His Judas Bride (21 page)

“Where you’re concerned, who knows? But I think ye might say, I’ve been waiting for this moment.”

“How charming of you.” She clasped the arm now encircling her neck with both hands, eased her chin up a notch. “Next you’ll be telling me how much you missed me.”

“Oh, there’s a lot of people missing you. I’m just one of them. Now let’s go.”

What?
She did not expect to be shaken free like this. Not by this ruthless bastard. She had expected him to play with her a little more.

But then of course, she did have secrets to spill. Lots of them. And she’d no doubt he thought she was going to spill them too.

“So?” She took care as she regained her balance neither to wince nor gasp, despite what shot through her ankle. It wouldn’t do to let him see any weakness in her. “I’m all ears. How did you manage to find me, Kendrick?”

* * *

Callm tossed the finger of whiskey he’d taken to warm himself down his throat and strode past Wee Murdie into the bleak midmorning light. The amber liquid had done nothing to warm the terrifying chill inside him. Even as his lips parted, the black cloud of fury clung so tightly to his whole body, he couldn’t even bring himself to thank Duncan, the clan blacksmith, for sparing him the warming drop.

He stared across the ghostly expanse of what was otherwise a favorite view, even on a day like this when the colors were all one and the silver glitter was the only variation in a gray illuminated by a struggling sun.

No sign? He was in no mood to listen to Wee Murdie’s conformation of the crafty bitch’s continued ability to evade him. The most obvious way to stop her from leaving Lochalpin—and it was written in his blood, he damn well would—was to station men at the top of the pass. He’d done that. Hell. Four days now. He’d done everything.

She had somehow escaped capture. As if she had vanished off the face of the earth into that same ghostly landscape. As if she’d never been on the earth in the first place and he’d dreamed her.

How the hell could that be? He was master of this glen. And there wasn’t a nook, a cranny, a fallen twig, the underside of a boulder, or upturned tree trunk, he didn’t know about. So how? How could she possibly evade him? A fine Edinburgh educated trollop like her.

He didn’t even understand how the treacherous bitch had managed to escape the cave under his men’s noses. The place was a fortress. As for Dug—he saved his best glower for the stupid bitch keening at his boot heels in the bitter cold, the cur would know the depth of her disgrace—Dug hadn’t picked up so much as a sniff of her scent.

What the hell was she exactly?

Whatever she was, she’d humiliated him, in every respect. And she could rest assured that when he found her, he’d repay the compliment. Tenfold. That much he did know.

“Are the men quite sure?” He unhitched Satan from the post. “The last time now, it seemed she paraded out from under your sorry noses. But hell, maybe she’s some kind of ghost that can disappear into thin air.”

Shame should have nipped his tongue. Wasn’t he the damn fool who had let her in his bed, not Wee Murdie or any of the others? Knowing every word that dripped like nectar from those sinful damned lips of hers was a lie? Arguing with his gut when it told him otherwise? But he was past shame. It was the oldest story in the book. Lust. And he’d been desperate.

“Archibald’s men don’t know the glen like we do, that’s all. It was them I spoke to.”

Callm canted his jaw. “Archibald?”

“He’s just trying to help.”

Of course, but Archibald’s wry comment still rankled.
So, Callm, you were just questioning her were you? That’s a queer kind of questioning that involves fetching Father Andrew to marry you both.

He spat on the ground. The whiskey—the first thing he’d put in his gut in eight hours of straight riding—was already disagreeing with it. He felt taut, jarred, sick. But still able to maintain the calculating, moody front behind which he took his own silver hip flask—his father’s actually—from inside his tunic.

“Fine.” He spun the top loose with his thumb. “If he’s out there on his big white charger we’ve nothing to worry about then, have we?”

He took a sip. He wanted no reminders of how he’d had to face his men with the shameful knowledge burning in his breast that he’d bedded a damned traitor for the best part of four days. They’d not laughed. They were his men after all. But their pity… Never in his life had he wanted anyone to feel sorry for him.

“Callm, I’m just saying—”

“Well, don’t say. Let’s just get out of here. This ground’s not exactly going to cover itself.”

“Could I have a mouthful is what I was saying.”

