Claiming Her (Renegades & Outlaws) (9 page)

“What ‘happened downstairs,’” he said softly, “is what I’d expect from someone with wits enough to see that their opponent was distracted, for even an instant, and the bollocks to seize that moment.”

Something that carried chills in its pockets swept over her. It was not so much coldness as a slapping sort of alertness, like drawing the furs off a slumbering body in winter. A splash of cold water in the heat of a fever. Alert, aware, awake.
 

“I do not disapprove.”

Oh,
now
she saw the danger. Felt it as surely as she felt the heat from the fire he’d lit. Now, when he was far too close.      

“Then you are a man different from any I have ever known,” she said quietly.

“That I am.” His eyes never left hers. “As for most men, Katarina, they are fools. I rarely do the things they do. I proceed where they stop, I sail when they waver, and I take the castles they negotiate over.”

A thread of chills scalded across her breasts, hardening her nipples.
Why?
Why when he spoke of such mercenary, acquisitive arrogance, why did she feel as if he’d touched her with a feather on fire?

“I think you are the same,” he said.

She curled her fingers around the edge of the dressing table. “I see.”

“Do you?”

She shook her head. “No.”

Yes.

He pushed out the chair opposite him with the tip of his boot and extended a palm toward it. “Sit with me.”
 

“Why?”
 

“To negotiate.”

She could not help it; she laughed. “Negotiate? Over what? I have nothing.”

He just nodded toward the chair.
 

“Aodh Mac Con, you have my castle, my men, the coffers, the coin. You tell us what to do, and we shall do it. What more could you possibly want?”

“You.”

Her heartbeat slowed. “Pardon?”

“I have a proposition.”

“What sort of proposition?”

“The sort where you marry me.”

The long hot trail of chills started in her belly this time, and spread across her skin like a tide washing in.
 

How in God’s name had it come to this?

She’d been facing a small query from one of the queen’s interrogators about a faint rumor regarding a minor crack in the loyalty of Rardove—almost entirely unfounded—and now she was being offered full-on rebellion in its stead.

She wanted to sit down, shut her eyes, catch her breath,
compose
herself somehow.
 

But that time had passed. There was no composure, no consideration, only falling, as if she’d been pushed off a cliff and was tumbling into an unknown future all alone. Even the small, stern counseling voice inside her was silent—doubtless rendered incoherent by recent events—and everything, absolutely everything, was now in her hands.

She lifted her chin a miniature inch, an infant inch, the smallest lift one could give a chin in a tight situation, swept her skirts out to the side, and sat down.
 

“What do you offer in consideration of your suit?”

Chapter Nine

AODH BURST OUT laughing.
 

“Lass, you’ve got bollocks,” he said as she lowered herself into the chair.

“I have been told that,” she replied with the same liquid grace she’d evidenced in everything thus far: greeting him in a cold bailey; handing over the keys to her castle; holding a blade to his throat.
       

He wanted to push her back on the bed and make her stop being graceful, become just heat. Roaring flames.

He pushed the heels of his boots harder into the ground and maintained his seat. Ravishing her would not encourage her to bend of her own free will.

Accursed free will.      

To give his body something to do besides ravishing her, he grabbed the wine jug and tipped the spout her direction in silent query. The fire reflected in her dark eyes as she looked at him for a long, silent moment. Then she reached out and took the wine.
 

A small surrender, but Aodh was on a path. Small accessions, small agreements, accumulating like snow.
 

He waited until she finished pouring, then said without preamble, “I can think of half a dozen persuasive reasons to join me.”

“By persuasive, do you mean ‘mad’?”

He shrugged. “Some might call it that.”

“
Sane
folk might call it that.”

He sipped his drink. “On the other hand, folk who down an entire bowl of wine in a single swallow might see merit in the notion.”

She settled back in her seat. “I see. You
do
think me mad.”
 

“I think you reckless and bold.
 
To the arguments, Katarina: firstly, we are already here.”
 

She inclined her head in a regal nod. “I had noticed.”

“To some, that alone would be sufficient motivation.”

She smiled thinly. “So now you think me easily swayed.”

“The dagger at my throat suggested otherwise,” he said briskly. “Secondly, I have sixty-odd men who can commandeer a castle in less than ten minutes.”

She settled back in her seat, wine cup held between the fingertips of both hands. “Yes, we were all appropriately awed.”

“They were,” he said. “You were not.”
 

“I was entirely awed, Mac Con. One might even say awestruck.”

“Might one?”

A secret little smile touched her mouth. “It would depend upon the one.”

He greatly liked when she smiled. “I think you will find sixty men of use, Katarina.”

“To what end would
I
use them? I have no troubles with the Queen of England.”
 

“Perhaps in your troubles with the Irish, then.” He smiled.

Her eyes grew fierce, no longer filled with graceful consideration; more like the woman he’d had to back up against a wall. She leaned forward, toward the table, toward him, as if she could not be reclined any longer.
 

