Chapter Twenty
WE HAD WALKED some distance around the side of a small cliff, and were now out of sight from the fields and the manor, alone.
Kade set me down on my feet. He grabbed my arm and pulled me roughly alongside him.
His grip was not at all gentle, and he clearly didn’t care if he was hurting me.
In fact, the dull pain as he dragged me into a secluded recess of rock had a very different effect on me than I might have expected.
I did not shrug off his punishing grip, nor did I protest the stunning strength of his attack.
My body was responding to him, as it always did, rising to his demands, opening to him, readying me for his onslaught.
I felt brimming and supple, inexplicably.
I could taste an otherworldly, unruly anticipation.
He pinned me against the hard rock wall, holding his sword to my neck.
I went still, staring directly into his cold, vivid eyes.
One of his eyes had a dark ring of a bruise around it and there was a cut along his cheekbone.
His hair was a wild mane, matted with dirt and blood.
He looked wilder and more enraged than I had ever seen him.
This was how he must have appeared to his victims on the battlefield.
Here was the ruthless warrior I had once feared beyond reason.
Here was the beastly assailant who would take of me what he wanted without restraint or remorse.
Or he would kill me. I knew it was a very real possibility.
He had been tested beyond his limits, and I was the cause of it.
And, while I knew his ferocity was capable of melting without warning into something akin to devotion—I’d experienced it firsthand, after all—I knew his state of mind now was as far removed from benevolence as it was possible to be.
“‘My husband is a brute and savage,’” he spat, repeating the words I had spoken.
“I’ll show you savage, wife. ’Tis who I am after all.
You said it yourself.” Kade’s hands held the fastenings of my cape, his teeth bared; then he ripped the garment open, sending several bone buttons flying.
My dress underneath had already been ripped, hours ago, and gaped open with his violence.
My breasts were barely covered, and my nipples drew instantly tight at the rush of cold air and the feel of his stunningly hard body shoved up against mine.
I didn’t care.
I didn’t care that he might beat me and hurt me.
He was considering it: I could read it in the shattered light of his eyes.
The blade of his sword traced a line—very, very lightly—down one side of my throat, along thin, vulnerable skin.
The slightest pressure would cut into my vein as he drew, if he chose to do it. I knew how sharp his weapons were kept.
“I love you,” I said.
Deep within him, there was a buried, almost-undetectable recoil.
He had not been expecting this. His breath quickened, but he did not release his hold on me or remove his knife.
He continued to quote my betrayal back to me, word for word.
“‘’Tis well known this was an arranged marriage I wanted nothing to do with. Even Aleck knows it to be true.’”
“It was the only way I could keep you alive.” My throat was parched. My voice was little more than a rasped whisper. I reached to touch my palm to his face but he flinched away from my touch angrily.
“You should have let me die,” he seethed. “It would be a better fate than this.”
“What this? We’re here. We’re alive. We’re together.”
“It matters not,” he said with quiet fury, watching the trail of his blade’s edge with some concentration.
“I want you, husband,” I whispered. “Take me now. Take me before you kill me. Please.”
“Do you not have a new husband? Have you not already been taken, as you wanted?” Somewhere beneath the rage of him, there was a gritty, graveled sorrow to his words that caused a hollow ache in my chest and a stinging burn behind my eyes.
“He is not and never will be my husband,” I said. “He’s dead.” This did cause my eyes to fill, at the memory of what had almost happened, at the brutality and the horrific violence.
Still Kade’s sword traced its thin line. He seemed so distracted by what he was doing that my statement barely registered. He didn’t believe me. “Is that so?” he asked with an air of disengagement.
“Up and in,” I breathed. “Twist and slice. It was easier than you said it would be. But there was much more blood than I ever could have imagined.”
He paused, his regard walking up my face until he met my eyes. “What?”
“And then I slit his throat. Just in time.”
His stillness unnerved me. His furious, caustic glare was not at all what I was hoping for. “Just in time?” he finally said.
I was losing some kind of edge. I was unraveling, for a thousand different reasons.
“Aye, husband. Just in time. Just after I pretended to hate you so that Campbell would allow you to live. Just before Aleck almost claimed me as his own, very nearly violating everything about me, breaking me and destroying us, just before I slit his throat with your knife and watched as the light left his eyes and his blood spilled all over me in a sticky, horrible flood! All right? Could I spell it out any clearer for you?”
Kade’s eyes narrowed and he gave me a look of cool disbelief.
And it infuriated me down to the depths of my being that he could dismiss my loyalty to him so easily, even if I’d been convincing in the moment.
Did he know nothing of me? Did nothing we’d shared in the past month and the distance we’d come even matter?
Maybe it didn’t. Maybe our connection had been only a purely physical, passing wave of lust—nothing more substantial, nothing more meaningful.
Maybe the risks that I had taken and the lives I’d cut short to defend his own proved nothing to him, nothing at all.
“You...intended to kill him?” he said. “All along?”
The effects of this day had, at last, overwhelmed me.
I was crying and seething all at once. “Of course I did, you daft fool! Is it really that easy for you to doubt me? Have I not shown you and told you and begged you to take me and possess me in every way because I desire you with my whole heart? And as for my body, I can hardly control the effect you have on me without even the slightest touch of your hell-raiser hand! Why, even now—” Here, I faltered, breathing heavily.
I could not begin to tell him that even his threats and the sliding glide of his sword were not only causing my heart to break but also inspiring the most delicious, wicked necessity in my warming, secreted places that was so intense I thought the hidden sensation might very well drive me mad.
His sword just barely disengaged. Vexingly, I missed its promise. I wanted to feel the contact—any contact—with him and his wrath, his pain, his love.
“Go ahead,” I said to him. “Kill me if that’s your plan. Here.” I lifted my chin, giving him a clean, exposed target. “Do it and get it over with. I’ve had enough of this, of you, of all of it!”
He seemed to be having difficulty grasping the meaning of my confession. “You mean your betrayal was all a...a ruse?”
“Are you an idiot as well as a brute?” I yelled.
“Aye! I wasn’t about to stand there and watch them carve your heart out with their razor-sharp meat cleavers!
I knew they would allow you to live if they believed that I held no feelings for you, and that you were of value to them.
I didn’t think it would be so easy to fool you, however.
Did I not just risk death—and worse, several times over—to free you?
I love you, with everything I have! I dream of you and crave you and want you close to me and in my bed, always.
And most of all I want you to keep your word to me—the one I asked you to keep, the one you’d promised you’d keep—and make love to me and seal this marriage once and for all, you... you big man!”
There was no humor in Kade this time as I blurted out the inane accusation. His emotion in his eyes was fiery and wrought. The blade at my throat was withdrawn, and I heard the heavy thud as it was dropped to the ground.
He kissed me.
I was so strung with the conflicting turmoil of my ordeal and my passion, I almost tried to push him away.
His mouth caught at mine, opening me to his avid invasion.
He kissed me as if he had already taken possession of me, as though he were already inside me.
I could taste his hunger. This kiss was full of him, and full of all the promise of what he was about to do.
His tongue drove deeper, articulate and unrelenting.
And the more passionate his kiss became, the more I wanted of him.
I felt his sweet, loaded aggression to my very core.
Every lick and every drive sent a clenching awareness to my tender depths.
He was going to ravage me, and I wanted all of it, every ounce of his force and his ruthlessness.
In an incongruously gentle gesture, his fingers stroked back my hair.
In his touch I could feel a light tremor, the hum and near restraint of his incredible power and his intense desire.