The Raider (Highland Guard #8)(37)

Robbie voiced what all of them were thinking. “You could have left him there and escaped.”

She met his gaze. “He would have died,” she said, as if the explanation were obvious.

For her, he realized it was. She wouldn’t leave a man behind to die, not even an enemy. He should know that better than anyone. Something inside his chest shifted. It was as if a big rock had been pushed out of the way, revealing a small opening.

Callum looked at him as if the world had just been declared round. “But she’s English,” he said in Gaelic.

“I know.” Robbie was at just as much of a loss for an explanation. It didn’t make any sense to him either. This one small lass seemed have more honor in her than the entire English army put together.

Yet the more he watched her, the more he believed it wasn’t an act. She was just as sweet and kind as she looked. He’d noticed how she’d distracted her nephew earlier to keep his spirits up and her natural friendliness toward his men—even in the face of their brusqueness (in most cases, outright rudeness). When she’d demanded to come see what could be done in the village, he thought it was a trick. But it wasn’t. It had obviously been motivated by honest concern. For Scots. She’d run into that burning building to help someone who was her enemy.

It defied belief.

But it was more than that. Beneath the sweetness he detected a fierce sense of right and wrong that reminded him of someone, although he couldn’t put his finger on who.

When she reached the part where he arrived, he tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t let him. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “I don’t know how you lifted that by yourself.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d heard admiration and awe in a lass’s voice, but it was the first time he felt his face growing hot. Bloody hell, he was blushing!

“You should see him at the Highland Games, my lady,” Malcolm offered. “The captain can throw a stone three times as heavy as anyone else. No one has ever come close to beating him. Why, he can defeat ten Englishmen using just his hands—”

“That’s enough, Malcolm,” he said sharply. “The lady doesn’t want to hear about all that.”

She looked like she was about to disagree, when she glanced to the man lying on the ground at his feet. Her eyes filled with tears. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

He nodded.

She looked up at him. “Why would he have done something so dangerous?”

Robbie reached down and pulled a purse from the man’s clenched fingers. “For this. He had it hidden in a space in the wall, along with some grain and other goods. He’d probably put it there when the English came and then tried to get to it once he thought it was safe.”

“All this for a few coins and some grain?” she asked incredulously.

Robbie’s jaw hardened. “Aye, it was foolish, but it was probably all he had to feed his family. These people will have nothing left.”

The realization affected her. There was no denying the real compassion and sadness in those too expressive eyes of hers.

“But you saved some of them,” she said. “The fires are almost out.”

The way she was looking at him…

For a minute, he felt like he’d donned some of Seton’s shining armor.

Bloody hell.

Robbie glanced over to where the rest of his men and the villagers were throwing the final buckets of water. But she was right. They had.

Something had changed. Rosalin didn’t know what, but over the next hour, while Robbie and his men helped the villagers put out the last of the fires and see what could be salvaged from the rest, she detected a difference in the men’s attitude toward her.

Once they’d stopped staring at her as if she had suddenly grown a second head, they actually spoke to her. And not just in grunts and unintelligible words in Gaelic. Men who she didn’t think knew a word of English were suddenly addressing her as “my lady.”

Even Callum. Well, perhaps especially Callum. Just as personally as he’d taken her tricking of Malcolm, it seemed he’d seen her refusal to leave his son in the burning building as the establishment of some kind of bond between them. She couldn’t tell whether he was pleased about it or not, but he’d taken his son’s place in guarding her and seemed to have nominated himself as her protector.

When some village children cautiously approached and started touching her soiled but very fine gown, he’d shooed them away and told them not to get the lady’s gown dirty with their grubby hands. Considering how inelegantly she’d been handled the past twenty-four hours and how filthy she was already, such admonishments were quite laughable. But cognizant of how serious he seemed to be, and his Scot pride, she smothered her smile and told him she didn’t mind just this once.

The children had been entranced with her and had asked some of the most humorous questions, at which she’d struggled hard not to laugh. They must have asked her ten times if she was truly English. That she didn’t have the face of a gorgon, or devil’s horns and tail, was apparently incomprehensible.

It was when talking to the children—a few of whom had lost everything—that she’d had an idea.

Callum hesitated, giving her that strange look again. “You want to give them our food?”

“Aye, do you think some could be found that might be spared?”