His Judas Bride

by Shehanne Moore

  She passed her tongue over her lips. “M-my hands?”

  He raised his chin, letting a tiny smile play. The one he reserved for such moments. How sweet was this? The way she widened her eyes and contorted her lips. Did she honestly think he was going to hang her? Here? Now? If she did, so much the better. Although already the way she drew back was not encouraging and he’d still to get her to McDunnagh Castle for what he did best but liked least.

  “No.”

  What the blazes did she mean no? Shaking her head like that as if to underline the fact? It was a rope not a viper.

  “Hell. Your hands. Give me them.”

  “No.” She huffed a sharp breath. “I won’t. I won’t be bound.”

  Aware his own hands shook, or he would grab her damned hands, he knitted his brows furiously. Gritted his teeth too. “What the hell do you mean you won’t be bound?”

  “What I say.”

  He refused to be moved by whatever little act this was. People were watching. He didn’t want them watching his god-awful inability to control his wife. He would. If he’d to hold a dagger to her throat, he would. He relaxed his face muscles. He wouldn’t show he was ruffled either.

  “Experiencing a little bit of difficulty with that promise of yours to oblige me in whatever way I want, already? Not that promises are exactly your strong suit. Now, are they?”

  Her narrowing eyes cut like indigo blades. That was all right because his lips were experts at curving in response. He didn’t even have to force them. Now she might do what she was told. At last. He had struck a chord in her seamless subterranean soul.

  It was nothing to what resounded off his jaw. Her hand had shot out, and the sharp smack reverberated all around the yard and those standing there.

  He stood for a second. Deserved it, did he? Hell, he wasn’t sure, but he wondered for a stunned second. Better ignored? Well, now he fingered his jaw, then worked it back and forth, and around and around, put his finger in and everything, he realized—his jaw wasn’t actually broken, was it? Felt like it. But that was all. He could still speak. At least, he hoped he could.

  And she… He drew down his brows.

  “I demand due treatment.”

  What? While it pained him, he squared his jaw. “Oh, you do, do you?”

  “Yes. As your wife.”

  Wife? In spite of everything, the trouble she’d put him to, to find her, the fact she’d whored herself in his bed for almost four days, that humiliating marriage, he fought the urge to laugh out loud.

  Who was this woman? At least the damned jade didn’t beg, or grovel, or try coiling a serpent’s path around his heart, with tender words about all they had meant to each other. She kept it straight and simple. And if he were to measure on a scale of one to ten how deeply she quaked in her boots about what she’d just done, he wasn’t too sure about that either.

  He was starting to suspect, in five years, he’d never had a better adversary. The fact she was a woman only added to the piquancy.

  Incredibly, just when he didn’t want it to, the treacherous thought flashed back through his mind like a lightning bolt. He’d never had a better lover either.

  What was the point in denying it? Or that his body didn’t crave her the way a drunk did whiskey? So it was an agony to stand here. Especially when she stood so close that the same breeze which didn’t quite cool his skin, ruffled her hair beneath his nose.

  Why couldn’t he see that she plainly refused to cringe, or grovel, or put out her hands, because she plainly believed she could escape though?

  He needed answers. Already he felt she was the least likely to give them to him.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong on this particular point of etiquette, but here was me thinking you divorced me. Now, put your damned hands out or I’ll gag you as well.”

  Gag? If this damned bastard came within so much of a quarter inch of her mouth with anything remotely resembling a muffler, he was dead. Kara had no idea how. The details were unimportant. But he was. If he took one more step, just one.

  Ma was so right about men. Kara should have bloody bashed her brains out before she ever wished for this. Him. Here. An answer of sorts. Just not the one she wanted.

  Of course she didn’t have the means to do it. To bash her brains out either. She never did. But the black, blinding rage that filled her senses—she could wish, couldn’t she?

  She dragged a ragged breath and thrust her hands out, narrowly missing his chest.

  “Hell. That’s better.”

