His Judas Bride (27 page)

“Go on. You never know. I might like it.”

But how could she think, however much she aroused him and however much she was at his mercy, he would do such a thing? However much of Lochalpin was a burning wreck by morning? However much he craved answers? However much his breath tore and his heart juddered? Just because he had wanted her to consider her position, it did not mean he wanted to put her in it.

He swallowed what knotted his throat, an empathy that was absurd, because she’d been here before. These marks, that man. Obviously she had, or she wouldn’t keep on about it. Yet if she had, why the hell would she goad him into behaving like a savage?

“Hell. That’s enough. Do you hear me?”

Unless she had somehow gleaned just how badly Morven’s fate had affected him?

“Yes. I’ll even let you know just how good you are. How capable.”

He rolled to one side and stood off the table. As a matter of some urgency, he needed to find the one thing that frightened her, when she seemed to be through every wall of his defenses and knowing how capable he was, he had no need of proving it, no matter how far she pushed him. Was there such a thing though? He was honestly starting to think nothing existed this side of heaven—hell neither—that would reduce this creature to quivering rubble, and make her tell him everything she knew.

No.
Actually there was.
How could he possibly forget? Maybe he honestly couldn’t frighten her.

But he certainly knew one who could.

Chapter Twelve

Kara remained taut and motionless, her throat a closed hole through which she couldn’t breathe. Not for the first time, it occurred to her she should speak. On the strength of this present performance though, how could she? Talk about her son to a man with crockery shards crunching beneath his boots—and not just Arland, but herself, or Morven? That was what she wanted to believe in the instant he swept the supper on the floor.

“Get up. Do it, sweetheart, or I’ll do it for you.”

She didn’t want him doing it for her. Very definitely, she didn’t. Not the way he gritted. Despite the fact it was a challenge setting her foot down to find a piece of flagstone to stand on that wasn’t littered with porcelain shards. Both her boots had dropped off. Then there was the matter of the agonizing bolt that shot through her ankle.

“Do you know I used to go about this glen, with a black wolf pelt on my shoulder?”

She didn’t. And the vision seemed quite surreal to her. But she didn’t want to say so, when he yanked the door open.

“I got it from the devil.”

Wasn’t that interesting to know? Most people with any desire to go about Lochalpin dressed like that, would just have killed the creature, maybe waited till they found a dead one to get the pelt. He had to be different.

“The self same day Morven died. It let me take care of quite a bit of business when I wore it.”

She didn’t doubt it. If he was telling her all this, maybe she should say something? After all the man had suffered as much as she had, and despite everything there was no denying she had been at his mercy there. No denying this entire situation and what she held onto and didn’t, had passed beyond her clasp.

But when the things he’d said about protecting her were too unnerving, when she had taken his knife to protect herself from hearing them as much as anything, when the knowledge thudded—oh yes, she had goaded him because that was what she did to exert sneering, freezing, smug control. Only in this instance she hadn’t done it for that. How could she?

She had never thought to see the day she would actively goad a man in order to hate him. This man, with his refusal to be baited. This man—oh, if only. Why give herself even more grief?

She should never have come here. As if this tortuous mess
was what it was to find. Every drop of knowledge about it, a dagger in her heart.

He muttered a few words to Wee Murdie, then he turned to her, the sea-green glitter barely visible in his irritated glower. “I hoped this wouldn’t be necessary but you leave me little choice.”

While she had never been more conscious of his height, or what covered him like a frost, she had also never been more aware of the fact that when he glowered like that she just wanted to tell him to stop it. Did he think she couldn’t see the kind of man he was? No matter the storms that raged?

But whatever he said, it was something Wee Murdie also disputed, judging by his frown.

“Go on.” The gesture was one of dismissal.

So he wanted to lock her up? While she had never thought to see the day when she would almost positively welcome it, there was, it seemed, another first time for everything. For now, she was not going to question it. She would simply walk from the room, with her head high.

