Chapter Seven
“Stay here,” Blake told the surviving mercenary, ignoring the man’s look of stark relief at the order. Blake tended to have that effect on people.
Still, he had to give the man points for courage, since he glanced at where Blake had deposited a furious Lady Katrina on Cagar’s back before asking, “Are… ye certain, Captain? Ye paid me to aid ye until ye captured the Lennox heir.”
“This is aiding me.” Blake gave him the answer as a reward for his bravery and honor. It was a rare quality among sellswords. “If Lennox thinks I’m vulnerable, he may be careless enough to reveal himself to me.”
The mercenary nodded. “Verra well, Captain. May fortune be with ye.”
And there went all of Blake’s good humor. He didn’t need fortune. Not when he had skill and the ruthlessness to wield it whenever necessary.
He turned his back on the sellsword and mounted behind Katrina, who sniffed pointedly but otherwise ignored him. She had been doing as much ever since he had forced her to trade gowns with the local woman who often traded her favors to the guards in exchange for some extra coin.
Even with Katrina’s gown soaked to the elbow in blood and torn where the blade had stabbed at her, the woman had been delighted to have such a fine garment. When Blake had left, she’d been muttering to herself about whether she wanted to sell the fabric or keep it for herself.
Katrina was decidedly less pleased.
He could tell that the rough fabric bothered her more and more as Cagar plodded along. With her hands bound before her, she could do little to ease the itching. She fought it at first, but they hadn’t gone long before she started to squirm.
He hadn’t missed the way she’d held herself away from him during the ride the night before. He had been charmed by her stubbornness in a way.
She was too distracted now to remember to maintain the distance.
When she shifted again, pressing back against him, he put a hand to her waist in warning.
She froze.
He chuckled, bending low over her ear.
“If ye dinnae plan on undressing again, lass, then ye had best stop moving about like that. Ye might give a man ideas.”
He didn’t really mean it. For all his sins—and they were plentiful—he did not hold with forcing women. It was dishonorable and repulsive.
But if implying otherwise stopped his little captive from rubbing herself against him, he was willing to do so. He was a focused warrior, but he was no monk. He was as vulnerable to distraction as the next man when it came to lush packages pressed against him.
Besides, it was a long, boring ride and it was oh so entertaining to watch her bite her lip and clench her fingers as she struggled not to move.
They rode all day, Blake keeping his eyes sharp for any signs of movement that ought not to be there, for any sounds that were missing because the animals detected something that Blake’s human senses could not.
Something like the presence of the Lennox heir and his new bride.
When dusk started to fall, Blake was tired and irritable. He knew that Arran would come after Katrina; even when he’d been playacting as some nameless guard, he’d been loyal and honorable—all those boring, pointless Lennox traits that didn’t get you anywhere but dead.
If Lennox was too foolish to realize that, then Blake wasn’t going to be the one to tell him otherwise. At least not before he put his blade to Arran’s throat.
He stopped by a spring; there weren’t any suitable inns in the area, ones where the proprietors wouldn’t ask too many questions about why he had a bound and angry woman in his keeping. When he pulled Katrina down from the saddle, he frowned to see that she was still biting her lower lip.
“Dinnae do that,” he said, irksomely aware that it was the first words he had spoken to her in hours.
Why would he even notice such a thing? It wasn’t as though they were on some sort of pleasure jaunt.
Nor should he care about the state of her lip, certainly not enough to tug it free from beneath her teeth.
And he really ought not to be furious that the imprint of her teeth, pressed there over hours, had left tiny bruises.
Her eyes were so big as she looked at him.
Hastily, he dropped his hand from her mouth, busying himself with untying her hands.
“Go,” he grunted, turning away. “Clean yourself up. We will make camp here tonight.”
He heard the telltale pause before she went to obey his command, and there was something about the nervousness in that hesitation that roused his temper. He wanted her to be afraid. He needed to remember that.
There were a lot of things he was struggling to remember right now, things that normally came easily to him. He could only blame it on the fact that he’d gone nearly two full days without sleep. He’d done such things before—many times—but perhaps it was catching up to him nonetheless.
Like now, for example. He should be focused on caring for Cagar.