Callm handed him the flask. He hitched himself up into the saddle. They were all of them, man, woman, and child, lucky to be alive.

So would she be, when he found her.

“Have ye not considered the possibility that just maybe she might not have survived out here in the open? I mean, how likely is it? And if she froze or fell into a gully, it would explain the lack of—” Wee Murdie’s confidence wilted. He averted his gaze from Callm’s freezing stare.

“Do you think I’ve spent the last forty-eight hours straight turning this place upside down in the hope of finding a corpse? The time before that either?”

“Some of the men do. They think we’re wasting our time.”

While he felt like it, he refused to fist the reins. “That’s their prerogative. But it’s not mine. The damned bitch has questions to answer. So she better not be dead. She can save that for when we’ve done.”

That was the reason he refused to picture her lying cold in some gully. Why he’d not slept for four days. Right?

“You see, I just know she’s here, because I know there’s no damned where else for her to be. I know her.”

If only.

“The day’s young. We take a party and fan out from the pass. We knock on doors. We ask. See if she’s not holed up somewhere. She’s not left this glen. Now, let’s go.”

He dug his heels into Satan’s flanks, his gaze filtering every sweep of valley land beneath the old road. Abruptly he yanked the reins, ignoring Satan’s snort of protest.

“What? What is it, Callm?”

“Nothing.”

He thrust the thought away. Christ, but the bitch had worked her way under his skin so that he spied her everywhere. In the trees. In the very snowfall. The frost beneath his nose. But mistaking some skinny, wind-whipped boy for her, simply because deformity made him limp slightly. What kind of bad way was he—
limp?

He narrowed his eyes. No. He was not going to get excited about this. In long years, he’d learned not to be that. Still, the crafty, conniving bitch. Correct him if he was wrong but wasn’t that even a McDunnagh plaid garbing her slanderous form? One of his in all likelihood.
And
pelts from his bed to keep her traitorous limbs from shivering too much in the cold. And him, not even noticing them gone. Because her clothes were gone too and he’d been damn well looking for the bitch in them.

Oh, he could almost envy this damned slut, the audacity of her sheer, bloody brilliance. But his humiliation was known to half the glen. He permitted himself a cold grimace. Easy when for four days his teeth had been clenched together.

“Down there. Look. Outside Daft Maisie’s.”

It was her all right. Maybe he knew damn all else about her, maybe she’d managed to disguise everything else, but the proud tilt of her head was impossible to change.

With a pang he didn’t want to examine, he recalled how well he’d come to know that during the last week. He’d see just how proud she was when he’d finished with her.

“Her.” He did not want to take his eyes off the wily slut for a second. She’d cost him too dearly for that. The damn fool she’d made him look before the whole glen.

“But Callm, they’re—”

“Exactly.” And not alone. He trained his gaze on the man at her side. While he fought it a shadow descended on his heart. So this was what the slut preferred to him? Who she must, in all probability, have been running off to meet when he found her that night up to her eyeballs in snow. Swaggering. Stocky. Middle-aged. Obviously, whatever he thought about it, a man wasn’t just a man.

“He’s no more McDunnagh than she is. Just because you wear a McDunnagh plaid it doesn’t make you a McDunnagh.”

He strove to tell himself it wasn’t so. Of course there was more to this. Much more.

The thought brought him sharply to the conclusion he realized he’d attempted for two sleepless days to avoid.

He could not afford to let her leave this glen alive. Her lover neither. In the two seconds he took to consider his next step, he knew.

He would do this cold.

“Let’s go.” He dug in his spurs.

* * *

Kara sat at the table by the smoking peat fire. Maybe it was a pleasure to find so hospitable a place on so cold a morning, she wouldn’t know. Not when the company rankled.

To think she had edged all the way along that gully, slipping out the way of the Wolf’s patrols, only to be caught by this festering swine.

“What the bloody hell is wrong with you?”

A spittle-spraying swine too. All over her face. Not that she was terribly worried about that now she understood the real reason for catching her.

“That’s a very nice plaid you’re wearing there, Kendrick.” Tilting her chin, she ran her fingertips over it. “Very, very nice actually. McDunnagh, I believe by the looks of it. How old was the boy it belonged to?”

