Chapter Five #2
He bent to it and inhaled, then straightened, towering beside her like the mountain outside his windows. “It smells appetizing.”
Appetizing enough to try it? Should she hand him an empty bowl? Fill it for him?
No need. He reached for two empty bowls and handed one to her. “Join me.”
“Of course,” she said with a mocking grin. He wanted to check for poison.
After she consumed a spoonful, and then another, including on her wooden utensil, every ingredient she’d used, he watched her.
“It isna poisoned,” she assured him.
When he strolled back to the Main Hall door and called for the others, her heart raced.
“They havena’ eaten yet,” he informed her on his way back to her, still holding his bowl.
For six years she’d planned this. Now, when it was about to begin, her skin grew clammy, her mouth dry. Could she kill four men?
She remembered the way her father always let her hide behind him when she’d angered Roderick, the eldest, and he meant to punish her. Her father always protected her, spoiling her, according to her mother, who was known to give Elspeth more plum pudding than her brothers.
She watched Logan Cameron lift his spoon to his lips. He was about to ingest her poison. Her gaze fastened on the spoon, his mouth opening. Her heart thumped hard and loud in her ears. Could he hear it? Would he suspect something and not eat?
The spoon disappeared inside his mouth.
Elspeth almost passed out from lack of breathing.
She didn’t want to appear to be swooning at the sight of him eating her food, so she looked away.
It began. The first step…the hardest step, had been taken.
Now, nothing would stop her until they all lay dead at her feet, then she would go find the rest of his clan.
She had planned her revenge for six years.
They killed young Padrig, Roderick, her parents.
They had ended her life as well. All because of Logan Cameron. Now, her dream was finally coming true.
She would not allow guilt or compassion to sway her. So what if he gave her a room, a bed, a bath, and meals to fill her belly? Who cared if he didn’t put his hands to her as her other masters had? The reason she’d had masters was because of him.
“’Tis quite delicious,” he remarked.
She nodded, hating her natural instinct to help and not hurt. No mercy, she reminded herself. Still, she didn’t want to watch him begin his slow journey to the ground. So, she put down her bowl and left the hall as the others entered the room.
They all stopped to watch her leave. None of them spoke to her and that was best. She didn’t want to become friends with any of them. Tomorrow they would be a step closer to their graves.
Where her family was.
*
Logan watched her leave, then flicked his gaze to his cousins, all turning from her to him. They expected answers to why she was out of her room and in the Main Hall with him. Alone.
“She coulda picked up any one of these knives and stabbed ye,” Steafan was first to point out when they entered.
“Did ye unlock her door?” Jamie asked. “After she escaped earlier?”
“She didna use the door earlier,” Logan told him. “And she wanted to cook her own food, so I let her. ’Tis quite good.” He held up his empty bowl.
Steafan’s face fell. “Ye ate her food?”
“Were ye here when she prepared it?” Ewen demanded. “How are ye feelin’?
“Och, Logan!” Jamie pouted, appearing on the verge of tears. “Dinna tell me ye ate it.”
Logan smiled at him, then gave them all an exhausted sigh.
“Quit yer worryin’. She served herself a bowl from the same pot as mine and ate it first. I watched her.
She ate without any hesitation and ye all saw her leave in perfect con…
” he cleared his throat, suddenly feeling a wee bit light-headed at the thought of her. … “perfect condition.”
His head cleared soon enough, and he and his cousins all agreed after eating her stew that Miss Woodburn could surely cook a delicious meal.
“I’ll bring her to Tor Castle tomorrow,” Ewen told him, scooping up the last mushroom in his bowl.
“I am also returnin’ to the castle tomorrow,” Logan informed him. “All of ye—” he pointed to Jamie and Steafan—“stay the night and we will all travel together.”
The others agreed, then left the hall with Logan and went with him to a small, separate sitting room down the corridor, where they drank mead and reminisced about battles they had fought in together.
When they heard a sound outside the door an hour later, they stood, ready to take on whoever had broken in.
