When a Scot Ties the Knot (Castles Ever After #3)(39)

“So it’s happened to you?”

“Och, no. I’m not that stupid.”

Of course not, Maddie thought bitterly. Of course this would only happen to her.

“But I have unmired many a cow and sheep,” he continued.

“Wonderful. If you’d just be so kind as to unmire me. Quickly?”

A hint of amusement gleamed in his eyes. That look told her something terrible.

He was going to help her, but he was going to enjoy every minute of this first.

Maddie twisted and pried at her leg, to no avail. It was well and truly stuck, and her heart was rabbiting about her chest.

He clucked his tongue. “The first rule of bogs: dinna panic.”

“What’s the second rule of bogs? I think we should just skip to that.”

“No thrashing about,” he said. “You’ll fatigue yourself. Just be calm and wait for your body to reach its equilibrium.”

Easy for him to say.

She tried to reach for something, anything, to grab onto. Her hands caught only air and loose grass. The bog tightened its grip, swallowing her hips.

“Logan,” she cried. “Logan, it’s getting worse.”

“That’s because you’re struggling.”

“Of course I’m struggling! I am being swallowed alive. And you’re just standing there.”

He crouched to her eye level. “You’ll be fine. Most bogs are no more than waist deep.”

“Most bogs,” she repeated. “So some bogs are deeper.”

“Almost no one dies of miring.”

“Almost no one? If you’re trying to reassure me, you’re going about it all wrong.”

“Relax,” he said. “The ones who do perish, they die of the exposure or thirst. Not because they’re sucked under.”

“So you’re saying . . .”

“You’ll be fine. We’ll build a little roof over your head and bring you bannocks twice a day. You can live here quite happily for years.”

Maddie clenched her jaw to keep from smiling or laughing. Every time she made up her mind to despise him, he showed a flare of that disarming humor. She refused to reward him for it.

“Not to worry,” he said. “It takes hours for the weight of the peat to cut off circulation to your limbs.”

She groaned in despair as she sank further still. The peat and mud sucked at her legs, pulling her waist--deep in muck.

She was truly beginning to panic. Landing knee--deep in a bog was a funny situation, even she would admit—-for a minute. Maybe two. But immobilized in freezing, waist--deep mud with the distinct possibility of never working herself free?

This was not her idea of a pleasant afternoon. Especially when it seemed likely to become her final afternoon.

Logan, by contrast, seemed to be having the time of his life. He sat down on a bit of rock nearby. “Say, remember that time when you got mired in the bog?” He chuckled to himself. “What a memory. We were there all day. Made a picnic of it. We sang songs for an hour or two. Counted to five thousand, just for larks. Then you insisted I go for sandwiches, and . . .”

She cast him a beseeching look.

He looked at the mud. “If I pull you free, will you promise to bed me for my pains?”

“Here’s what I’ll promise, Logan MacKenzie. If you don’t get me free, I will come back from the grave and haunt you. Relentlessly.”

“For a timid English bluestocking, you can be quite fierce when you choose to be. I rather like it.”

She hugged herself to keep her hands out of the creeping mud. “Logan, please. I beg you, stop teasing and get me out of this. I’m cold. And I’m frightened.”

“Look at me.”

She looked at him.

His gaze held hers, blue and unwavering. All teasing went out of his voice. “I’m not leaving you. Ten years in the British Army, and I’ve never left a man behind. I’m not leaving you. I’ll have you out of this. Understand?”

She nodded. She was beginning to comprehend why his soldiers would follow him anywhere, and why the tenants trusted him on sight. When Logan MacKenzie took a soul under his protection, he would die before he let them suffer harm.

Maddie’s wasn’t a soul under his protection, not truly. He meant to use her for her lands, plain and simple. But at least she had the comfort of this knowledge: He couldn’t leave her here.

So long as their marriage remained unconsummated, she was of no use to him dead.

“First, draw a good breath,” he told her. “In and then out. Slowly.”

“I don’t want to waste time with breathing. Can’t you just pull me out of this?”

“Breathe,” he repeated.

It would seem he wouldn’t help her until she obeyed him. She closed her eyes, drew a breath, then released it.

“That’s it, again. More slowly this time. And again, until you’ve calmed.”

Those half dozen slow, forced breaths were the most torturous moments of her life. But at the end of them, she did feel somewhat improved. Her rioting heartbeat had calmed to a slightly less deafening clamor.

“When you’re ready,” he said, “you can begin to move back and forth.”

“How?”

“Just rock to and fro. As if you’re dancing.”