Claiming Her (Renegades & Outlaws) (8 page)

She set the cup down on the table, careful not to come any closer to his body, while demonstrating she did not
care
how close she came to his body. He rested a hip against the table and watched.
 

“That was speedily done,” he said, a faintly admiring tone to his words. “More swiftly than I’ve ever seen a cup of wine downed.” He reflected a moment. “Even by Cormac.”

“I am sure your Cormac has other talents,” she said modestly. “You’ll be pleased to
 
hear I am also quite skilled with a cup of ale.”

He laughed, a low, entirely masculine sound. “I am impressed.”

She waved her hand. “Do not be. It is not a terribly useful talent.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “I would say that depends entirely upon the occasion.”

She studied him. “Would you? And upon what occasions do you deem it wise to render yourself witless, Aodh Mac Con?”
 

Certes not the wisest thing to say, but then, this moment was not made for wisdom. It was parry and thrust, stand and deliver or die. That was life over the Pale in Ireland: the edge of a knife.
 

Especially when one had an Irish warrior standing in one’s bedchamber.

One who was…smiling at her.
 

He stood, hip against the table, arms crossed, head tilted slightly to the side, not answering, just…watching her, as a hawk might do, if hawks smiled.

Why, this was just how young Bran had stood in the solar, absent the hawkish smile. It was unsurprising, and doubtless unconscious. Aodh Mac Con emanated a presence like air or light. Elemental. The sort men wished to emulate, the kind one absorbed without intent, the way a sheet laid on the grass absorbs the morning dew, or a rag tossed onto a spill absorbs the wine.
 

Water. Wine. Aodh.

A flush moved up her cheeks. She had to physically force herself not to cover them with her fingertips as he slid his gaze down her body, forehead to boots, a swift, masculine appraisal. Heat trailed behind, searing everywhere his gaze had touched.
 

“It depends,” was all he said.

He’d been correct; the wine was quite strong. Katarina had the smallest, waviest feeling of being out of her senses.
 

“I am unsurprised you find such a thing relative, sir,” she said. “Most folk, though, take a certain comfort in knowing that coups of castles are almost always a poor occasion upon which to render oneself witless.”

A dark brow arched up. “Do they now?” He moved his gaze pointedly to the wine cup she’d emptied in a single downing. “Then why did you just do so?”
 

Her eyebrows lifted. “Aodh Mac Con, you do not think me witless now, do you?”

A smile of something, perhaps delight?, crossed his face. “Ahh,” he exhaled, as if a new clue had just been discovered in a treasure hunt. His eyes were all but dancing. “I do not know. You
did
take my blade.”

“And you did take my castle.”
 

“Ah.” His gaze roamed her face. “Was that unwise of me?”
 

“Exceptionally.”

“And yet I have done many unwise things in my time.”

“As have I.”

“How unwise?”
 

“Enough to almost get me kicked out of Ireland,” she said without thinking. How could one think properly, locked in his ice-blue eyes?

“That would be bad indeed. Mine was enough to bring me back again. And since then, lass, how has your wisdom fared?” Rough, low-pitched, dangerous, the questions were like tiny tools chipping away at her composure.

“At times, ’tis practically nonexistent,” she admitted in a whisper.
 

A slow, dangerous smile crossed his face. “Good.”
 

 
“My steward would not agree how fare my men?”

She threw the question out the way an anchor is thrown off a ship, so it became a single unstoppable sentence, trying to slow down this thing he’d set in motion, this river comprised of Aodh Mac Con holding her gaze, talking about wisdom and the things they had done and the things they might do, and how dangerous it all could be.

He pushed away from the table and leaned over her so she had to tip her head back. His mouth was bare inches away, his tongue so close, so able to do the things it had done before.
He will take me now
, she thought wildly, her body charged, and she, standing here with her lips parted, not to receive him—not at all, that would be madness—but to draw air into her suddenly breathless body.

He smiled just above her mouth and said, “Stubborn,” then turned away, striding into the room.

She tripped backward a step, almost reeling at the…nothingness. The absence. At the way her expectations had not been met.

“Stubborn?” she echoed. “My men are stubborn?”

He made his way deeper into the room, touching small things as he went: the edge of her dressing table; the long oak table that dominated the side of the room, the post at the corner of the bed. He touched everything he passed, brushing it with his fingertips as if testing its quality.
 

Or laying claim.

“They are reluctant to surrender.” He ran his hand gently over a small beveled glass perfume bottle on her table. It rocked slightly but did not fall. “It seems they await a word from you on the matter.”

“Fools,” she said aloud, but inside, she smiled. Loyal, wonderful fools.
 

“Aren’t they?” His gaze slid to her. “I do not need their allegiance, of course. But neither can they stay at Rardove in their condition.”

Their rebellious condition.

“No, of course not,” she agreed.
 

His red-and-black tube tunic, belted at the waist, stretched taut across the flat plane of his stomach as he reached across the table. She saw a thin tendril of paint curling up the back of his neck, like a vine, a lick of dark flame.
 

She felt breathless.
 

Good God, was he painted
everywhere
?
 

The corded muscles in his neck flexed as he looked over his shoulder at her. She ripped her gaze up.

“And you are their fire. More wine?”

She stared stupidly at the cup in his hand. “I am their…what?”
 

“Fire. The thing they kindle themselves on.”