  “Is it?” She jerked up her chin. “Well, it’s like this. I’d offer my apologies. But something tells me you’re in no mood to accept them right now.”

  He loomed closer, looping the rope around her wrists. “Right first time. And I won’t be in any mood to accept them later, either, if that’s what you’re thinking in that pretty little head of yours. So how about you keep your lying mouth shut?”

  “With pleasure.”

  And yet, when it would help matters greatly if she knew whether she simply faced him as an unfaithful wife or whether he had somehow discovered why she’d come here, wouldn’t it be better to take that pull on herself? Sweep out this rage that consumed her like a tide? Calm this awful trembling that shook from the tips of her toes all the way up her legs?

  Kendrick lay dead. And while she did not wish to speak ill of the dead, that the murdering son of a toad was here at all confused things. Although noticeably the Wolf didn’t seem to think Kendrick had kidnapped her, extricating herself from this mess mattered most. If Kendrick didn’t return—and he couldn’t, could he, unless it was in a box—then she must think how that placed Arland, Kertyn, and Ardene. Placed herself. She must think many things.

  But the business of the rope was too alarming. She hardly needed reminding what ropes meant. She lowered her gaze, dragged into focus, as if observing from a distant star, where she was a different person, a different woman, one who was calm, ordered, whose life was not in this sorry mess, an unintelligible fact.

  This man who loomed over her, his glare, sufficient to freeze oceans and continents and keep them crystallized in subterranean depths, for centuries to come—his hands shook.

  His bruising attempts to fasten the hemp bracelet demonstrated any minute now he was going to fling the rope on the ground. Maybe even stamp on it.

  Of course she had conspicuously failed to observe he was as much a master of patience, or docility as she was at biting her tongue. Yet she must conclude she had never seen the likes. Didn’t the terror of two glens want to tie her up?

  “I mean it about the gag.” He huffed out a breath as if perhaps he knew precisely what she was thinking. “So I’d just come quietly if you know what’s good for you.”

  “Certainly.” This was like that moment in the cave when he had wiped her face with his tunic. Ridiculous when what she needed was to reconstruct this, she should find herself looking for that man, the one who would find this as chronically overblown as she did. But she had gazed at the moon, hadn’t she? And it had dazzled her. “Just let me know when you’ve managed to tie the rope.”

  Stupid when his response was to yank the knot so tight, she smothered a gasp.

  “In a hurry to say goodbye to your lover, are you?”

  “My—”

  “Let’s get something straight here and now, sweetheart. I saw your little play through the window there. The little…”

  Oh God, he didn’t have to show her, did he? She knew exactly what he meant without him brushing the open neck of her tunic with his knuckle. And if that was the reason a dagger sat in both these men’s hearts, well, it was good that he had seen it, in terms of how she could play this. So each breath prickling and burning as if someone had put a torch to her lungs was unwelcome. As was the desire to tell him not to be so damned stupid.

  “And I don’t think you limped all these weary miles through frost and snow, just to say hello to him. You see, I think desperation for him must have laid waste to that
lustful soul of yours.”

  It was the fact Kendrick had murdered Lachlan, wasn’t it, that made these words so shocking, she could hardly stand to hear them? And nothing to do with the marks of sleeplessness that stood out on his handsome face, as if he was tormented close to madness?

  “But that’s all right.” He snapped the knot tighter. “As we both know, you weren’t exactly faithful to him and I think, in the dark, I can satisfy your desperation just as well.”

  Although the blood drained from her cheeks—why on earth had she asked for due treatment as a wife—she faced him squarely. “Well, if you desire congratulations, for your prowess…”

  “Unless you tell me he kidnapped you?”

  She parted her lips. Now she’d be the one being damned stupid though. If this man wanted her to tell him she’d been kidnapped, would he now have a rope around her wrists? Even for a man of his reputation it was a little extreme.

  “Because you do know, this marriage has never been consummated.”

  Well, of course.

  “Now, let’s go.”