His horse had served him well over the past few days, working tirelessly to carry two riders over countless miles.
But instead, more than half his focus was on Katrina, even though there was nowhere for her to go, no way for her to escape.
When he heard splashing and a sharp intake of breath as she made her way into the stream, however, he couldn’t help but turn.
He felt every inch of himself go still as he took her in.
She was not, as he had assumed, taking small handfuls of water to splash at her face and neck.
Instead, she’d removed her gown entirely, leaving only a thin chemise beneath, one that covered little.
And what it did cover was revealed to him in tantalizing peeks as the light fabric went translucent with water.
He had been able to feel a hint of her softness when she’d wriggled against him earlier, but how he could see it: the lush curve of her hips, the strength in her long legs, the slope of her breasts, all revealed just enough to rouse in him a powerful hunger to see more, feel more.
He felt himself stirring, but he didn’t move, not to touch himself nor to turn away. He just watched as she rolled her neck to get the tension out of her shoulders.
Katrina had kicked aside the woolen gown, leaving it in a careless heap at the riverbank, demonstrating quite clearly her feelings for the garment.
He watched shamelessly, his pulse hammering in his chest as he watched her splash water over her arms, neck, and shoulders with an almost frantic eagerness.
When she turned, the shadows of the setting sun hit differently, and he could see that the flush on her skin wasn’t from the bracing chill of the water.
It was an angry, spreading rash.
Blake choked back a growl, fury roaring up in him like a tide as he understood her fidgeting and writhing in a new light.
He’d known the dress had been bothering her, but he’d assumed it was the fussing of a prim lady used to only the finest things in life.
He had little sympathy for that. But this, this was something angry and hot.
It was real pain, and he had forced her to endure it.
The thought doused his ardor like a bucket of water on a fire, with an anguished, dying hiss.
He clenched his fist and turned away. It was time to build a fire. That, at least, was something he knew he could do right.
Katrina had thought she would spend the night shivering, dressed as she was only in her thin, damp shift, but she would rather freeze to death than put on that wretched dress for one more minute.
But as she emerged from the frigid river, legs numb halfway up her calves, she’d found a fire blazing merrily, stoked higher than she would have expected from a man like him.
This was a fire that was built for comfort, not for survival or stealth or any of the other things she would have thought the Bloodhound would value.
She felt the chill leave her body as she sat beside it.
It isnae kindness, she told herself sternly as she stared into the flames. He did it for some other reason. I just dinnae ken it yet.
She repeated it. She would keep repeating it until she felt it as deeply as she felt the heat from the fire.
She caught her fingers inching up to scratch at the rash that still lingered on her skin despite the relief that the cold water had brought her.
She snatched her hand back down, stopping herself.
Any healer knew that scratching at a rash only made it worse.
It was the same logic that made her stay her motions whenever she wanted to rub at the wound on her arm.
She’d checked the bandages before plunging herself into the water, and she liked what she saw. It was frustrating to admit, but the bit with the whisky had likely been wise.
It still itched like the devil, though. Healing always did, she supposed.
Motion near her stole her attention away from the fire, and there he was, the Bloodhound, his hand extended.
She blinked when she saw that he didn’t hold a weapon or a rope or anything else she would have expected from him.
He had herbs.
“Take them,” he commanded, brusque as ever, when she hesitated.
Cautiously, she reached out and did so. It was marshmallow root and plantain leaves—precisely the herbs she would have chosen to soothe her irritated skin, if she’d had the opportunity to go foraging.
“I’ll boil water,” he said, all swift purpose. He was turned back toward his saddlebags before she recovered her wits enough to respond.
“How did ye ken?”
He stopped, glancing at her over his shoulder.
“Ken what?”
She hefted the handful of leaves and roots. “These herbs. How did ye ken that these would help with the rash that awful dress gave me?”
He shrugged one shoulder, still mostly turned away from her.
“I used to gather them for my wee sister,” he said. “She would get a rash like that from all sorts of things, really. Drove her mad.”
Somehow, this stunned her even more than his producing the right herbs. Not that he’d had a sister—all sorts of people had sisters, and all sorts of people had suffered losses—but that he’d admitted it to her.
Maybe, said a quiet voice inside her, he needs to talk about it. About her.