“Belonged to? What the—” A shadow fell across the table. Releasing her wrist, he snapped up his jaw. “Sorry, Mistress Maisie. My nephew, ye understand.”

Nephew? A pity Kara could not drink the steaming posset the old woman set on the table but what this man had imparted made her gorge rise too high for that.

“What the hell is wrong with me?” It was all she could do to lower her voice, the second the woman bustled back across the hearth, to mend the fire. “Let’s just say traveling together like this has thrown us into an intimacy I never expected to share with you. I’m less than enamored of your attempt to worm your way upward in my bastard father’s esteem by killing more innocent boys. Like Lachlan.”

Now, there was a name she never thought she’d say to him. A ghost that clung to his bloodied sword hilt. Yet was it so wise to let what burned in her veins quite this close to the surface?

She could delay thinking it no longer though. The thing was she no longer feared wrath, viciousness, cruelty, whatever hellish torture was inflicted on her. Not really. Not now. What was the point? Even had her father not double-crossed her, she knew that. Indeed his double-crossing had nothing to do with this.

But she did fear to face a five-year-old boy and tell him why they now would not go home together. When she had wanted nothing so much. That much she had already decided. Kertyn and Ardene too.

She had done a terrible thing. How finally and how freely she admitted it. But had she not married the Wolf she would have done a worse thing.

It wasn’t the only reason she knew not to waste her strength.

With the wind howling through the stone cracks, the cobwebs festooning the empty stools, this old woman may have looked the part, but she was no more innkeeper than Kara was glen fiddler or this was an inn, for all a peat fire smoked.

It still would be nothing to Kendrick to cut the woman’s throat.

“Listen, you damned bitch. I’ve been hiding on the edge of this glen, crawling on my belly in the snow for six days now, all to get sight or word of ye. And if ye think I’ve been risking my life here, in Black Wolf territory, for nothing—”

“Aye.” The old woman stopped raking cinders across the hearth. “As I said to ye the other day, sir, just so long as her new ladyship knows how to keep his lordship busy—no’ that his lordship’s ever likely to bother an auld hen like me.”

Kendrick raised his eyes to the ceiling as if for forbearance. “The night would have to be dark for that would it, good Mistress Maisie?”

“It would need to be pitch, sir. Aye.”

Kara leaned closer. “But you’ve not been crawling on your belly in the snow for six days, now have you? As good Mistress Maisie over there just testified. What you’ve been doing is something else all together. A little murder. A little passing yourself off as my savior. A little staying here between times. If you want to talk about crawling on your belly through the snow, about sleeping in the snow, for that matter, let’s talk. I’m more than ha—”

Kendrick snatched her wrist with bruising force, as if he’d like to snap it.

“I just dinnae know though.” Maisie stood up from the hearth. “The Black Wolf’s men have been up and down at all hoors of the day and night. I saw him myself yesterday, and you’d think the de’il himself was on that poor horse’s back, the mood he was in.”

Kara felt her gaze darken. Patrols were not unexpected. Had she not cowered in fear of them several times? But
him
? Yesterday? So close. The thought gave her no comfort. Indeed she fought not to push her fingers under her hood and through her hair.

Lightning seldom struck twice though, because right now, the way her palms prickled, lightning like him? What would that be when she went down to hell willingly? An answer of sorts?

“I told him what he’s needing is a wife. ‘A braw, bonnie man like you,’ said I, ‘With no woman warming your bed at nights. I’d be in a mood myself if I was in your boots.’ Now, if I was just that wee bittie younger.”

Maybe the cackle wasn’t more than Kara could bear, it was still a close second to sitting here feeling her throat tighten.

Kendrick rubbed his chin. “And what did he say, Mistress?”

“He just gave me the look o’ steel, sir. Ye know the one that would freeze hellfire. And has us all trembling in our boots.” Not very afraid was she? Laughing hard as she mimicked her own words.

Which was why it was important Kara did not think, not here, not now, not when Kendrick now sank his nails into her thigh, how well she knew that look.

“When I get you past Black McDunnagh’s men when your father takes you back, when I marry you, as we agreed—”