Page 31 of Blood of the Thistle

“Oh, geez,” she murmured, wincing as she caught sight once more of the blood soaking the shoulder of his linen shirt. “Your shoulder,” she reminded him, only to realize in the next instant that he was hardly likely to have forgotten it. “There’s a lot of blood.”

“Aye,” he answered without looking at her. “I’ll need to address it anon, ere the riding worsens it.”

Still they rode another mile or more, Bram seeming determined to put as much distance as possible between themselves and whoever now might be chasing them before stopping. Anna found herself wondering how one tended to a sword wound in the beginning of the fourteenth century. She rather suspected—her insight gleaned from television and movies—that the answer would involve cold water, a strip torn from his shirt, and a great deal of stoicism.

She thought she understood just enough now to be relieved when they crested another rise and found a much denser forest spreading before them, where they might be concealed. Without hesitation, Bram turned the horse beneath the canopy of ash and oak, where the shade swallowed much of the afternoon sun, hiding them from searching eyes. The trees grew close together, their branches knitting overhead until the woodland felt almost secluded from the rest of the world. Before long, the quiet murmur of running water reached them, and they came upon a narrow stream winding lazily between moss-covered stones.

Only then did Bram draw the horse to a halt.

He slid stiffly from the saddle, suppressing what looked suspiciously like a wince as his bare feet met the ground. He then turned and reached up to help her down.

“I can get down,” Anna said quickly, waving him off. “Don’t make it worse.”

A storm of irritation gathered on his face. Seeing his thunderous expression, she quickly clarified, “Your injury. Don’t make it worse.”

In truth, his displeasure barely eased before he stepped away to secure both horses to the trunk of a slender sapling. Satisfied they wouldn’t wander, he crossed to the stream, already pulling the blood-soaked shirt over his head.

Anna followed, but slowed when he removed his shirt.

She’d known he was large, more than half a foot taller than her, with broad, squared shoulders. After months of captivity, she’d expected him to be gaunt beneath his tunic, yet he wasn’t. There wasn’t a spare ounce of flesh on the man, but neither was he wasting away. His back was wide and powerfully built, tapering to a lean waist, the muscles beneath his pale skin shifting easily as he crouched beside the water.

Anna stepped closer, and whatever appreciation she might have felt was quickly overshadowed by the full measure of his suffering. His back was a canvas of violence. Some scars were old and puckered, silvered with age, while others were fresh—long, thin welts layered over a constellation of bruises in shades of purple, blue, and green. A new horror settled in her stomach. She couldn’t reconcile the agony written upon his skin with the man’s stoic silence. How was he even standing?

But as her gaze moved over him again, concern did not entirely erase her awareness of the body beneath those injuries. His shoulders were enormous from this close, his arms thick with muscle. Even battered and exhausted, Bram was an extraordinarily impressive man, and the realization brought an entirely different sensation curling low in her stomach.

Anna looked away abruptly, heat rushing into her cheeks, appalled with herself.

The man was covered in evidence of having been beaten and tortured, had just killed people, while she had apparently been ripped out of her own century, and somehow her body had decided this was an appropriate moment to notice that Bram MacCailin was spectacularly built.

She risked another glance.

It wasn’t only that he was handsome, or even the undeniable physicality of him. There was something raw and elemental about Bram that she had no better words for. Nothing about him was polished or modern. The powerful body, the scars, the controlled economy of every movement all belonged to a life of brutal necessity she couldn’t begin to imagine. He was unlike anyone she had ever known, and the sheer, unvarnished reality of him was utterly compelling.

He rose then and turned toward her, and while Anna felt her face grow embarrassingly warm, she didn’t look away. His chest was as powerfully sculpted as his back, broad and hard with muscle, a scattering of dark hair narrowing toward his stomach. Her gaze might have lingered there if not for the ugly wound marring his side, and the last of her appreciation vanished beneath renewed concern.

“Oh...” she whispered.

The sword had carved an angry slash across the top of his shoulder, deeper near the front and tapering as it curved toward his back. Blood still welled sluggishly from the deepest part, though not with the alarming flow Anna imagined must have come when he’d first been struck.

She recalled something just then. “I might...” she began uncertainly and dropped to her knees, rifling through her purse. “I might have something.”

She’d owned the little purse-sized kit for years and had never once needed it, but practicality had compelled her to pack it. Band-Aids for blisters, ibuprofen for a headache... She’d tried to prepare for the small troubles of travel, never imagining a crisis of this magnitude.

She unzipped the little red pouch and examined its meager contents: Band-Aids, alcohol wipes, a tiny tube of antibiotic ointment, Ibuprofen and, for some inexplicable reason, a pair of plastic tweezers.

“What have ye there?” Bram asked, suspicion immediately entering his voice.

“A first-aid kit.” She stood and approached him, then looked from the handful of Band-Aids to the six-inch gash across his shoulder. “Though apparently one intended for much smaller injuries.”

“What will ye do with it?”

“Clean the cut, for one thing, and hopefully keep it from getting infected. And these might hold at least the deepest part closed.” She showed him the paper-wrapped bandages, then caught his dubious expression and sighed, wondering how she might explain to a fourteenth century man tools from a modern world. She had no idea.

“Do you trust me?” she asked instead.

“Nae,” he answered without hesitation. “Nae particularly.”

“Oh.” She was more dejected by the answer than seemed reasonable, a surprising sting of disappointment. “That’s a shame,” she said, her voice soft, fairly certain that she trusted him quite a bit.