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Now that was curious. “I should say you succeeded in the ultimate test of loyalty, Ian. Do you need thanks for fighting for me—”
“I don’t need thanks for doing what I’ve sworn to do,” Ian snapped. “But you won’t thank me for touching your woman, will you? You dangled her before me. And I failed to refuse the offer.”
Ah. So that’s what this was about. John tried to set his kinsman’s mind at ease on that score. “What did you think, Ian? That I would bid a woman to kneel and take you between her lips, then expect you to pull away? I wouldn’t have offered to share her if I didn’t wish it.”
Ian’s eyes narrowed. “No man could want to share a woman like her.”
Ian’s voice actually cracked on the last word, betraying that what he felt for Heather was not merely lust. And a mixture of emotions flooded the laird’s heart. First, came the jealousy. Oh, he’d known Ian lusted for his violet-eyed beauty. But to harbor emotions for her…that was exactly the kind of attachment he’d hoped to inspire in his kinsman. And yet, it was like a knife to the heart.
Still, John would have to endure it for Heather’s sake. She took pain for him every night. Took it gladly. Took it with courage and devotion. He could do no less for her. What he should feel was relief that Ian cared for Heather—had perhaps cared for her all along, and been too loyal to show it.
Meanwhile, Ian was saying, “I wasn’t about to let you toy with me. I decided to take you at your word because I am not a man for games. I wanted what we shared in that bed tonight, and no matter the sin—”
“Jesus, Joseph and Mary!” The laird shouted, feeling a vein in his forehead begin to pulse. “Sometimes you’re as priggish as a churchman. Until we were nearly murdered, we had a most enjoyable evening. Most. Enjoyable. And if you deny it, I’ll know you for a liar and a hypocrite.”
Ian crossed his arms over himself. “I won’t deny it.”
“Good. Then I don’t want to hear another word from you about the sin of it. Especially not to the lass. She’s been through enough.”
Ian’s jaw clenched at that, as if he agreed.
Then the laird’s eyes fell upon the ax in the middle of his bed, and he admitted something that pained him to the core. “I’ve endangered her. I can’t have her here at night in my chambers anymore. Not even with a guard at the door. Nor can I send her to her own chambers unprotected.”
Ian nodded, as if he had never been fooled, for even one moment, about the girl’s true importance to the laird. But he stopped nodding when John added, “You will have to take her into your own chambers until the danger has passed.”
Chapter Eight
HEATHER
“May the Donalds and MacDonalds rot in hell!” my sister cried, helping to wash my skinned hands and knees. Malcolm had taken me straight-away to her chambers, which had been my chambers before the laird insisted upon me in his bed each night. I saw that Arabella had made herself at home, replacing a number of my candles and other pretty things with jars of dried sticks and weeds. “I don’t suppose I have to guess what the assassin meant to do to you, throwing you down on your hands and knees.”
My sister had been abducted and quite nearly violated by the enemy not long ago, and in spite of the terrible shock I’d just suffered, I still found it within myself to want to protect her from reliving any of that. “It was actually the laird who did it,” I explained, careful not to slip up on any of the particulars of the official story. “He threw me to the floor to save me from a blade…”
“Gallant of him,” she said with an edge of sarcasm. My sister didn’t entirely approve of the laird—and she was, no doubt, worried about her betrothed, who had disappeared like a ghost from the castle. Truthfully, I would have been more worried about her betrothed were it not for some odd pieces of information I had put together.
When Ian had reported Davy missing the laird dismissed any notion that Davy might have been a traitor. Instead, he suggested that Davy may have come to harm. Strangely, the laird never mentioned sending Davy on any sort of special mission. Which meant that whatever he’d asked Davy to do was something he didn’t want Ian to know about.
I’d kept quiet at the time, but for my sister’s sake, I planned to get to the truth of the matter.
Meanwhile, Arabella grimly pulled the stopper from a bottle with her teeth, then wetted down a rag to swab my skinned knees with the fluid. I hissed at the sting of it. “Ow!”
“It’s just vinegar,” she said. “The physicker says it helps clean wounds.”
“By burning the dirt away?” I groused, but let her continue as she was, finding it strange to let her tend to my wounds when I was the older sister and had spent the better part of my childhood tending hers.
“What’s this?” she asked, eyeing what looked to be finger bruises on my arm.
They’d got there from the laird holding me down so hard to the bed. I hesitated to tell her as much, but given her own unconventional personal arrangements, I dared to say, “These were taken in love play.”
Arabella frowned. “Love play. And yet, you complain of the vinegar.”
Well, that was different, wasn’t it? It wasn’t the pain that I enjoyed but the lust of the man who did it. Burning with embarrassment, I ventured, “Surely you know that there’s a pleasure to being roughly grabbed by a man…”
“I’m sure I don’t,” Arabella said with a sniff. “Davy is quite gentle.”
I couldn’t let her get too above herself in judgement of me. “And Malcolm?”
Her cheeks pinkened, but on the whole, she was quite shameless. What doxies we’d both become! “Neither man would leave marks like the ones I’ve glimpsed on you. There’s even a fresh, scarlet bruise at the base of your throat.”
