“Who can tell?” The light he’d brought had long since guttered out.
“We need to go back.”
“Aye.” He ran his lips across her cheek to her mouth, and fires that should be well quenched flared again.
“Once more, mayhap, first?” she suggested.
He laughed. Ach, by all the holy gods, she loved it when he laughed. Above all the other things she loved about him.
Ja, he was her ást. Her love.
“Lass, ye ha’ wrung me dry.”
“I do not think so.”
It proved she was right. Sometime later, when she came to herself once more, she realized morning light filtered through the broken roof and allowed her to see him. He lay with his eyes closed, brown lashes making two fans.
“By the gods,” she groaned. “We are late.”
“Ye ha’ fair killed me. I am too weak to rise.”
“Fool.” She kissed him fiercely, which opened his eyes. He smiled at her, and she near lost herself in him again.
Yet when they got to their feet and began to dress, it was she who felt weak and light in the head.
They held on to one another like two children.
“It has stopped raining,” he observed.
“Has it?” Was there still a world out there?
“Wha’ will ye tell your men?”
“That we waited out the rain, I suppose. That you have given us leave to use these hunting grounds. Do you give us permission to hunt here, Chief Murtray?”
“Aye so, but I would keep well north o’ the settlement if I were ye. Armed men meeting other armed men out in the wild canna be safe.”
She thought about that. “Any excuse to loose an arrow, eh?”
“That is what I am thinking.”
They ducked out of the half-ruined building, a haven it now seemed to Hulda, into the gray morning light. The entire world had changed, though it had not. She had changed, as had the very color of all she saw.
She turned to him. “Do I look like a woman who has taken off all her clothing and put it on again?”
He smiled. “A bit, aye.”
Ach, but she loved it when he smiled that way, with his head thrown back and the light in his eyes.
“Come,” he told her.
They went hand in hand like two lovers till they left the trees and the sea came into view. A glorious sight it was, the sky still lowering but with early light showing through in ladders, combers raking the shore far below.
“We maun part here,” he said with regret.
Nei. Her heart cried it. But she was a grown woman, a leader of men. She had learned, had she not, better than to whine and moan at the unbearable?
She had to go back to her camp and he to his settlement. Even now, eyes might be watching. She should not, could not touch him.