This was a shocking observation. “Me?”
 

“Aye. You.”

“You are mistaken,” she said, intensely startled. “I assure you, I am as baffled as you why my men would be so reckless in such a lost cause.”

He gave a soft laugh. “I did not say I was baffled.”

Something about the low, slow way he said the words sent a trail of heat flaring through her body.
 

He set down the refilled cup of wine on the table next to her. She regarded it grimly, then looked away, not without effort, because it truly was exceptional wine. She peered up at him suspiciously. He was toying with her. Dragging out whatever punishment or unpleasant consequences he had plann—

“Have you been treated well?” he said.
 

“I have been locked in the solar, and have not yet had the opportunity to learn how your men take to their role as conquerors, nor how they treat their plunder.”

His gaze held hers, pale blue and piercing. “You mean rape.”

She hesitated, then nodded.
 

He watched her a moment more, then turned and dropped into the carved lord’s chair at the end of the huge oak table. Meetings of lords and princes had taken place around this table for hundreds of years, secret councils plotting coups and rebellions and marriage alliances. Aodh sprawled back, his fire-ice eyes unreadable beneath dark brows, hard fingers interlaced on his lap, his body in the pose of ease, but Katarina could
feel
him from across the room. His entire being was barely leashed power, like a bow drawn back, taut and ready.
 

He said nothing.

She desperately wanted him to say something. Anything. She also wanted more wine. She wanted something to throw at his head. Anything to break the tension.
 

“Where do we begin?” she asked.

“We have begun.”
 

The simple, ominous reply occasioned a host of chills across her chest. She swallowed. “You’ll want to see the ledgers.”

“No.”
 

She blinked, then curled her fingers into the wool of her skirts and tugged free the castle keys. Armory, storerooms, castle door and coffers, they held access to everything of value in Rardove. She gave them a silvery-iron jingle and held them up.

He shook his head.

“They open all the doors and coffers,” she told him, unnecessarily. Surely he knew what keys did. “You will find the account rolls. The ledgers. The coin.”

He shook his head again.

She reversed step to examine the padlocks of the nearest chest, sitting under the edge of the table. Perhaps they’d already been broken open. No, they were intact, as flat black and foreboding as ever. She turned back, feeling oddly and unaccountably embarrassed.
 

Their eyes met. He shook his head again, very slowly.
 

He had the face of a warrior, hard and bold, with no way to hide the past. His chin was scarred by an old, jagged slice. Another long, narrow scar traversed the summit of his cheekbone. His nose had clearly been broken sometime in the past. He’d been in battles. He was a warrior. He was in her bedchamber.

The first inkling of things to come slid down her belly like a drop of cold rain. Their eyes locked on each other.
 

“Why do you not simply do it?” she asked quietly.

He pushed his boots out. “Do what?”

”Punish me.”

“Why would I punish you?”
 

She gestured behind her, toward the door. “For what happened. Downstairs.”

“Ah. What happened. Downstairs.” His echo was a long, drawn-out affair.
 

Heat swept across her cheeks. “’Twas an…aberration. sir. It is not like me.”

He leaned his hard body back, slung an arm over the side of the chair and let it hang, deceptively relaxed, for she knew he was as relaxed as a wolf.
 

“Oh, Katarina, what ‘happened downstairs’ is very much a thing of you.”

Her jaw dropped at his words, at the use of her Christian name. For on his lips, it had not sounded Christian
at all
. He’d rendered it into something else entirely. The words were English, but the intonation, the inflection, the way it rolled over his tongue… No, this was not her language. This was his. Some melding of English and Irish. Something old, foreign. Ensorcelled. Enchanted.

She dragged her mind from the things he was doing to her name. “Y-You are wrong about me, Aodh Mac Con.”
 

He bent to the floor beside him, lifted something, and tossed it onto the table. It was a lightweight sword belt, blades attached.
 

Her blades.

Other weapons followed behind, hitting the table with muted thuds: the long clumsy dagger; the short, fierce knife; the sleek, keen-edged
misericorde
. Her wheel-lock pistol. The newer snaphances. Five of them.
 

Why, he’d found everything. How…unsettling.
 

They stared at the deadly cache together in silence a moment. Then she cleared her throat. “Ireland is a dangerous land.”
 

He gave a low laugh. “Aye, Katarina. With you in it.”
 

She forced herself to look at him. “I would not want my men to suffer on account of my misdeeds. I offer my… I am…sorry.” She scraped the word out and wiped it through the air.
 

He pushed the weapons to the side, inconsequential anymore. “’Tis time to clarify a few things, lass. I do not rape women.”

His voice had turned to hard steel, and it made her feel cold inside.
“Oh.”

“I do not smash open coffers to steal coin.”
 

“I meant only—”

“I do not deal in feigned apologies—”

“I—”

“And I do not punish men for defending what is theirs.”

It was an impressive litany of the restraints of a warrior.
 

Katarina was not impressed. “Do you not punish men for defending what is theirs? That is most noble of you. And what of women, sir? For I have found there are so often different rules for them.”

He watched her a moment. “I do not follow many rules, Katarina.”

Whoosh
, directly through the center of her belly. With her name strung on the end like a pearl, in his rough, dark lilt, it had sounded like a promise.
 

“Ah,” was all she could conjure up, a sad reply to the admission of his mutinous nature.