His Judas Bride (15 page)

“Breakfast?”

Why did his eyes widen as if he thought her incapable of such a domestic chore?

“A glen princess who cooks?”

No. Not exactly. She had never cooked a meal in her life. But he couldn’t know that so she was going to give it a try. Ma had once said that was the way to a man’s heart. Not that she wanted particularly to find her way to the Wolf’s heart. But she was keen for him not to find his way between her legs. So she thought the saying could be reworked.

“Yes. Edinburgh was not all about balls and parties and learning French. It was my noble father’s idea that I should be an ideal chieftain’s wife in all regards. Dutiful—”

“Some men prefer beautiful.”

Her palms sweated. Perhaps some men did? But that wasn’t her, so she wished he would not say it.

“Obedient and capable of running a household
and
making a meal that would please and honor her chieftain man—”

What a pity her attempt to be obedient and capable was marred by her lack of knowledge about what was in fact a cooking utensil and what was for poking the fire with. Or maybe they all were. Maybe he didn’t have any cooking utensils. Maybe the deal he’d done with the devil involved him not doing any cooking.

Yes, that was it. So now, not only was she going to look even stupider, she couldn’t even wipe her perspiring palms down the pelt, unless she wanted it to fly open.

Nonetheless she stepped forward, her progress instantly arrested by the sharp crack her ankle gave. It was the last thing she needed, to be propelled onto the shingle. Or maybe the last thing was him, naked, catching her.

“Please, sir, I must insist.”

“If that’s the way you walk, we’ll be starved by the time you make breakfast. Why don’t you hang on?”

She swallowed. Beneath her show of indifference, her heart kicked into a pounding gallop. Hang on? Not when Arland was still out there. Not when her father’s plans for Lochalpin didn’t include this man, could she do that.

“What on earth for? Do you lift every woman about when she fixes breakfast?”

“Not really. There’s other things I much prefer a woman to do.”

He did too. If last night was anything to go by.

“Seriously, if you’re not about the most stubborn chit I’ve ever come across, you’re certainly a close second. Now hang on.”

She considered refusing but she’d seduced him, hadn’t she? Touched his manhood, so now he obviously took it for granted his neck would hardly be a problem. And under other circumstances she admitted it wouldn’t be. It was just these ones, in here, that made unease flicker.

Taking a careful breath, she slipped an arm around his neck. “There. All right?”

It wasn’t, she saw with a horrible start, as he swung her up against him and held her there against the hard wall of his chest, and not just because that shore she so needed to remain a stranger to, swung into view. That he stirred arousal was bad enough. The door of that room, the room she felt she could only ever stare through clouded glass at, seemed to loom before her.

Ridiculous. All he did was lift her. But his naked proximity sucked all the air from her. Men didn’t pick her up like this. If she landed back in his bed now, she’d plead her ankle. Maybe even her head as well? She could do that, couldn’t she? Versus her son, her freedom, versus everything that had been done to her, this man was no opponent. So why did feelings she could not quite quantify flicker all along her veins? Ones that were not just disturbing, but more than.

“Me?” She cleared her throat. Vital when his lips were close as this. “So, who was the first? Lady Morven?” Of course there were ways to deal with it. Morven would always be first with him, and were he to know Kara’s real truth, he’d think himself better off carrying a leper.

“Morven? No. Morven wasn’t a pretty clan princess like you. She was a glen woman, plain and simple.”

Well, didn’t this just get better by the minute? Not just the disconcertingly glazed way his gaze flicked over her face, as if he really did think she was pretty—what was going on here? A glen woman? Kara’s heart lurched so her breath tightened in her chest. And Lachlan had been a clan slave. A man who thought his second name was McLaughlin but couldn’t swear to it.

“So why—”

She bit her lip. Already, when his answer was likely to undermine her further, when she felt not just completely at his mercy in his arms like this, but as if she were being, not just carried, but carried from her dreams, why add to it by asking stupid questions? Even if that question might simply enrage him?

