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“Stop,” he rasped.
Stopping did not seem wise.
With a burst, she flung herself away and slithered out of his grasp. He gave a muted curse as she rolled a few painful times over tree roots and sticks and something soft and furry and no doubt dead, then she was up again, running.
He caught her in three strides.
She struck out in a frenzy and they both went rolling, until this time he came to rest atop her. Everything went immediately, abruptly, shockingly still.
He loomed over her. Dark hair fell forward beside his mouth, which had compressed into a single, thin line. His eyes were terrifying: blue and furious. His body ranged the length of hers, packed with muscle and anger, his knees on either side of hers, one palm planted on the earth beside her head.
The other, oddly, was cradling the back of her head, keeping it off the ground.
His gaze held her like a steel cord. She was bound to his cold, glittering eyes and she knew she was doomed.
Not because she did not scream for help, for there was none.
Not because she had not cried, “I yield,” for she never would.
Not because she didn’t raise her knee and smash it up between his legs, for she was trapped and could not move.
But because, in these straits, when all had failed, when there was nothing she could rely on and she faced certain doom, her heart dragged a single word from the depths of her soul: the name of the man who had engineered that doom.
“Máel,” she whispered.
Then a beat more.
“Please.”
For a second he held, then he muttered something in Irish and rolled off her.
Perhaps she could rely on something after all.
Chapter 15
“Dia ár sábháil.” Máel muttered the foul curse and pushed off her, rolling to a sitting position, his knees bent, staying directly beside her, ready to grab her at the first sign of escape.
But she was breathing too heavily and lay on her back, in the leaves, panting.
He looked down at her prone form. “I told you I would catch you.”
“Yes, well, my gown…” She paused to pant. “Tripped me up… Repeatedly.”
He felt torn between poles of intense emotions—fury, despair, the urge to laugh. He stomped on them, burying them where they belonged, in the gutter of his heart.
His original plan had been simple: leave the tent when darkness fell, situate himself up high, and wait. For he’d known d’Argent would try something perfidious: the man simply knew no other way.
But Cassia had drunk his whiskey and shown her spirit and competed with him as no one ever had, and he became distracted. Forgot to attend the ever-present danger of his life. Forgot to plot. Forgot to hate.
In truth, he’d known nothing but her. The battle in her eyes and the hot surrender of her body, pressing up against him, silken and sweet and willing.
He’d underestimated her. Twice.
For after her father burned down the tent, she ought to have been stunned. Shocked. Frozen with fear.
Docile.
/> Instead, she’d flipped up her gown and run.