Good.
 

“Your boldness implies a certain ignorance of what is to come, Aodh Mac Con, so allow me to enlighten you. Sixty-odd men will never hold the line against the forces the Queen of England will be sending to Ireland once she learns of your deeds here.”

“No doubt. That is where you come in.”
 

“As your consort?” she said sharply.

“As the sword wielder. And wheel-lock-gun wielder. And the snaphances,” he added in an admiring tone. “
Five
of them.”
 

Her lips parted in surprise. “I, fight on
your
behalf?”
 

“You would not?”
 

“Are you mad?”
 

“’Tis quite an array.”

She looked at the guns. “Is it?”
 

“’Tis.”

She glanced into the depths of whatever wine was left in her goblet. Probably none. “Would you say that if I were a man?” she asked quietly.

He shook his head. “I would ask where your lance was.”

Her head came up swiftly. “Then you see, there
are
different rules for women.”
 

“There is a difference between a rule and a regularity, Katarina. You are highly irregular.”

She laughed then, amusement yanked unexpectedly from the depths of her, apparently, for she looked as surprised by it as he. It was a goodly thing, this laughter. Musical and low, almost throaty. Pleasing. Very. As was the faint flush that washed across her pale cheeks.
 

Her laughter faded to a pretty smile, then she turned away, presenting him with the perfectly acceptable substitute of her high-cheeked profile, the fine upturn to her nose, the fitting squareness of her chin, the ashen sweep of long lashes.
 

“You’ve no idea how many times I’ve been told that, Aodh Mac Con, if not quite in that way.”

“And were they all as pleased by it as I?”

Her body became a study in frozen moments: fading smile, furrowed brow, deep brown eyes, turning to his.
 

“I thought not,” he said briskly. “I am unsurprised. They’ve no idea what to do with you.”

“Who is ‘they,’ Mac Con?”
 

“Every man you’ve ever met, Katarina. Everyone but me.”
 

He could almost
feel
the chills race across her skin. Silence spread, except for the crackling fire. Then she leaned forward and rested an elbow on the table, considering him from across its length, somewhat like a battle commander in a war tent. It was an uncommonly uncomfortable moment, this woman’s appraising, clever gaze inspecting him.
 

“You do not like Ireland overly much, do you, Aodh Mac Con?”
 

Surprise spiked through him, and with it, all the bodily changes that mark vigilance, as when you heard the snick of a lock in a darkened room, or felt the thud of a boot stepping where there should only be sleeping bodies. He didn’t move, though; too much experience with being scared half to hell and never showing it.
 

Clever, clever Katarina.
 

“Not overly,” was all he said.
 

“And yet, here you are.”

He spread his hands, palms up, to indicate he was, indeed, here.

The fire picked up the strands of reddish-gold amid her falling brown locks. “For myself, I have discovered that for all its savage wildness, Ireland is not entirely a land of want. One discovers things that are lacking in almost every other place of the world.”
 

“Rain?” he suggested.

She smiled faintly.
 

“Cold? Darkness? The number of savages?” he went on absently, not interested in a discussion of the limited charms of Ireland. He was far more interested in the way her lips formed words. Full, wet, faintly red, and ever so slightly crooked.
 

“Indeed, sir, Ireland is all those things. Cold, dark, wet, although, as you say, the worst menace is the savages who paint their bodies like pages in a manuscript.”
 

He slid his gaze from her mouth to her eyes. “You noticed.”

Her face flushed. “Barely.”

“Ha.”

“But amid such trials,” she went on, “Ireland bears gifts too. Boons. The lining of a dark cloud.”
 

“For instance?” he said doubtfully.
 

“No one much cares what you do if you are in Ireland, so long as it does not inconvenience them. And as they are hundreds of miles and a sea away, it so rarely does.”

He sat back, slung his arm over the arm of the chair. “I see.”

“Do you? Send the receipts, ship the wool, imprison any shipwrecked Spanish soldiers you stumble across, and you become…chaff.”

“I know,” he agreed grimly.

“I mean, one may do as one wishes,” she pressed, as if it mattered that he understand her strange affection for his homeland. “One becomes…beneath notice. Blurred. A mote of dust. Taken”—she lifted a hand and let it fall—“for granted. This would not please one such as you, no doubt, but for one such as me, this absence of attention provides certain…freedoms.”
 

She was correct. One benefit of being in a cold hell: no one bothered you. Until they came to crush you.

“This invisibility,” she went on, “and the freedoms it brings, creates the strong, one might say
intense,
desire to avoid ever again becoming a thing to be done with.”
 

The fire crackled through a moment of silence. Then, in case she’d not been clear, she said in a low voice, “I am not a thing to be
done with
.”
 

Although, of course, she was.
 

He knew it, she knew it, every member of her stubborn, currently locked-up garrison knew it. There was nothing clearer in all the world than that women were chattel and plunder.