As last night had shown, the answer to that was plain. Not only had she seduced him, he’d seduced her. Put simply the man was a randy dog. Not the least bit put out by the potentially disastrous situation he’d woken up to this morning either—a clan princess in his bed, his brother’s affianced bride.

On the contrary his glittering sea-green eyes held that caressing measure of heat that had taken her straight to hell last night. Morven had probably gotten pregnant and was wonderful in bed, so he married her. Need Kara count all the things she herself wasn’t? Yet, having opened her mouth she knew she must say something.

“I mean, wasn’t your father furious that you chose a glen woman?”

“It certainly didn’t win me any prizes in the favorite son contest. Not at the time. But he came around eventually.”

He adjusted his grip but not before the thought flickered in her mind that he must have loved her, as she had Lachlan, to have sacrificed so much.

“Anyway, how about I take a look at that foot? Then, why don’t I make us some breakfast?”

Kara’s jaw almost fell open
.
Make breakfast? Him? The terror of two glens? She wanted to see it, didn’t she? But any more of this charming domesticity, this twanging of heartstrings she didn’t possess, and she’d need to gouge her eyes out, considering what she was seeing instead.

Still, breakfast—breakfast sounded good. She needed him to put her down.

“How lovely. If you…” Was it too obvious if she insisted he put her on that ramshackle wooden chair there though?

“There.”

Too late. He set her down, just where she didn’t want to go. On the bed. And as if she were a piece of porcelain that might shatter too, although when she considered it, she felt like it to some extent, with the tiny fissures that crept like lace vines on her armor.

“Breeches first though.”

Thank God for that. Even if they sat so far down his hips, it wasn’t worth his trouble. Wondering how he rode about the glen, doing the things he did, with them like that, was not the thing to do here, when the necessity of reconstructing this, reconstructing herself, was paramount. Nor, when what had somehow began with him carrying her, maybe even before that, should she let her gaze be drawn by the baggy seating, to consider, for all the abundant muscles, his body was lean.

The door handle to that room was one she could not grasp, for all it was there before her. That this man gave all kinds of damns for everyone but himself was something she could not afford to see. Her throat dried.

“So who’s the first?” Somehow she made herself speak.

“I’m sorry?”

“The most stubborn woman you’ve ever known?”

He gritted his teeth on the hem of the tunic he picked off the bed. “Fallon.” He tore off a strip.

“Fallon?”

“That wee lass you somehow thought I’d committed incest to acquire.”

Kara swallowed to mask her discomfort.
Fallon.
Grandchild of the ruler
.
Legitimate
grandchild of the then ruler.
Exactly what he’d name his child if he had one. She wished he’d stop this. For a man so masculine, he did seem to be surrounded by such a strong female presence. Even the dog, with its three and a bit legs. And he seemed so at home with them too.

“You seem surprised.”

She was but not as he thought. “I just thought she looked small to be…well…”

He eased down beside her. He was so relaxed the way he did it. In spite of all her efforts not to, for the second time she was struck by his total acceptance of the situation. Of her. Yet he must know, if she was a chief’s daughter, not some piece of glen skirt, what he now faced. Could he have enjoyed it that much, being with her last night? Or was it an act? Last night she’d thought he’d been playing, to start with anyway.

“She is. You try being left with a three-week-old baby and none of the right equipment.”

Three weeks? Her breath caught so, she could barely sit there. She’d no idea. None. And her father had ordered that? For her?

“It’s not easy.” He drew down his brows in that way where she couldn’t quite see his eyes. “I know you probably thought that knife business was strange. I just want her to be able to look after herself.”

Almost Kara couldn’t breathe for what clogged the very back of her throat, the lump that rose from her ribcage and sat there like a fist.

Pity, weaker than compassion, meant nothing. She could somehow push them to the darker reaches of her soul. Admiration, on the other hand, was harder to dismiss. If only her father had taught her that. To look after herself, because of men and the things they did. Instead of which he had fed her to them.

“I shouldn’t say it, all right, given those responsible, but Morven being my wife was no guarantee of anything.”

No, it wasn’t, and she was glad when in fact it was because
she
was his wife, he did not look at Kara. His fingers reached beneath her anklebone.

