He was real. He was here. He was all a woman’s heart could desire.
Everything else faded away from her. The water at her feet. The boat at her back. Garik at her side. Even the savage Scotsmen glaring at her, most with weapons in their hands.
She might die here and now.
At least she’d laid eyes on him first.
“Quarrie MacMurtray,” she returned, and her voice, rather surprisingly, sounded like her own. For she did not feel like herself. She felt like a woman who knew him, who had claimed him, somehow as her own.
Madness.
“I come not to attack,” she said, and looked around at all the hostile faces, the hostile postures, even though it hurt to take her eyes from him. “But to talk.”
“Talk,” he repeated, and even that single word shivered through her.
“Ja. You owe me that.” She returned her gaze to him. Did he look surprised?
A man came running up to him, out of breath and heavily armed. Quarrie glanced at him.
“She comes to talk,” he said. “No attack. Understand?”
The man gave Hulda a glare out of hard blue eyes but nodded.
“Come,” Quarrie said to Hulda, “we will speak together in the hall.”
“Stay here,” she told Garik, and to Quarrie, “My man will not come under attack? I have your word?”
“My word on it.” Quarrie directed a look of his own at the men and added, “This man’s safety is assured, aye?”
No one spoke. No one moved as Hulda and Quarrie walked up the stony path toward the tall stone structure ahead.
How strange it felt, after her summer, to enter a Scot’s settlement in peace.
The thought crossed her mind that she might not leave again. She could indeed die here. Felled by a dirk in the back. An arrow. MacMurtray’s hand.
Not by MacMurtray’s hand. He would not harm her. How she knew that, she could not say. She just did.
She entered the stone structure at Quarrie’s side, him meeting every hostile glare with an even stare. She remembered the place, ja, from her last visit—it could not be less like the houses back home, which were long and roofed with thatch or soil and had a central hearth. This had an entryway made ofstone and a hall with a timbered roof. A hard place to fight one’s way into, or out of again.
A fire burned at the far end of the room. Quarrie led her to this and turned to face her.
After the strong light outside, this seemed very dim. She could not see him as well as she wanted to. His hair—tied back into a tail down his back—looked plain brown. His bare chest no longer gleamed.
It did not matter, because he was close enough that she could reach out and touch him if she wanted to.
She did.
“So…” He spoke softly and it sounded incredibly intimate in that large, empty place. As if whatever words they spoke should be honest ones and would exist only for the two of them. Even if she knew better. Naught in their world could concern but the two of them.
“Will ye sit,” he invited her, “before ye say wha’ ye will?”
Why did he affect her the way he did, this one man out of the many in the world? Why did the sound of his voice send that shiver through her every time he spoke? Why did the very scent of him—for she stood near enough to catch it—cause her emotions to rise up wild? Longing and an answer to it, all in one.
“Ja, let us sit together and speak.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Quarrie glanced atthe woman who sat beside the fire in his hall, and had to blink before he could believe his eyes.
