Page 50 of Marin’s Promise

He shuddered. “Gregor stabbed one in the neck and the man fell. Two reivers caught him and held him down while the third ran him through. He’d only seen eight summers, still a lad.” He hesitated, trying to ward off the memory and falling prey to its clutches regardless. “My mum was next, and then Ena.”

The blade shoved through Gregor’s skinny chest and he dropped like a sack. Mum’s screams were like an animal, feral and wild with grief before they too cut off with a choked cry.

Bran's hair stood on end and he buried his face in his knees to keep from seeing anymore. He wished he could close his ears too, to keep out the sounds of Ena’s cries, of how she struggled.

Bran stared at the coverlet of the bed, where a wrinkle in the fabric shaded the other side. “I waited a long time before I came out and that’s when I found them all. Ena was still alive, only barely. And so, I did what I could to care for her.”

The shame of it all pressed hard on him, the way it always did when he thought of that day. Deep, burning shame for having been the cause of their deaths. If he hadn't frozen, Ena would have hidden better. If his mother hadn't thought he needed protection, she and Gregor would have as well. They would have both been alive.

“Ena lived.” He swallowed. “But it took several days before she was strong enough to leave.”

“You stayed with their bodies?” she asked softly.

Their bodies. Those of his mother and brother. He nodded. “Aye. I didn’t want to leave them, but I couldn’t bury them. I was too small.” Too weak. “Leaving them was hard. It made their deaths so real.”

“I understand.” She eased from the chair and settled on the bed beside him, the way she'd done when she was nursing him through his wounds. “I struggled with the finality of it all when my mother died.”

He wanted to curl against her and breathe in her sweet, soothing scent, to sweep away these awful memories. Hell, he didn’t know why he was telling her now. For a cathartic cleansing of his soul?

“When I got hit on the head.” He looked down at the coverlet where their hands were nearly touching. How he craved the brush of her smooth skin, the connection to keep him grounded through the awful reliving of his worst moment. “It brought me back to when I was caring for Ena.”

She reached up and put her palm to his cheek. This time he did give in to the temptation to lean into her. He put his hand over hers and cradled her against him. He allowed himself one perfectly wondrous moment to savor the moment before lowering her hand and easing back.

He was being weak, he knew. The pressure of the past fortnight had built around him: Ena’s marriage to the Englishman when the rule preventing English and Scottish from marrying was always broken before without consequence. The Middle March Warden using it to his advantage and stringing up a rope to kill her. The bloody bargain Bran had been forced to accept so that she might live. The warden had been looking for an excuse for years to get Bran to work for him. Ena had provided him with the perfect opportunity. And now here Bran was, pouring out his soul to the woman whose castle he’d taken.

He scrubbed a hand over the thickness of his untrimmed beard, as if he could clear the sensation of her caress. And how much he wanted more. “I shouldna have told ye any of this.”

A sad smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. “Everyone needs someone to need, even the strongest of us.”

“I dinna need anyone.” He said it gruffly, as though it might mask the exposed underbelly of his buried hurt, as if a brawny display could overwhelm his vulnerability.

“Why did you tell me?” she asked.

He shrugged, but deep down he realized he knew the answer he would never say. The considerate sweetness of her care had aided in the healing of his physical wounds. Foolish though it may be, he'd hoped she might likewise do the same for his soul.

* * *

Trust was a precarious thing,and somehow it had begun to spin between Marin and Bran like a delicate web with thin, fragile threads.

Mayhap she ought to rein in her curiosity, but she could not. This intimidating man with his wild ruggedness had been a wounded boy forced to witness the violence and brutality at an even younger age than she. She didn't need to ask to know it was not a story he'd shared often. The way it had rasped from his throat, as though wrenched from a buried darkness. Mayhap he had never shared it at all.

“Why did you share with me?” She wanted to reach for him again, to cup the rasp of his beard against her palm. But the way he turned from her told her he did not wish her comfort.

“Ye're to be my wife,” he answered, and shrugged as if what he'd done were no large matter. “Ye should know.”

Aye, he would be her husband. This man who had stolen her castle and then helped her save her sisters. This man whose family was destroyed by reivers before becoming one himself. This man who had been a broken boy.

And she would be his wife. After years of being allowed to cast aside suitors, to focus her efforts on her sisters and weapons mastery and the upkeep of the manor, finally she would succumb to marriage–the one thing she never wanted.

Already her roles stretched her in so many directions between her father's people, the castle itself and her sisters. How could she possibly make time to be a wife?

There would never be enough light in a day to see to everything and everyone reliant on her.

The idea of a child slipped into her mind and glowed within her chest. A child of her own cradled to her breast… An ache blossomed where she’d imagined the babe, a desperate, deep pang she had told no one of. After all, how foolish to not wish to marry and yet crave a child so.

Bran's dark gaze searched her eyes. He reached up slowly, as if he feared startling her. His fingertips gently stroked over her cheek and down her jaw, the touch light and tender. “I'll be the most envied man in all the land.”

Marin did not move from the caress. “Because you'll have Werrick Castle?”