  With this bitter cold cutting knives through her and rivulets of water easing down her spine in the places where the tunic didn’t stick, she would join Kendrick in no time. Then she and Kendrick could go to hell together. Her lips parted faintly. It was probably the idea.

  It would be a mistake to show she was afraid. Certainly to him. As the way this had turned around on her over Kendrick and Lachlan there just now had clearly shown, it was wrong to underestimate him, just because he fumbled with the rope. It was wrapped around her wrists now, wasn’t it? As for begging, look where that had gotten her. She straightened her shoulders.

  “By all means.”

  Chapter Ten

  As the Wolf reined Satan to a halt, Kara wished she had not said the words about means. Although her inability to obey him in the matter of dismounting was as much down to the fact her spine felt as if it had snapped in five, if not six places, her legs were cramped, and Maisie’s old cloak clung heavily to her quivering form, as it was down to those means.

  Of course horses and her didn’t exactly agree. So her hair had stood on end to realize that not only did he expect her to mount Satan’s back, he was unprepared to wait until she had and set off tugging the animal behind him, with her hanging over the saddle. But only after first arguing with Wee Murdie about the logistics of it and leaving an old hen—Maisie—already daft as a big enough brush, apparently, with a corpse on her doorstep, too.

  Kara didn’t doubt Maisie’s cloak dug the Wolf out of a hole. Her too, since she’d have faced the humiliation and indignity, not to mention the perishing cold, of having her backside in the air the whole way here. She was able to sit on the horse properly after that. As he sat behind her, she wasn’t sure of just how much of a reprieve that was.

  Maisie hadn’t just put the cloak on Kara, she’d elbowed his ribs and given a lecture about making other men jealous showing off his bride like that. It had improved his temper not a wit, especially when Maisie also told him, one visit from him in a day was enough.

  Kara knew she hadn’t helped things—unless she had something to say that greatly improved silence, she should hold her tongue apparently—but she had wanted to know where they were going. Now she knew.

  “I said…”

  She registered the need to move, although registering the need to move and being dragged in the next instant down from Satan’s back, were very different. No doubt he thought she was going to bolt. It was the most distressing thing about all this. The fact there hadn’t been a single opportunity. He hadn’t let her out of his sight.

  Distressing apart from being here that was. McDunnagh Castle.

  Hoping her extravagant gesture of obedience would convince him to release her wrist, she straightened her shoulders. To think she had been prepared to sacrifice her son for this. A man who couldn’t even be bothered to look at her and who turned his attention to unfastening Satan’s girth? He had ridden here at a speed that could conceivably have killed them both. The horse too. As for bringing her here, to this place…

  Her eyes brimmed.

  “Well, by Christ.”

  A shudder ran down what remained of Kara’s spine. A voice, the very last voice she wanted to hear in the world right now, when she’d been so hoping that wherever they were going the place might run to some warm water and the possibility of escape, streamed with the moonlight across the castle yard.

  “If it’s not Lord and Lady Perfect.”

  Kara drew a shallow breath. Ewen McDunnagh’s barrel-like body blocked the keep door. When she rode beneath the stone archway, had she thought things could get no worse? Now she acknowledged they just had.

  Her prayer that he would be lying drunk somewhere had not been answered. None of her prayers had.

  “Well, come in, won’t ye? The castle awaits.”

  Kara was sure it did. In every respect. She swallowed. So much of her life had revolved around fear and shock, little paths of darkness she had managed to find her way along, to places where she’d managed to survive.

  It had not broken her. Because the thing she had to care about was always there for her to see. No matter how dark the night.

  To tell herself it was all gone, lost at Maisie’s croft door, that would be an act of unparalleled folly. She wasn’t going to, was she?

  Not when the reason stood here, cool as the air about her face and his. Not a care in the world sitting on his shoulders, for all a second ago she’d felt his flaming hardness, the smolder of his body, all along the lines of her own. And not just a second ago, but for the whole journey here.

