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Olivia held his gaze, and oddly, through the grave situation, found some humor. “I am yer wife, arenae I?”
A corner of his lips flickered, but he still looked serious. His gaze roamed over her face, “That ye will be.”
“This way, me lady,” a soldier said while nodding to the doors in front of them.
As she entered the great hall, with Ó Riagáin, Olivia drew to a halt instantly. The room, as long as it was wide, with trestle tables and wide casements, was as empty as a graveyard.
Olivia blinked—had she been expecting a welcoming party, a jubilant feast of fifty? The truth was, Ó Riagáin had not anticipated, liked or welcomed the crown’s order for him to marry her—why would he celebrate it? Olivia flattened her lips and followed the soldier up two flights of stairs, and down a corridor to a room that, truly, could host royalty.
Thick furs covered the wooden floor, and rich tapestries were on the wall. The bed was massive, piled high with furs, woolen blankets, and pillows, and three cressets filled with burning oil cast a gilded light over the room. She went to the bed and touched the post. “It’s…very English.”
“Aye,” a young woman said behind them, and Olivia turned to see a lass, younger than Olivia was—she was sure—standing at the doorway in a modest gray dress. “His lairdship had once thought to incorporate English elements to his home, but then again, he swiftly changed his mind when the wars started.”
“Who are ye?” Olivia asked.
“Ana, me lady,” the girl curtsied. “His lairdship assigned me to be yer maid. Should I—” Ana’s eyes dropped to Olivia’s bloody clothes, “—shall I draw ye a bath?”
Dropping to the edge of the bed, the dire truth of what had just happened to her and Ó Riagáin descended on her like a bag of bricks, and she knew she needed a moment to think, so she nodded. “Please.”
When her new maid went off, Olivia braced her blood-splattered hands on the rugs and leaned over. Why had someone tried to kill them—why now—on the day he had come for her?
It’s an enemy… but is it mine or Ó Riagáin’s?
* * *
Conner clenched his teeth as the needle bit into his skin repeatedly to sew his wound together. The metallic smell of his blood was thin in his nose, but it was there. It was not his first time being stitched together, but he damn well hated it.
The wounds he had collected over the last ten years, chasing down any sign of his missing mother and sister, had made a silvery roadmap across his body.
Training his gaze—and mind—away from the healing woman and his hip, he began to grimly decipher the attack, little by little.
Not attack, t’was an ambush—they had been waiting for us.
“Aye,” the healer snapped the cord made from sheep’s gut. She stood, her diminutive frame and wiry fingers twitching, as she smeared it with a paste of fern and comfrey before wrapping bandages around it. “That should hold ye for the healing, me laird.”
Looking at the strips of white around his thigh, Conner nodded. “Thank ye, Lady Frigga.”
“If ye had let the lady to come to ye like I had advised,” Sionn O’Bernei, a member of Conner’s council came in, the taps of his elder-wood cane loud in the room, “then ye wouldnae be laid up on a sick-bed.”
Looking up, Conner shook his head. “Aye, I ken, Elder O’Bernei, I ken, but I believed it to be a show of faith and me diligence if I went to speak with McKoy first. How would ye take it if a strange man summoned yer daughter to his home to marry her without a word from him?”
Sionn’s lips thinned, while his forehead furrowed, shifting the thinning hair that barely covered his crown. “I wouldnae take kindly to that, nay.”
“Then ye ken why I did what I did,” Conner said, shifting and drawing his kilt over his thigh. “What bothers me most is who sent those men and why. It was an ambush, Elder, a bald-faced attack from a sorry fool who will be even sorrier when I get me hands on him.”
“Hmph,” Sionn came closer, his old, weathered face inscrutable. “And what about the McKoy lass?”
“What d’ye mean?” Conner asked, stepping off the bed and looking at his closest advisor. “We’ll wed. That is the order of our dear King, isn’t it?”
“It’s a foolish order,” the man snorted. “What is the sense? Ye have had other lasses to court, better lasses to court. Look at the McDonald lass, I—”
“Doubt she would have flung a dagger into one of the attackers’ head or use a sword like Lady Olivia had done today.” Conner swallowed, thinking of how fearlessly Olivia had fought for him— for them. “What’s more, even if we had courted, she had her hat set on the Turner lad since her eyes were at her knees. I’d have made a cuckold the day after the marriage.”
“He is a poor mockery of ye,” Sionn sniffed.
“Despite it all,” Conner said as he went to the doorway, “I am going to be a married man, His Highness’s irrefutable orders.”
Leaving the room, he headed up to where Olivia’s rooms were as he had to speak with her a little more. He was still awed that a lady like her could handle a weapon so effortlessly. When had she learned—why had she learned? As he came to the corridor, he saw the guard posted at her door standing with his hand on his sword.
