Chapter Fourteen
For one day, Blake let Katrina fuss over his shoulder.
Only reminding her a few times that the wound was her own bloody fault, since she had stabbed him, which he felt was a show of great restraint. In an even greater show of restraint, he didn’t reveal that, in a perverse way, he was sort of proud of her for doing it.
For one day, he let her scold him into sitting. For one day, he rested. He drank all the little potions that Katrina kept shoving in his hands, each of them impossibly more disgusting than the last.
For one day, he let himself enjoy the feeling of someone caring for him, even if he had to keep reminding himself that it wasn’t real. That it wouldn’t last.
And then the one day ended.
When the next dawn arrived, Blake woke Katrina before the sun had cleared the horizon.
“What?” she said when he shook her shoulder to rouse her. “Why? It is nae even—”
“‘Tis time to go,” he said. “We lost time yesterday.”
She groaned, bringing her hands up to cover her face. She was charmingly sleep-rumpled, her hair a deep, nut-brown cloud around her head. There was a piece of hay sticking out of it.
“There isnae any chance of us catching them now,” she complained. “So why the hurry?”
He pulled her hands away from her face, then used his grip on her wrists to tug her to her feet. She complied easily enough. Though her mood might have been poor this early in the day, she was apparently too sleepy to be argumentative. He would remember that.
No—he caught himself.
He would have no need to remember that.
They would be back to MacFarlane lands soon enough, and he would turn her over.
And then he would be sent on another quest for his laird—and another, and another, and another after that. And when he came back, he would see her married to Brodie.
Or, worse, he wouldn’t even see this Katrina at all, just the shell of the woman after Brodie had ground her mischievous spirit into dust.
He couldn’t care about that. He didn’t care about that.
“We arenae going after Lennox and his bride,” he said, dropping her hands abruptly. “We are going to MacFarlane Keep. Lennox followed before; he will follow again.”
She shoved her hair out of her face. Her guard was back up; he saw it as clearly as he would see a physical shield.
“Nay,” she said. “They willnae come back. They are too clever for that.”
Blake rather suspected that they were too loyal to do otherwise, but he wasn’t going to waste his breath arguing with her.
“Either way,” he said, eyeing the cart horse with distaste. The horse eyed him back with a similar attitude. Blake spared a longing thought for Cagar, who had spent the last few days being cossetted by the stable lad back at the inn where Katrina had tried to poison him. “We are leaving. Now.”
“Fine,” she sighed, winding her hair into a thick, long plait.
The deft movements of her fingers were oddly hypnotizing.
He’d liked the wild puff of hair she’d woken with—it felt intimate, just seeing it—but he liked watching her do anything with those competent healer’s hands.
“As long as your shoulder isnae bothering ye.”
Oh, had he just been thinking that he liked the healer side of her? That was his mistake, he supposed.
“My shoulder is fine,” he said, moving it up and down in illustration. The movement tugged a little, actually, but not enough that he needed any more of her brand of coddling.
“Fine,” she said again. She looked rather sulky about it as she jammed all her remaining herbs into the pockets of those bewitching breeches she was still wearing. “Fine.”
Katrina grew progressively less grumbly as they rode, particularly after he shoved a lump of bread and cheese into her hands. This had the unfortunate effect of making her badger him nearly incessantly about his shoulder.
“Are ye truly, truly certain that it isnae bothering ye?” she asked him for about the dozenth time that morning.
“Katrina.” He groaned her name. It had been a very trying day, and the sun was not even high in the sky.
For one thing, his shoulder was bothering him a touch, no matter how he denied it.
Then there was her questioning. But worse was that, now that she had the breeches on instead of skirts, he could feel her all the more.
And this ragged old nag was not nearly as broad of back as Cagar, which meant that she was pressed up against him even more firmly than she had been when they’d been in this position before.
She sighed theatrically, as though he was the difficult one.
“Verra well,” she said. “I will stop asking.”
Oh, he did not believe that for a second.
“But,” she went on innocently, “ye might want to be careful of that bush over there.” She gestured to a place where an overgrown hedge was encroaching on the narrow woodland trail that they followed.
“The thorns are poisonous. Unless, of course, ye have protected yourself against every poison in existence.”
“Verra clever,” he said dryly, but he did skirt carefully around the poison bush.
She looked over his shoulder to grin at him—an image that would remain forever fixed in his mind, the brightness and joy of it—when the woods around them erupted.
More than ten years of daily training spurred Blake into action as fast as blinking.
He pulled Katrina from the horse—his shoulder screamed—putting her behind the animal as he leapt down the other side, facing the men that were pouring from the trees.