Logan held up his hands, knowing exactly who was out there. He hadn’t locked her bedroom door.
“Lass,” he called out when he heard her footsteps backing away from the door. “Come in here, please.”
They all waited as she opened the door and appeared before them. Steafan still gripped the hilt of his sword.
“Apologies if I startled ye,”
“We dinna startle, lass,” Steafan was quick to tell her.
Logan smiled—until he came to his senses and remembered who he was smiling at. “Are ye lookin’ fer somethin?” he asked her.
She nodded and held up an apple. “Is it all right if I took it? I was still a bit hungry.”
“Aye, eat what ye feel safe eatin’.
She rubbed the apple on her thigh, then took a bite out of it.
“Do ye drink mead, Miss Woodburn?” Jamie asked, missing Logan’s murderous glare. He was a wee bit drunk and didn’t think it wise to spend time with her now.
She eyed their cups. “I have only partaken in mead one time.”
Ewen stood up, poured her a cup, then handed it to her. “Have a seat and join us.”
His cousin motioned her to sit on the settee with him. He avoided Logan’s gaze or blatantly ignored it. Logan couldn’t tell which. Either way, it darkened the warning that flashed across his eyes like lightning in pitch black skies.
“We should get some sleep if we are departin’ in the mornin’,” Logan told them and was about to stand when he heard her slight, dulcet voice.
“Are ye all goin’ somewhere?”
“Aye, home to Tor Castle,” Jamie told her.
“Tor Castle?” she repeated, growing pale in the firelight.
Logan was struck, not for the first time, by the sight of her bonnie face.
She wasn’t the bonniest lass he knew, but something about her expressions, her haunted gazes and fierce passion to hate him, stirred his blood—just as she had the first time he’d seen her.
Despite her knotted hair tied at her nape, he remembered a lass whose glossy flaxen curls shone in the sun like a crown.
“Are ye taking me with ye?” she asked, looking directly at Logan.
“Of course,” he answered. “Do ye think I would leave ye here alone?”
“What if I dinna want to go there?”
“Why would ye no’ want to go there?” he asked, insulted. Tor was the home of his father, Lochiel. She wouldn’t be safer anywhere else.
“Too many people. I dinna like crowds. I dinna like being alone either. I thought it would be just the five of us fer a wee bit. A sennight, mayhap, seven days, at least.”
“What are ye sayin’?” Logan asked her.
“What? Och, just that I am uncomfortable in large crowds of people.”
Three of the men grew quiet. The fourth, the obvious leader, spoke. “Ye will grow accustomed to it after livin’ there a few years.”
She went from pale to a tinge of green before she spoke. “But…I thought ye put me in Ewen’s possession?”
Logan noticed how she nearly choked on her last word. “Ewen lives at Tor Castle,” he told her.
“Have ye lived in a castle before, lass?” Jamie asked.
She nodded; the blood draining from her face again. Logan thought she might faint. He readied himself to catch her.
He took a step closer to her. She looked up at him. “Craigton Castle. I had to put up with people throwing their food at me if it displeased them. Men slapping my bottom when I passed them and them blaming the man next to him while they laughed and laughed.”
“No one will touch ye at Tor,” Ewen swore between his teeth.
“They willna dare,” Logan muttered under his breath.
Mayhap he should claim her. If people knew to whom she belonged, she would be safest. Many feared Ewen because of his great skill and cunning on the battlefield.
But Logan demanded loyalty without ever having to speak of it.
His men…his kin, would die to save him, just as he taught them, he would do for them by almost dying four times.
His uncles, both on the Cameron side and the MacDonalds’, would look after her if the Lochiel’s son but asked.
“My father is Captain Constantine Cameron, Lochiel of Lochaber, but ’tis my mother ye should fear if she hears ye makin’ threats against me.”
“Noted,” she said with a subservient nod. “I will keep my threats to myself.”
He almost…for an instant…believed she might not be so dangerous after all. But she proved to be contemplating his demise every moment. Tor might not be so safe for her, after all.