But then Wee Murdie turned sharply to the right. A familiar room filled her vision. For a second she couldn’t think for the chill that blanketed her spine. This was another attempt to make her talk, wasn’t it? And if she stared…if she stared at him hard enough…

That was difficult when Wee Murdie’s footsteps clumped into the distance behind her.

“What the—” Whether Ewen McDunnagh’s ability to add and make four on this occasion, or whether he thought she was here for some other social reason, Kara had a fairly good idea of the word his lips froze around.

Because of course, she also had an even better one, that the activity in question was one she was shortly about to be forced to indulge in with him. Or? Her gaze swung to the door.

“Weel, weel,
weel.
” Ewen rose from the chair by the fire. “Look whit the cat’s sent in. Its leavings.”

It had, hadn’t it? Although she had the distinct feeling that the
tramp, tramp, tramp
of Wee Murdie’s footsteps, just outside in the corridor, didn’t actually go along the length of it but stayed in the one spot.

“Now, if only you’d bed with me, mah lady.”

Bed?
Did he mean stayed by any chance as opposed to the act itself? Ewen’s speech was rough whether he was drunk or not, and as earlier had shown, he didn’t appear to have been drinking.

“But no, no. Ye had to have him. Just like the old days that. Whenever he was about and all the women had but eyes for one. And that one was not me. Yet he defended ye earlier. How vexing is that?”

Vexing enough. She just refused to say so.

“And before that too. Told me to keep mah manky paws off. Or he’d cut off more than them.”

Kara swallowed the knot in her throat. So large a knife to sit—not just there, in her heart too—was not one she could afford to suffer bleeding drops from, to stand feeling the slow trickle, when she must consider if the Wolf had put her in here to frighten her into talking. Might this backfire?

Especially now the monster had planted his feet, right in front of her.

“Excuse me for asking, but does that sound like a man who cares about entrusting me with your sacred person?”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps? And perhaps tartan pigs fly in that corner there, on nice satin wings, waving pretty pink banners for all our edifications.”

Kara raised her chin. Her fingers curled. Her toes too. For just an instant, she felt as if she stood on a high mountain, cold air swirling about her face, everything seemed so far away and she was just a tiny figure looking down on an even tinier one. Herself. Who perhaps had not seen until this moment, the real reason she could not have bedded Ewen McDunnagh, when in her prison cell she had so casually thought she could.

In that instant she sprang for the doorway. Although where she thought she’d go, and how far she thought she’d get, once she got there, didn’t come into this for the blood pounding in her head. Only Ewen reached the door first. The force with which it juddered shut sent shockwaves through her body.

She swung around. Even as she did her ankle wobbled, propelling her forward to the floor. Now her ankle was accompanied by a burst knee. Maybe even a bleeding nose.

But she made herself not to whimper. Not to beg. Not to cry either. That was for cowards.

But what she read in Ewen McDunnagh’s eyes, as she tried to squirm away, was a cruelty, so deliberate, it undercut even that.

* * *

How long Callm stood amid the broken crockery, bolstering his belief in the absolute correctness of his actions, seemed an eternity to him.

She was a scheming, traitorous creature, who’d come perilously close to destroying his people. She wouldn’t talk. In every respect she’d used him. From seducing him to going through with that farce of a hand-fasting.

Of course, he freely admitted, passing a hand over his face, there was a bit of him that wasn’t sure of it at the time. Hadn’t wanted to have to do it. Was it any damned wonder when he barely knew her though?

Of course, she was a very pretty scheming, traitorous bitch. No doubt about it. Pretty damned good in bed too. But he’d proved pretty, as well as pretty damned good, meant nothing when he handed her along that corridor, so it was vital he didn’t undercut himself here. Didn’t feel this trembling in his veins about it.

Naturally he knew Ewen would know better than touch her. Wee Murdie was under strict instructions to wait outside to be damn well sure he didn’t. And Wee Murdie was someone Callm trusted with his life, however much they sometimes disagreed. And not just that. Ewen knew better than go near any woman Callm had warned him off.