“I’m certain this is just a sprain. You’d not be able to walk on it otherwise. I just need you to hold still while I bind…”

Kara thought she was going to faint.
It.
He was going to say
it.
The word was right there on his tongue. But he didn’t. And she couldn’t. Not to save herself. She had forgotten all about those, the marks he stared at, right there on her ankle, as if his eyes were riveted.

His brows clapped together. “Jesus. What the—” Before she could stop him he grabbed her other ankle. “That’s—that’s—”

She tried wriggling her foot back from his clasp. Their situation of charming domesticity vanished like melting snow off a dyke.

“A-a mess.” Dear God though, if she did not speak, speak calmly, rationally, without passing her tongue over her lips, she was finished. “Yes, I know.” Although how she spoke so calmly, so agreeably when his harsh stare engendered such horror, she had no idea.

“You
know
?”

Of course she knew. She knew he did too.

“A riding accident.” Not even last night had she needed to think so quickly. “Last week.”

This was like asking him to believe she was a ninety-eight-year-old man who could successfully pirouette across the surface of Loch Alpin. On two broken legs. When it wasn’t frozen. What else could she say though?

What they had shared last night would not outweigh the fact he was the Black Wolf of Lochalpin and these were manacle marks on her ankles.

He tilted his jaw. “A riding accident?”

She would actually have preferred it if his brows had sunk instead of rising at the effrontery of her quick thoughts. It took every shred of her self-control not to falter.

“Yes. My new mare. It dragged me along the ground.”

Yet why should she falter? She’d seduced him, hadn’t she? It would be for nothing if she now let these ghosts of her screaming past condemn her, if she couldn’t now get her way out of this somehow. Surely he wasn’t going to come right out and accuse a woman he’d slept with, not once, but three times, of lying?

“Well.” He stared for what seemed an eternity. Then he raised his chin. “Then maybe you won’t mind telling me, being how it is that stories of Lady Kara McGurkie’s horsewomanship are so legendary they keep all us poor people here entertained on cold winter evenings, just how exactly it managed to drag you along the ground? So many times too? The truth, Princess. Who did this to you?”

Oh, he was going to accuse her, wasn’t he? Damn him. And damn her father for spreading those lies, so now she’d have to tell more. Ones, that under other circumstances, she would have refrained from. Ones, that realizing he wasn’t just angry at her, it cost her to tell.

“Did this to me? I’m sorry? If I could remember the exact details, I would. But I was busily trying to prevent my skull from fracturing at the time.” Lies she had to tell coolly too, but it would not do to stammer. Not if she wished to keep her throat intact. “Your winter evenings must be terrible though, if that is all your people have to entertain them.”

“Oh, we have ways of relieving them.”

They did. She could tell by the heavy way he breathed and what they were too. And it wasn’t the ways last night had been relieved with him either. Her stomach clenched, terror raking her scalp.

“Really?” She quelled the unexpected desire to throw herself at his feet and beg for mercy. What good had such a thing ever done her after all? “And do they involve the sort of thing we did last night?”

He slammed down his brows. “Well, maybe they damn well might, if you didn’t have marks older than Methuselah there you weren’t so damned determined to lie about.”

“Oh, how convenient that is what you now want to believe, now you have taken my virginity. Used me. In the most brutal way a man can do a woman of my standing.”

“Me? Use you?”

“Yes. Yes, you have actually. I can’t think what other word there is for it.”

“That’s rich coming from someone who hauled my tunic off last night. Do you think I don’t know what these marks are? How they came to be made? So now, it’s not just you’re telling me a pack of damned lies, it’s why you feel the need.”

Cry. If only she could cry. But her tears were as nonexistent as her smiles. And she suspected he already saw through those. She did not wish to make things worse. To think if she had stayed in bed none of this would have happened.

Bed? It was an idea of course.

“I don’t know what you mean when I have no need to do anything. Only that now you don’t want me. And my father will be cross. He will shout and bawl.”

“Isn’t that a wind change for a man who told you to follow your heart?”