Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
When the blackness finally peeled away, Selene woke to the glow of a fire.
It was not gentle warmth, but fierce heat around her, beneath her, above her, bringing life back to her almost frozen form. A deep, rhythmic rocking travelled through her body, as though she were being carried upon some steady current.
She blinked, making out very little through her hazy vision. Overhead, wooden beams flickered in and out of focus. The low groan of a hull shifting in the storm reached her ears. She was no longer in the water. She was on another ship, no longer on the birlinn that had been her refuge.
She was somewhere else.
Someone murmured nearby. A calm, deep voice she remembered – low and steady but, unmistakably in command.
Kenneth MacDonald.
Her awareness wavered again, drawing her between layers of sensation: the weight of a heavy woolen blanket tucked around her, the faint taste of salt on her lips, the distant echo of men shouting orders outside.
But above all, she felt hands – large, calloused – adjusting the blanket around her with surprising care.
She dimly remembered his voice, taut with an urgency she had never heard in a man’s tone before. “Strip the wet off her,” he’d growled, “she’ll freeze else.”
Now, the evidence clung to her. Her gown and skirts were gone, replaced only by the thin linen of her shift beneath the blanket. Heat flooded her cheeks at the realization, but she was too weak to lift her head, too heavy-limbed to protest.
“Callum,” Kenneth said quietly, but his voice carried the iron weight of a command. “Make certain the men stay away from this cabin.”
“Aye.” Callum’s voice, lower and rougher, in response. The sound of boots thudded on the planks outside. “They’ll nae come near.”
“Good. The lass needs quiet.”
“But Kenneth—” Callum’s voice again.
“What now?”
“D’you truly think it was Aidan? This reeks of his daeing.”
A long silence followed. Selene’s senses drifted, but even in her half-dreaming state she felt the shift in the air – something dark and heavy, that brought the past into the present.
“Aidan’s behind everything,” Kenneth said at last. “He’ll never rest. Nae after what happened three years ago.”
The weight of those words lingered like the storm clouds outside, thick and brewing with the threat of something far greater. But before she could fathom their meaning, the world tilted again and she vanished again into darkness.
She woke abruptly to motion.
A rhythmic sway – gentler than the violent rocking of the ship, but firm enough to jostle her senses. Her cheek rested against something solid.
She inhaled sharply, her nostrils filling with new scents: grass, leather, and a familiar smell, warm and alive.
She was on a horse.
Not astride properly, but seated between a pair of strong thighs, her back pressed flush against a broad chest. A strong arm lay firmly across her stomach, anchoring her in place with absolute, effortless control.
She gasped and jerked upright – or attempted to. Leather tightened across her wrists. Her arms were secured in front of her with a short tether, preventing sudden movement.
“What in the name of all the saints in heaven—?”
The man behind her did not flinch. Not so much as a tiny shift of muscle.
“You’ll fall if ye dae that.” His voice rumbled through his chest, deep enough that she felt it against her spine before she even processed the words. “Sit still.”
Selene twisted as far as the tether allowed, and there he was – Kenneth MacDonald.
For the first time she saw him clearly. And dammit.
He was far too handsome, with that straight imperious nose and those cheekbones as sharp as blades.
He was looking down at her with blue-grey eyes and a most infuriatingly calm expression.
It was, for all the world, as if riding across a storm-soaked stretch of Highland terrain with a half-conscious Englishwoman bound to him was a perfectly ordinary occurrence.
And, dear God, perhaps it was.
“Untie me at once,” she snapped, heat flaring with rage.
Then as she realized she was in nothing but her shift beneath the heavy plaid he had wrapped around her the heat rushed to her cheeks.
She tugged futilely at the wool, unable to reach the leather straps around her wrists.
“How dare you bind me like this. Put me down. Now!”
Kenneth raised a thick, dark eyebrow. “On yer feet? In this mud? Bare as ye are beneath that blanket?” His mouth curved slightly yet his eyes were steely, with no hint of amusement. “Nay, lass. Ye’re me prisoner until I learn more about you and satisfy myself that ye’re nae a spy.”
“No?” she repeated, disbelief breaking through her shock. “You cannot simply—”
“I can,” he said, utterly unbothered by her fury. “And I am.”
She struggled to pull away from him again, only to collide with his unyielding chest. He did not shift. Not an inch. She might as well have tried to dislodge a mountainside.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she muttered, wriggling to gain space between them. “Must you sit so… so damned casually?”
“I’m sitting as I always dae.” He adjusted the reins with a fluid roll of his shoulders that brought her even closer. “It’s you that’s flailing about like a hen who’s lost her head.”
Her indignation burned hotter than the embarrassment prickling her skin. She tried to lean forward, away from him, but the horse jolted suddenly, and she nearly pitched sideways.
Kenneth tightened his hold at once, his forearm banding across her middle, drawing her securely back against him.
“Ye see?” His breath brushed her ear. “Ye’d be on the ground if I let ye go.”
“That is not…this is not…” Words tangled hopelessly on her tongue, partly from indignation, partly from the awareness of his hard body pressed along the length of hers. No man had ever held her so closely.
Her breath hitched in her throat.
“Ye ken the name I am called,” he said simply. Not boastful. Not ashamed. Simply stating a truth.
“I believe many in Scotland know you as the Brute of Sleat,” she replied, lifting her chin. “Mayhap even some in England. You’re feared.”
“Is that so?” he murmured, unreadable.
“Yes,” Her voice trembled with cold and something else she could not name. Not fear. Excitement? Anticipation? “And now I… I… find myself tied to you, wearing scarcely more than my shift, on a horse, in the middle of nowhere.”
“Ye forgot soaking wet and half frozen,” he added. “That’s an important part of the story.”
She glared at him. But save for a tiny flicker at the corner of his wide mouth – which could have been amusement – there was no response. He was impervious to her ire.
He faced forward, guiding the horse with the ease of a man born to command beast and land alike. The plaid around her tightened slightly as he adjusted it, protecting her from the icy wind.
“We ride fer Duntulm.” He urged the horse forward and their pace increased. “Once there, ye and I will speak together and ye will tell me exactly who ye are, where ye’ve come from, and just what business ye had on a ship with no colors sailing in me waters.”
Selene swallowed hard, raising her tethered hands to clutch her mother’s necklace at her throat. By some miracle it had survived her near murder and near drowning and was still in its place. A comfort, always.
But nothing could still her awareness of the steadiness, the strength, the unsettling calm of the powerful man holding her. And nothing could still the undeniable crackle of tension that flickered between them like the remnants of lightning after a storm.
Indeed. He was her enemy.
They were enemies who had been pressed entirely too close together.
And, despite every grain of commonsense in Selene’s body telling her to beware, she was forced to acknowledge that between them was the faintest spark of something else. Something she’d never felt before, something she did not understand.