He watched her for another moment. She drank with his cousins, paying him no mind.
She was like a hellcat without any claws.
She fought back but gave up quickly. Or did she?
Her sea-blue eyes held secrets in their roiling depths.
She was a storm in the distance, coming like a curse.
She’d promised to kill him. Many times, in fact.
She had good reason to hate him and his kin.
Would he be putting his kin in jeopardy by bringing her to Tor Castle? Should he keep her here?
“Ye three,” he blurted to Ewen, Steafan, and Jamie, “go back to Tor withoot me. I will remain here with Miss Woodburn until I decide what to do with her.”
Jamie laughed. Ewen and Steafan did not.
“We are no’ leaving ye here alone with her,” Steafan let him know.
“Are ye tellin’ me I canna handle a lass made of veils?” Logan asked darkly.
“Logan,” said Ewen, concern marring his brow. “There is nae reason to do this. I will take her somewhere besides Tor, aye? If ye refuse and insist on stayin’ here, I will have to insist on stayin’ with ye.”
“Aye, me too,” Jamie exclaimed.
“No one is stayin’ with me,” Logan said with authority and a scathing look that silenced them.
“I’m no’ a child who needs lookin’ after.
Ye will all return to Tor withoot me. I’ll no’ have this lass cause any harm to my kin, nor will I have them cause harm to her.
The only way to ensure that is by keepin’ her here.
I dinna need ye to stay here to ensure my safety. Ye insult me by suggestin’ it.”
“Logan,” Steafan tried.
Logan held up his palm. “And dinna any of ye arrive here while the sun is up tomorrow. I see more of ye than when I lived at home. Now, nae more. Let us get some sleep.”
They left the sitting room with the lass lagging behind.
When his cousins disappeared into a room at the end of the hall, Logan looked around. When and why had he slowed his steps to wait for her? Suspicion of why she hadn’t left the sitting room with them. Something else? Something that made his heart beat a wee bit faster.
Before he had time to consider it, he turned around and walked back to the sitting room to find her.
He wasn’t sure what he would find her doing when he returned to her, but sitting where he’d left her, staring at someplace far away, where only she could see, wasn’t it.
Were her eyes misted with tears? And how did she manage to make him give a damn if they were?
He wanted to ask her what was troubling her, but nae.
Deep down he really didn’t give a damn. Her father ruined his life.
She didn’t deserve his mercy, nor did she want it.
He was correct to keep her away from his kin. He had to keep her away from him too.
He turned to step back out of the sitting room but her fingers grasping the sleeve of his shirt stopped him.
“Thank ye fer not bringing me to the castle.”
“I didna do it fer ye alone,” he assured her, lest she think more of it.
“But do ye think we should be here alone?” she asked, unfazed by his last statement. “Mayhap ye should insist that yer men stay here too.”
“Why?’ he scoffed. “Do ye think I fear ye?”
“I dinna know, Mr. Cameron, but ye should.”
At this, he chuckled. He’d fought skilled soldiers armed with various weapons. Should he fear this wisp of a woman?
She watched with her hand on her hip while he laughed. Her challenging glare gave him cause to reconsider the last question he asked himself. He thought it best to sleep with one eye open.
“What are ye doin’ loiterin’ in this room when the others left?” he asked with demand staining the deep cadence of his voice.
“I was remembering something and didna want to disturb my memory.”
Something that brought her to the edge of weeping. “What were ye rememberin’?” Nae! He didn’t want to ask her! He wanted to hit himself on the forehead.
“My brother, Roderick,” she told him, ignoring his fallen expression. “I called him Roddy. He was mean to me when we were wee brats, but later, he became second only to my father. I have missed them all fer too long, and knowing my heart will never heal makes me hateful and hopeless.”
Logan stared at her. He didn’t know what to say. He would never forgive anyone who hurt his parents and siblings. “I understand why ye hate my clan.”
She walked out of the sitting room and then said over her shoulder, “Good, then understanding that I must kill ye shouldna be far behind.”