of silence.

For a moment I considered giving him another false answer, but almost immediately realized it was a bad idea. “No,” I said.

Maggie grew still beside me, her lips pressed together in a disapproving line.

Jace said nothing for a moment. He looked at the fire and turned his knife over once more and I kept my chin up and didn’t offer any explanation for why an Alpha’s daughter had never been trusted with anything as basic as a night watch. The explanation was humiliating and he hadn’t asked for it.

“Your senses are as good as mine,” he said finally. Not a compliment. An assessment. He glanced at me with the air of a man making a practical decision. He was tired. He’d been riding and hunting and running since Greymore Forest and he needed a few hours of real sleep and a wolf on watch, even an untrained one, was better than nothing.

“Middle watch,” he said. “Two hours.”

He picked up a stick and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You’re not watching for what you can see. Wind direction first — know where it’s coming from. Listen for what doesn’t fit. Animals don’t go quiet for nothing.” He met my eyes. “Anything feels wrong, you wake me. You don’t investigate. You don’t move. You wake me.”

“I understand,” I said.

“I’m a heavy sleeper,” he said, with the faint ghost of something dry in his voice. “You may have to be persistent.”

“I can be persistent,” I said.

“I figured as much,” he replied dryly.

Maggie made a slightly distressed sound, and covered it up by clearing her throat loudly.

Jace wrapped the remains of our roasted pork in leather and tucked it away in his pack, and then he carried the bones somewhere outside of the camp to scatter them for the wild beasts to scavenge in the night. He came back and sat a safe distance from me, staring into the dying embers.

Silence fell between us. The comfortable kind that had crept up without announcement. I noticed it and decided not to examine it.

“Get some sleep,” Jace said. “I’ll wake you for the middle watch.”

Maggie stood, shook out her skirts, and looked down at me with great serenity. “Goodnight,” she said. To both of us. I noted that she had not offered to keep watch with me.

I lay down, pulled my cloak around me, and closed my eyes. I listened to the fire settle and the creek run and thought about wind direction and forest silence and things that didn’t fit, and told myself firmly I was going to fall asleep immediately.

But instead of closing, my eyes kept drifting across the clearing to Jace Blackwood, tracing the lines of his lean and powerful body, from his broad shoulders to his narrow hips to the long legs he stretched toward the fire. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of man he had been before he had become a rogue.

Not the ordinary kind, I’d wager.

It took a long time before I found sleep.