He pulled his sword from his scabbard before his feet had even touched the ground, and slashed out in a defensive movement before his brain fully processed that his enemies were wearing MacBrae colors.
One of them was dead and he was spinning to fight off the next before he put all the pieces together.
Laird MacFarlane had sent him off to retrieve Arran Lennox as a sign of good faith to the MacBraes, but he had come back with Katrina, instead.
Laird MacBrae had clearly taken that as a sign that MacFarlane and MacAllan intended to ally against MacBrae, something that the laird simply could not allow.
Blake understood all this, but the politics of it all were not his problem. Not his duty.
He had one reason. One purpose.
To protect Katrina.
Another guard lunged for him, but Blake spun, deflecting the blow but not stopping it, so that the guard ended up stabbing into the arm of one of his comrades instead of cutting through Blake’s chest.
There were a half dozen MacBraes still standing, and Blake was wounded. It didn’t matter, though. None of them could hold up against him. He wasn’t even particularly worried.
That was, until he heard Katrina cry out.
He whirled, droplets of blood flying from the edge of his blade. One of the guards had grabbed Katrina from behind, both his arms wrapped around her as she kicked and screamed furiously.
Aye, that was his brave lass—fighting her very best, right up until Blake could get there to save her.
She didn’t need to last long.
Red tinged the edges of his vision as he flew forward, his attack confident and true as he slid his sword into the guard’s upper shoulder.
The man released Katrina immediately, and it was the very last thing he ever did.
Blake cut back from the same thrust, this time dragging the sharpened steel through the man’s neck.
He went down, choking on his own lifeblood as he died.
Still fueled with a brutal battle rage, Blake turned, only to find that Katrina hadn’t scurried off to hide like she ought to have done.
His irritation over that fact warred with his pride as he watched her shove one of the guards from behind, sending him careening into the poisonous bush that she had warned him about, then scooping up a thick branch from the ground and using it to smash a third in the throat hard enough that he dropped his sword so he could clutch at his neck as he struggled to breathe through his collapsed airway.
Blake indulged in a tiny smile before turning to dispatch the rest of the bastards who thought they could dare to threaten Blake’s woman and walk away with their lives.
He had never found it quite so easy to kill.
The last man was still falling when Blake turned back to Katrina, desperate to make certain that she was fine. She flew to him across the corpse-laden clearing, her hands coming to his shoulders, then his chest, then his face.
“Ye are covered in blood,” she said, and he found that he was suddenly, irrationally furious over the way that blood was getting on her. Those men shouldn’t be able to touch her, not even in death. “Are ye hurt? Where are ye hurt?”
As if his injuries mattered.
“What about ye?” he demanded. More and more blood smeared on her hands, her clothing as she inspected him, and it made it harder and harder for him to see whether she was unharmed.
He had a tangled feeling in his chest that felt a lot like panic.
It had been so long since he’d experienced such a thing that it was alien to him by now. “Did they hurt ye?”
“Nay, Blake, I’m fine,” she said dismissively, as though her safety didn’t matter—as though it wasn’t the most important thing. “But ye—”
“I’m fine,” he said, and he was, because she wasn’t hurt. He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tight against him, because he needed to feel that she was fine, too, and he had long since missed his opportunities to keep her clothing clean. “God, Katrina—”
She wrapped her arms back and held tight. The words only came out because she knew that he couldn’t see his face.
“I couldnae save my sister,” he said. “My brother, my Ma—they all died. I could not lose ye, too. I willnae fail ye, too.”
He’d said too much. He knew it as soon as the words left him, and he knew it even more when Katrina pulled back to look up at him, her eyes wide and her mouth fallen open in shock.
Blake did not apologize. But then, he almost did.
Until Katrina stole the words out of his mouth by pressing up on her toes, grabbing him by the collar, kissing him directly on the mouth.
Her lips were the softest, sweetest thing he’d ever tasted.
Except, no—that wasn’t enough, because Blake hadn’t felt very many soft, sweet things. Kissing Katrina was…
There weren’t words.
And yet he could not let himself have it.
He was a bad man.
A killer.
A weapon.
He pulled back, but he didn’t have the strength to remove himself from her arms.
She didn’t pull away, either. Instead, she just looked up at him, all earnestness and hope and goodness. She was so honest. He could only ever sully her with his touch.
But Blake? He was a bad, bad man.
And so when she smiled, he kissed it off her, pressing his lips to hers until they were lost in lips and tongues and teeth and brutality.
It was, he feared, the only thing that he knew how to give.