Leith backed off a step. Rory did not like the look he saw in his cousin’s eyes.
“List to me, Leith. I want ye to tak’ this letter to MacBeith.”
“Aye? So I can be captured and killed in turn?”
“She will no’ harm ye. No’ a hair o’ ye. Not her sister’s man.”
“I canna. I will no’.”
Not words Rory wanted to hear, especially now when he felt his back to the wall.
“Leith, man, ye swore fealty to me. When my father died, ye did.”
“Aye, so.” Leith’s blue-gray eyes grew hard. “A lot has changed since then.”
Pain slammed through Rory, shaking him. Shaking his world. “Will ye turn on me? As Farlan did?”
“I am no’ sayin’ that.”
“Let us get this settled, Leith. Once ’tis done and the lands are mine, ye’ll be able to live wi’ yer woman in peace.”
“Let me talk it over wi’ Rhian. She may ken better how her sister will react.”
Rory wanted to sneer. Wanted to deride his cousin for being under a woman’s thumb.
Thinking of Saerla MacBeith, he kept silent.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
After Rory lefther, Saerla could not rest. She had not a hope of sleeping and could not make herself lie in the bed. Instead she paced from the fire to the window and back again, cursing herself.
What had come over her? She did not know the woman who had been in Rory MacLeod’s arms. How could she have invited him to kiss her the way she had? To touch her the way he had?
How could she have forgotten—forgotten completely—to plunge her knife into his neck when she had the chance?
It was madness.
She rubbed fitfully at her head as she paced and tried to deny what she had done. What she had failed to do. Mayhap the blow to her head had affected her. But nay, that was not it.It was him.
Remembering made the breath come short in her lungs and made her fingers tremble. She’d set out, aye, to seduce the man. She’d succeeded so well, she’d seduced herself also.
Morning came and bloomed through her slit of a window, finding her exhausted and still on her feet. The rain had fled, and golden light washed upon her. She wanted to be home, up among the stones. Away from all this.
Away from him.
She’d always feared him, on some level. The boogeyman. The monster. Now she doubly feared him for a new reason. He threatened her self-control and all she believed about herself.
She tried to look at it dispassionately, there in the light of the new day. Rory MacLeod was a fine-looking man. Indeed, despite the terror he instilled in her, she did not think she’d ever seen finer. Those canny green eyes of his. The way he regarded her with them. The fall of black hair and—och, by the powers, the wiry black hairs on his chest. The sharp planes of his face that spoke to her—spoke to her in a way she did not understand. Of longing. Of something so right she could scarcely comprehend it.
She’d expected him to be a brute. When he’d touched her, he was not brutal, not at all. Gentle, his touch and his lips. On her lips. At her breast.
Who would have thought such a sensation could exist? She had to stop thinking on it. She would lose her mind if she did not.
Had she not forgotten what she was about when he kissed her, he’d be dead by now, her mission done. Leith would become chief, and Rhian’s son after him.
How could a man’s kiss distract her from all that?
Would he return? Would he come back expecting more kisses and to be held again at her breast?
