“Come outside,” she said.
The morning broke upon them, wild and beautiful, everything in motion. The trees upon the rise, the sailing clouds, the raking sea. Darlei drew in a breath.
“Are ye all right?” Deathan asked in a low voice.
“I do not know. Now that word of Rohr’s lover is out, everyone expects me to be humiliated and cast down, but my heart rejoices because I might not have to marry him.”
“Ye ha’ no reason but to hold yer head high.”
“Still, I wish I could escape all this. I have not seen your brother and do not wish to.”
“Wi’ your father and most o’ his party gone, there will be no more grand dinners for the time. I do no’ doubt Caragh’s parents will keep her close to home. All the same, ’tis no’ a good idea for ye to venture out alone.”
Her gaze clung to his. “I do not suppose there is any way you might be assigned as my personal guard?”
She meant it lightly, but he did not take it that way. “Let me speak to my father about it. The post might be better taken by one o’ the men yer father has left behind.”
“But he, a Caledonian, could not show me around the settlement.”
“Aye so.” Deathan’s gaze moved over her face, intimate as a touch. “And if ye could do aught ye wished, what would it be?”
I would kiss you.The answer flooded not only her mind but her body from fingertips to toes.I would kiss you for a day and a night.
She said, “Escape this place. The stares and the whispers. If only for a short time.”
“Let me speak wi’ my father. Wait here for me. I will no’ be long.”
He hurried away back into the keep, and Darlei lingered outside in the sun, becoming aware only then of—yes—the stares. The uncomfortable truth of being at the center of much gossip.
Being the woman she was—a princess—she gazed back defiantly and the clan’s folk looked away. But there was a next stare, and a next.
It seemed an age before Deathan returned to her, though it could not have been long. He had lost his sword and his leather tunic, and gladness burned in his eyes.
“Father has bidden me entertain ye—at least for the morning. He insists yer woman must come along, though. For the sake o’ propriety, ye understand. He has had enough o’ scandal.”
She had a chance to be with him. Who cared for propriety?
“Orle was not feeling well this morning,” she lied barefacedly.
“I suppose, then, she would not enjoy a sail out on the sea.”
“A sail?” Her heart rose impossibly.
“Aye. I thought to get ye awa’ from all this, for a time.”
“I should like nothing better, nothing in all the world.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Darlei had neverso much as glimpsed the sea before journeying to Murtray. She had certainly never dreamed of riding out upon it in a tiny boat like a leaf on a stream.
The boat was, indeed, very small. Made of slatted wood and coated hide, it looked more like an oversized drinking vessel than a watercraft and tipped alarmingly when Deathan helped her in.
Terror might well have swamped her, had she not placed herself wholly in his hands.
In his hands, precisely where she wanted to be.
He had grown up here and, he told her, had sailed all his life. He handled the oars competently, and anyway, she gladly embraced the possibility of ending in a watery grave, if it meant she could be with him.
