Chapter Thirteen #3
Fury and indignation carried her straight through whatever caution ought perhaps to have taken hold. She shoved him again instead, both palms striking hard against his chest while Charlie barked and jumped furiously at her side and the soldier staggered another step backward into the clearing.
“You have no right to trespass!” she screamed at him, rising on her toes, getting up in his face, her pointing finger an inch from his chin. She didn’t care that tears spilled or that her voice cracked. “That’s my house!” She poked her finger into his chest. “That’s my stuff!”
In the midst of her outrage, she hadn’t paid enough attention to his growing anger and so was mightily surprised when he lifted his hand as if he would hit her.
Avery snarled at him, almost daring him, at the same time a roar erupted behind her. Several actually. She recognized Alasdair and Finlay’s voices among them, shouting a warning to the man.
But those were only shouts. The roar belonged to some primal animal, the sound so deafening it widened Avery’s eyes and spun her around, half expecting a new threat. Even Charlie’s barking cut off mid-frenzy as every living soul within earshot seemed to go still at once.
And then Morggán rode into the clearing on a huge black beast.
Avery had never seen him look as he did now before this moment.
Rage transformed him so completely that for one disorienting instant he did not at all resemble the man who had laid his hands over hers the night before asking softly whether she had grown weary of being alone.
His face was as hard as carved stone, every trace of warmth obliterated beneath a fury so absolute that men stepped instinctively from the path of his horse before he even reached them.
The atmosphere of the clearing itself seemed to shift around him as he thundered forward, soldiers falling silent and motionless in his wake while his gaze fixed wholly and violently upon the red-haired soldier standing beside Avery.
Tormod and Donnchadh and several other returning soldiers rode hard behind him, weaving through the camp nearly as fast, though neither carried the terrifying singular focus that Morggán did.
Morggán swung down from the saddle in one fluid movement before the horse had fully stopped.
He covered the distance between himself and the soldier in less than five furious strides, without so much as a glance toward Avery.
The red-haired soldier had frozen outright now, all color drained from his face. He was still in the process of lowering his raised hand—with excruciating slowness, as though the motion itself might somehow go unnoticed if he managed it carefully enough.
Morggán crashed into him before the man could speak a single word.
His fist tangled violently into the soldier’s shirtfront while sheer force drove the younger man stumbling backward several steps across the clearing.
“Ye dare raise yer hand to her?”
The young man—named Kerr, Avery had enough wherewithal to understand, having heard his name shouted and roared so vehemently—blanched even further. His lips moved but no sound came forth. He blinked rapidly.
“I ought to kill ye for this,” Morggán seethed.
“Look at me when I speak to ye!” he shouted then, when Kerr lowered his gaze against the fury of Morggán’s.
“Explain to me what possessed ye.” Still holding him by his shirt and collar, he shook him violently.
“Say one thing. One thing that keeps me from spilling yer bluid into the dirt.”
“Aye, there will be bluid,” Tormod said, coming to Morggán’s side, somehow managing to squeeze himself between the laird and the soldier. “But nae here, nae now—nae in front of the lass.”
Tormod was forced to give a swift elbow to Morggán’s forearm, to get him to release the guy. He grunted and grimaced as he did so, and then, when Morggán’s grip had been released, he pushed Kerr backwards still, away from Morggán, using his free hand to summon someone, fingers beckoning.
“Bind him to the ash tree,” he said to a serious Alasdair, who arrived to collect the white-faced soldier. “Strip his weapons. He’ll sit under guard till I decide what’s to be done with him. I ken he’ll beg the lass’s pardon afore sunset.”
Morggán now, finally, turned to Avery.
Her chest still heaved from outrage and shock alike, and tears were wet upon her face. But Christ, he still looked furious. The expression upon his face had not softened at all. His mouth remained hard, one corner still faintly curled with restrained wrath, his gray eyes bright with it.
Yet when he reached for her, his touch could not have contrasted more sharply.
He closed the distance between them, taking her hand without hesitation, his grip firm but careful, and simply turned with it, drawing her with him as he strode away from the gathering soldiers and toward the front of the house.
The movement happened so naturally and with such quiet certainty that Avery followed without question.
Fury still lived within him, Avery realized.
It was there in the rigid set of his shoulders and the dangerous tension remaining in the hand that held hers.
And yet his fingers were warm and astonishingly gentle around her own, as though despite all that rage he remained acutely aware that it was her hand he held.