“What was she like?” Katrina asked quietly, her gaze fixed on the herbs. They were fragile things, but powerful, too. “Your sister.”
He hesitated for so long that she was sure that he wouldn’t answer.
“She had blue eyes,” he said eventually. “Like the skies when they’re clear.”
His tone was soft, fond… and laden with heaviness.
In a different man, she would have been charmed by the description, by the way he remembered the girl he had so clearly lost.
But he wasn’t another man. He was the Bloodhound.
The contrast filled her with a sudden rush of bitterness.
“It’s a pity,” she said, and she knew it wasn’t quite fair that her words came out with such acid, but nothing about this entire situation was fair, “that ye come from a clan of killers and that ye seem determined to be the worst of them. I might have liked ye, otherwise.”
She was thankful that he was still looking away, otherwise he might have seen the way she flinched when he released a snarl.
He was a frightening man, but somehow, she didn’t feel frightened enough to stop. Or maybe her good sense had washed away in that cold water.
So, she pressed.
“I assume ye ken by now that it was our own countrymen that planned the attacks that night ten years ago,” she said. Her sarcasm was a taunt. “Or perhaps ye have known for a long time.” She let the pause hang, then let the sword drop. “Perhaps the MacFarlanes were the ones that planned it.”
He spun around, rage in his features. She felt a prickle of concern, but it was drowned beneath the surge of satisfaction at having successfully baited him. She pushed to her feet, her fist tight around the herbs. She didn’t want to see any evidence of his kindness, not now.
“MacFarlanes,” he snapped, “dinnae sneak around to stab our allies in the dark. We face our enemies head-on.” He narrowed his eyes dangerously. “I think ye saw proof of that well enough last night.”
She was undeterred.
“Ye cannae deny that MacFarlane Clan benefitted,” she said. “All that trade that once went to Lennox—how much landed at MacFarlane’s door?”
“Och, please spare me,” the Bloodhound snarled. “We all benefitted, in ways big and small. And, need I remind ye, that it was your friend’s clan that benefitted most of all? Or are ye judging her for being born a MacBrae?”
“That isnae the same,” Katrina protested. “And Kenna is a Lennox now.”
He shot her a razor-edged smile. “Ah, so ye have spoken to her. Perhaps conspiring for other ways that your clan can benefit from tragedy? After all, medicines become verra important in a war, don’t they?”
She opened her mouth to defend her father, her brother but then she fell silent. Medicines would become valuable in the coming conflict. Even if they didn’t do anything nefarious to earn that benefit, they would still reap it.
The Bloodhound huffed a vicious laugh, like he had won something.
Furious with herself, with her, with her brother and father for betraying her in the first place, Katrina sat back down in front of the flames.
She ignored everything about this man, her wretched captor, and stared at the fire.
She let the gentle crackle of the wood and the hypnotizing flicker of the flames lull her exhausted body into an uneasy slumber.
She half woke when something warm and soft draped over her body, and she might have thought she imagined it, except when she woke hours later, there it was. MacFarlane’s cloak.
She clutched the garment around her as she sat up. Maybe she was dreaming. What other explanation was there for her comfort, especially under the steely gaze of the Bloodhound, who was propped up against a tree, looking for all the world like he’d been there the entire night?
Didn’t he sleep?
He gave no sign that he did, for as soon as he saw her eyes open, he pushed to his feet with a truly disgusting level of ease. After the past two days she felt as though she’d been stepped on by a horse. Possibly several horses. Big ones, like the Bloodhound’s mount.
“Good,” he said. “Ye are awake. Time to ride. Get dressed.”
And, just like that, any gratitude she might have felt for the cloak was swept away on the tide of his curt words. How considerate of him.
“If ye think that I’m wearing that dress again, then ye truly are daft,” she said, clinging to the cloak as though he couldn’t take it from her if he wanted.
But he merely rolled his eyes as though she were a troublesome child, which was irritating, to be sure, but not nearly as irritating as the feel of that awful wool against her skin.
“Fine,” he said. “There’s a village nearby. But get moving. We dinnae have time to waste.”
She was so disarmed by this stern, brutish kindness that she found herself complying, not even certain if it was the wrong thing to do.