The Rogue’s Stolen Bride

Chapter Fifteen: The Salve

Chapter Fifteen: The Salve

Jace

She was in more pain than she was letting on. But she never complained. She clamped her teeth over that soft, full lower lip and pushed on like a soldier. That was… unexpected.

I had noticed it the moment she dismounted — the white knuckled grip on the stirrup leather, the careful way she placed her feet, the slight catch in her breath when her knees tried to give. She had recovered quickly and lifted her chin and walked away like nothing had happened, which told me everything I needed to know about Kaida Hawkins.

She would rather suffer in silence than ask for help.

I recognized the type. I had been the type, for most of my adult life.

I watched her across the fire now, the way she shifted her weight with studied casualness, the small tightening around her eyes every time she moved. The maid — Maggie — was no better, sitting with her legs stretched out in an unladylike V in front of her and the expression of a woman who had endured a day of slow torture. It spoke volumes to her love and loyalty to her mistress.

The fire crackled between us. The birch trees whispered. An owl called somewhere in the dark.

She asked me how long I had been a rogue and I told her long enough and closed the conversation down before it could go anywhere I didn’t want it to go. She accepted this with a directness that was somehow more unsettling than argument would have been.

She just looked at me across the fire with those dark eyes and said nothing, and I got the impression she was filing the non-answer away alongside everything else she had observed about me today, building some picture of me that I wasn’t sure I wanted her to have.

I reached into my saddle pack.

The salve was at the bottom, wrapped in oilcloth — a goose-fat and herb preparation I had bought from a healer in the last town, thick with comfrey and calendula and something else she had refused to name but which worked with remarkable efficiency on saddle sores and raw skin. I had used it myself on more long rides than I could count.

I turned it over in my hands for a moment.

The problem was self evident.

Saddle sores on the inner thighs were not the kind of injury that announced themselves easily in mixed company. Handing the salve across the fire and explaining its purpose would require me to reference parts of Kaida Hawkins that I had been making a concerted effort not to think about since she had slid off that horse and Maggie had squeaked about her skirt.

I had gotten a glimpse of her long legs, surprisingly strong and shapely for a girl.

I looked at the salve. I looked at Kaida. I looked at the fire.

“Here,” I said, and held it out across the flames.

She looked at it. “What is it?”

“Healing salve. For the ride.”

A beat of silence. In the firelight I watched the exact moment she understood what I meant — the slight widening of her eyes, quickly controlled, followed by a flush of color along her cheekbones that she immediately and unsuccessfully tried to suppress.

“Thank you,” she said, and took it from me with great dignity.

Another silence. Longer this time.

She looked at the oilcloth parcel in her hands. She looked at Maggie, who was watching the fire with an expression of intense and unconvincing innocence. She looked at the trees around us. She looked at me.

I looked back at her steadily and said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say, and also because I was a fundamentally terrible person who was finding this enormously entertaining.

“Perhaps,” she said, with enormous care, “you might take a short walk.”

“It’s dark,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “It is.”

We looked at each other across the fire.

“I won’t go far,” I said.

“Far enough,” she said.

I walked far enough that the firelight was a distant flicker between the trees.

Then I stopped and stood in the dark and stared at nothing and had a very firm conversation with myself.

She was a job. She was a client. She was an Alpha’s daughter being delivered to a human settlement in exchange for four hundred gold coins, half of which I had already spent on supplies and a horse named Gerald. She was not — under any circumstances — something I was going to complicate my life with.

I had been hired to deliver her untouched and unharmed.

Untouched.

I was very focused on that word. It distracted me from the thought of Miss Kaida Hawkins lifting the tattered remains of that fine green skirt, spreading her knees, and smearing that greasy salve along the tender skin of those soft, pale thighs…

An owl moved silently overhead. The stream murmured somewhere to my left. The night smelled of wood smoke and cold earth and somewhere underneath both of those things, faint and persistent, the ghost of something herbal and sweet that I recognized as the scent masking potion wearing thin after a long day’s ride.

I wondered that George had shared his scent masking tonic with his beloved. Or perhaps she had shared it with him. Either way I had noticed immediately that Kaida Hawkins had no wolf scent. Just that faint herbal fragrance.

Underneath it, just barely, was her.

I turned around and walked back to the fire.

“Done,” Maggie announced, from her spot by the fire, with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had handled the situation and moved on.

Kaida was sitting with her legs folded beneath her, her expression composed, the oilcloth parcel sitting neatly beside her as though it had always been there and nothing of any significance had occurred.

“Thank you,” she said, without looking at me. “For the salve.”

“Practical necessity,” I said, and sat back down across the fire and looked at the flames and absolutely did not think about any of it. “You need a pair of trousers.” I chewed the inside of my cheek for a long moment before I went back to my saddle bags and pulled out my only extra pair. “I’ve only got one extra pair.”

Maggie looked at me. She looked at Kaida. “The Miss will take them. I’ll make do with what I have.”

She looked back at her piece of hard bread with the expression of a woman who had formed several opinions and was keeping them entirely to herself.

For now.

I had a feeling Maggie’s opinions had a way of eventually making themselves known.

“We ride at dawn,” I said. “Sleep while you can.”

Kaida nodded without looking up. Maggie made a sound that was neither agreement nor disagreement but contained multitudes.

I lay back on my saddle roll and looked up at the stars through the birch branches and listened to the fire settle and the stream run and the night breathe around us.

Across the fire, I heard Kaida shift position and then go still.

I closed my eyes.

Untouched, I reminded myself.

It was going to be a long eleven days.