His head and side hurting something fierce, Niall led the stubborn lass to the byre, not needing this further aggravation. He couldn't believe he'd fought with a pitchfork-armed lassie when he only vaguely remembered entering the cottage in the first place, looking for help.
He hadn't recalled hardly anything, except for seeing the cottage, then barely remembered he'd walked in and found no one. God's knees, she could have run him through with a pitchfork while he was sleeping.
He smiled at the thought, particularly because of just who had been poking him gently with the farm implement. Still, his mistake could have cost him his life if a burly sheepherder had come after him instead.
Then again, if her family arrived soon—he let out his breath with exasperation. He had to get
rest.
He glowered, the notion he could be in for further trouble, unsettling him. He glanced down at her unveiled hair. Wisps of chestnut and golden strands mixed together, lightened by the sun, struggling to break loose of their confinement. His scowl softened.
“Are you an unmarried maid?” Mayhap that’s why she was so skittish around him. Then again, even if she was married, he was a stranger and had slept in her bed so she had every reason to be wary of him.
He had another thought. “Are you a concubine then?”
He suddenly realized something else, his head clearing a little, not much, but a wee bit. The bed had smelled like her, sweet, womanly, a flowery fragrance, and straw. No man had recently been in the bed.
He glanced down at her then. She lived alone?
The lass glowered at him. “Release me at once, you… you, barbarian!”
Ignoring her demand, he smiled a hint. He couldn’t recall any lass calling him such a thing. Most thought he was charming. “If no’ a concubine then, does your father manage the croft lands?”
But he now suspected she lived alone. Why else wouldn't she have told him she lived with family?
“Are you always this forceful with the people you first encounter? I imagine you do not win too
many new friends this way.”
Again, he couldn’t help but smile at her audacity. He was a battle-hardened warrior, who had fought numerous times against clansmen who encroached upon the MacNeill lands. Yet, this slip of a woman did something to him he’d never expected. Made him consider hearth and home and a woman to warm his bed in more than a temporary way. He was an honorable man—so he thought—but seeing her lying on the bed, the folds of her léine dipping between her legs, and the way she so haughtily considered him, he couldn't help but think of what it would be like to bed such a bonny—and feisty— lass.
Uncomfortable with the way his thoughts were going, he said brusquely, “I dinna seek
friendship, lass, only sleep.”
“Seek it at the local tavern in the village then. They will offer you room and board for a fair price, or have you no coin or naught to barter with, either?”
He didn’t answer her query. He might have thought her perversely obstinate, but he had noted she’d been genuinely concerned about his intentions. He assumed her haughtiness had more to do with covering up her fear than anything else. Not wishing to harm her, he was desperate to get more rest before he ventured out across the glen to search for Gunnolf and continued to look for the French lass.
When they'd been inside the cottage, the lass had been so fearless when she brandished a pitchfork against him, a Highland warrior. If his cousins and Gunnolf, their childhood friend, had seen the way Niall had reacted to the lassie poking at him with the prongs of her pitchfork, they would have laughed their fool heads off.