  She had her pride, if nothing else. She would sweep in there. Yet it was hard to think how she would when she also saw clearly as the silver moon above her head that she hadn’t lost Arland at the croft door. She had lost him a long time ago.

  Until this moment she just hadn’t wanted to see she had.

  A wooden step creaked beneath Ewen McDunnagh’s weight.

  While she must consider the Wolf’s bringing her here meant he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, she wasn’t simply an unfaithful bride—God only knew how, but he did—it was difficult what she now envisioned to stand here and imagine that he hadn’t also considered the jeopardy it placed her in. Himself with but a handful of men to protect her.

  Maybe he just meant to frighten her into compliance? Maybe he just hadn’t thought it through, the seething temper he was in? Occasioned—no, she was not a fool—by her physical presence. But he had to have known, so it was also difficult to understand his ruthlessness, his brutality. All the things she had in fact heard of him and while acknowledging them, had chosen to ignore when she placed herself in his bed, because his bed held dangers more insidious than she had ever known. And really, nothing in her sorry excuse for a life had prepared her for what it had been like when he took her body.

  Sipping a breath, she edged backward. One step. She took care her boots didn’t squelch. No. She would sooner do it even if the snow was hard packed and she was likely to slip, than stand here like tonight’s choice. Serenne. Wynn. They would cheer her on. It was as much as was left to her now.

  “So? Ewen?”

  Considering the concentrated effort with which the Wolf tugged that girth and his men stood about chatting and doing likewise, none of them were likely to see.

  “Are you the sole welcoming party?”

  “Wouldn’t ye like to know?” Another step creaked.

  “Hell, Ewen.” The Wolf frowned. “Knowing the single, solitary person you can’t stand most on the face of this earth is yourself, I’d be mesmerized.”

  How true that was. It was one of many things that had driven her insane about living here. The comings and goings. The noise at all times of the day and night. Him. And that drunken coterie of friends he surrounded himself with. Yet the yard was deserted. Eerily so. No groom scurried out to take the horses, despite light glowing in the stables. No clatter of crockery from th
e kitchens. Or dreadful bagpipe drone laboring from the bowels of the keep.

  “Really, brother?”

  Of course an enemy chief’s daughter was valuable. But an enemy chief’s disgraced daughter? If that was somehow known, to more than Ewen. And it must be. Her heart pounded. She was right about this, wasn’t she? While it made it more imperative she reach the gates, how was she to do that past these empty, darkened windows? Silent corners where, if the castle was empty… Her foot hovered.

  Ewen came another step closer, so she could see the moonlight glinting on the spittle beading his beard. “In competition with her for that honor, am I?”

  “What honor is this?”

  “The honor of mesmerizing you?”

  Judging from the way the Wolf stood, his head bent, the wind lifting his soft hair in the burning torchlight, it was very obvious that the only thing mesmerizing him was Satan’s girth.

  Ewen had reached the bottom of the stairs now and his gaze fixed itself on Kara with a great deal more hungry speculation than previously. Kara did not know what to do. If she knew what was in these corners, if she had not lost everything, at least, she would not inch that step, that one she meant to take toward the gate, into the Wolf’s moonlit shadow instead.

  He eased the last bit of the girth free. “Did you get my message?”

  Ewen rubbed the back of his neck. “Aye. Aye I did. About half an hour ago, it was. From Big Billy Kelty.”

  Kara very much hoped that silly whimper didn’t come from her. Messages had been sent on the way here. She just hadn’t thought it was to Ewen McDunnagh, of all people. So now she’d edged like this… Her chest constricted so, it strangled her breath.

  The Wolf raised his head. “And was it agreeable to you?”

  “Christ, but that’s good of ye to ask, Callm. You dinnae usually when ye help yourself te mah things. The castle. The woman.”

  Her scalp froze. The clink of steel was short inches from her face. She couldn’t for a second believe it. Or the hand that descended on her arm. These men, these few Brotherhood men, whose hatred of her couldn’t have been more evident had they hung placards around her neck saying “That Woman’s a Bitch” stood in a steel ring around her.