Callm just couldn’t have her undermining him further, throwing bits of himself in his face. He had a clan to protect. His boots scrunched on a sliver of glass. One of his mother’s wedding pieces, he noticed. Irrevocably shattered now. And something deep in his gut twisted.

Who the hell was he kidding?

She almost stilled his heart, what she did to him. He just hadn’t, couldn’t let go. The fear he could fall again. Couldn’t be hurt. Couldn’t lose.
Not even when he saw, clearer than he saw anything tonight, the way she fought, the courage he so admired, she was all the way through his defenses.

And if there was something he missed here, it was because he was too frightened inside himself, after Morven, and the way he’d cracked—a man like him—to let himself see it.
She
terrified him that way.

Be hurt again? He swallowed the knot in his throat. Didn’t it hurt to think of life in a world she didn’t occupy the space next to him in? When he didn’t breathe her. Inhale her. Love her. As he hadn’t truly let himself the day he married her.

Was he going to lose this woman because he was afraid to feel again? When he’d known damn fine when he saw her in the yard, shivering and vulnerable, conniving too, he’d have died for her in that instant.

The thought was swiftly overtaken by another. More potent. More alarming. Stunning enough to make his feet recognize what his mind lagged behind.

Maybe she hadn’t touched on anything at all. She had been there before. And to let her out of his sight with Ewen for five seconds was five seconds too long.

* * *

“Son of a whore.”

“Callm!” Ewen may have been traumatized by his abrupt collision with the candelabra, but it didn’t stop the roar as he picked himself out the shattered remnants. “What the—”

“Princess. Jesus! Are you all right?”

Kara clamped her lips shut. Her inclination to say anything was tempered by a chair splintering inches from her head.

“And what if Ah tell ye she’s not? Eh?”

“Princess. No, no, listen…listen…”

Already she strove not to gulp as she cowered behind her arms. If Ewen McDunnagh wasn’t going down without a fight, then she could, she must get out of here. So the Wolf reaching for her, his fingers clasping the sides of her face…

“Jesus Christ, don’t ye need to make your mind up? First she’s mah bride. Then she’s yours. Then ye want me to have her. Then ye dinnae.”

She smothered another shriek. Dear God, if Ewen survived being smashed backward into the wall, so the flagpole fell down on his head, it would be a miracle. She scrambled onto her knees.

And yet while she was not fool enough to believe this show was staged, she must now admit—damn the Wolf to hell in a handcart and back again—these two men, and the reason she couldn’t let one touch her, well, she needed to stop that, didn’t she? Thinking her body was so calcified it didn’t matter whether men touched her or not. Her stomach clenched. She needed to stop lying too.

It didn’t matter that it was hardly likely, given the nature of the blows being lavished on Ewen’s face, he would win this. Or that it would consequently make things worse for her if he did. It was just she couldn’t keep quiet in that instant. She needed to be honest for once.

“Stop it! For God’s sake.” Although getting between them was impossible, there was still something she must say. Something that was the truth. “He never touched me.”

“He never? Never touched you?”

“Stay out of this.” The look Ewen sent her was one of pure fury. “Ah dinnae need you fighting mah battles, madam. Christ, Callm. Will ye just—just—let go?”

The Wolf did, sending him clattering into the table. He rounded on her. She had never before seen such a look of bemusement, of fury and fear, in the eyes of any man.

“What the hell was he doing with you then?”

Doing? Not when she felt the breath tear like this, when she was too busy scrabbling for her icy self-control should he now dare knit his brows. Or glare in that icy way. That way she could not tear her eyes from, blood on his cheek, running down his neck, could she say Ewen was helping her up.

And how could the Wolf expect her to master what raged through her in that second, the tidal wave of fury. As if it was her fault he had completely lost control. As if, now she advanced, the words bursting from her about Ewen only helping her up after she fell
because of him
landing like rain on his chest, along with her fists, because she couldn’t master anything.

What cracked, what broke inside her in that second was beyond it.

He dragged her from the hall, along the corridor, and back to the porcelain-strewn chamber, every place he retreated to in front of his men. Except then he stopped. He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her against him so tight she could feel his heart beating through his ribs.