They ate in companionable silence, enjoying the sound of the drumming of rain on the roof. Once he'd put away half of his meal, Kieran shared a few details of the fruitless patrol he and his men had been on that morning – they'd been hoping that the impending bad weather would drive the thieves back to their hideout, but the weather had caught them before the thieves had returned, and they'd had to ride back to the castle in the pouring rain, empty-handed.
"Next time," she consoled him with a smile, reaching out to put a hand on his forearm. She heard his breath catch in his throat at her touch, gazed up into his blue-gray eyes as he turned to look at her... and then, like it was the most natural thing in the world, he leaned down and closed the space between them, claiming her lips in a kiss that was unapologetic and surprising in its passion. She blinked up at him when it was over, shocked and delighted – and more than a little worried that she'd imagined it.
Kieran cleared his throat. "I've been wanting to do that for a while."
"Me too," she said faintly, her heart thudding against the inside of her chest. "I wasn't sure if you felt the same."
"Well. I do."
Silence fell between them again, Kieran turning his attention back to his meal… but she could see the hint of a smile in his eyes, the big man clearly making a conscious effort to keep it off his face. She grinned to herself, turning back to her own lunch, and let the comfortable silence linger between them. She was very, very glad that the storm had stopped her leaving the castle that morning. Kieran certainly wouldn't have wanted to kiss her if he'd known what she'd been planning… a twinge of guilt stirred, and then was banished.
At any rate, the weather made the proposition of leaving the castle an impossibility for the next three days. But Kieran and Sarah certainly found ways to keep themselves busy. They must have found just about every discrete place in the castle to meet – places that weren't necessarily secretive but were rarely visited. Places where they wouldn't be disturbed… places where they could spend a good amount of time getting to know each other more intimately. Nothing more forward than kissing, of course – Kieran behaved like a perfect gentleman, though sometimes the look in his eyes when he broke away from a long, passionate kiss suggested he might have some other ideas about what they could do together…
And Sarah, for her part, could feel herself falling for this man harder than she'd fallen for anyone before. She was no stranger to dating, of course – no stranger even to making out. But it had never felt like this before… the electricity that coursed up and down her spine, the way her body seemed to thrill to his touch. Her dreams were full of him… full of activities that went a long way beyond their clandestine kissing. And the more time they spent together, the more heat their contact seemed to generate… and the more desperate she was to get him alone in a room with a bed in it.
But that idea came with a whole host of concerns that she wasn't quite ready to deal with. She found herself thinking more and more about it, feeling the pressure mounting… not from Kieran, of course, who never pushed her toward anything beyond their passionate make-out sessions, but from her own greedy desire for him. She wanted to have sex with him, that was the truth… but what if she did? It wasn't as though condoms were in good supply here, was it? She'd never been on any other kind of birth control, either… and as happy as she knew her friends Carissa and Edith were to be with child, it wasn't exactly high on her list to fall pregnant out of wedlock in medieval Scotland. As much as she liked Kieran, she didn't see herself parenting a child with him any time soon.
And further to that… this was medieval Scotland. The men she'd met so far had treated her with respect, true, but it was impossible to know what the attitudes were to premarital sex. Sure, the servants gossiped about love affairs blossoming between people all the time – but she'd never quite figured out exactly how much sex people were having before marriage. What if she had sex with Kieran and was promptly branded a slut? Would it ruin her reputation, make it impossible for her to live here?
She knew she should talk to Maria, or Edith, or Carissa – women who lived here, who knew better than most what it was like. But part of her was reluctant to give away the delicious secret of her blossoming romance with Kieran just yet. She knew all three of them would be delighted to hear what was going on… but she didn't want them to know just yet. Just for the time being, she wanted him all to herself.
The days crept by. She considered returning the supplies she'd sequestered away in her room, but something stopped her… she had no intention of going any time soon, but part of her liked having the means to up and leave whenever she wanted to, so she kept the bag in the bottom of her wardrobe for safety, covered in a few spare gowns that Edith had given her so that any prying eyes wouldn't find it straight away. A kind of medieval bug-out bag, something that she could grab and go if she needed to… and she still might need to. Because no matter how much she might have been enjoying the new dimension to her relationship to Kieran, no matter how comfortable she got in the castle, no matter how much her concern strayed toward the bandit plague and the safety of the villagers and people of the castle… still, DeBeers burned in her mind like a brand.
She wasn't going to forget about him, and she wasn't going to give up on tracking him down. All she could do was hope that that wouldn't interfere with her relationship with Kieran… or her friendship with Maria and the other women of the castle.
"That look in your eye," he said to her over dinner one night, quite abruptly.
Her mind had strayed back to the question of DeBeers, as it so often did, especially when silence fell and her thoughts were left idle… thoughts of whether he was eating dinner right now, too, out there somewhere in the night… plotting his next move…
"Sarah."
"Hmm?"
He chuckled at her, clearly exasperated and amused, but there was a shadow in his eyes she didn't much like the look of. It was a shadow that indicated he was onto her. "You get this look on your face sometimes. Like you're a thousand miles away from here."
"Further," she said quietly, thinking of home. Thinking of the first she'd ever heard of DeBeers… thinking that if she'd only skipped over that case and picked up another on the agency's database, that she never might have found her way here…
"I wonder where it is you go," he said softly.
She bit her lip, feeling suddenly like she was betraying him by thinking those thoughts. "Back home, sometimes," she said, wanting to share some part of the truth with him… without quite bringing up the subject that always made his expression darken. "The path that led me here. Here to you," she added, a little daring, tilting her head whimsically.
But his expression only softened momentarily. "Thinking of your man?" he asked, a cryptic look on his face. "Your murdering jewel thief?"
"Sometimes," she said, masking her discomfiture. How had he known? He was so quiet, so closed-off… but with a wickedly insightful streak that sometimes made her wonder if he was reading her mind. "I mean, he was a pretty big part of my life before I came here. I'd been chasing him for… nearly a year."
"Had been?" he asked, tilting his head a little.
She exhaled in a rush. "Kieran, I'm not going to pretend I don't still want to catch him. But you've said it's too dangerous, so I'm staying put, okay? I'm not going to pretend to have forgotten all about the man I spent most of the last year of my career hunting. And I'm not going to pretend to have forgotten what I do for a living," she added, feeling an old grievance flare to life in her chest. "I'm a good detective, Kieran. My skills are being wasted here."
He sighed, reaching out briefly to touch her hand, and she looked up at him, hopeful that he might offer her… something. Some hope, some tiny olive branch. To let her help with the bandit investigation, perhaps, or bring her onboard as a guard… anything.
"You'll find new skills," was all he said.
She bit back her anger. What had she been expecting? For all his charms, Kieran was a man. And she'd
been underrated and undervalued by men her whole damn career.
And in that moment, she was very, very glad she still had the satchel, stashed away secretly in her room.
Chapter 15
Troubling news began to drift in from the village over the next few days, and Sarah was able to distract herself from her ongoing grievance against Kieran and his refusal to let her help by getting across as much as the gossip as possible. It seemed that the work of the castle guards wasn't going unnoticed by the bandits that roamed the area. Without Kieran and his men, it seemed, their thieving and robberies would be going a great deal better – they were growing frustrated with having to leave the roads when the guards patrolled, with having their raids on farms interrupted by armed men.
"How do you know all this?" Sarah asked one of her sources, a groom in the stables with a pair of huge blue eyes and an over-excitable demeanor. The boy couldn't have been more than seventeen or eighteen, but he spoke wisely about the robbers as though he were one of them.
"There's a pub just outside of town," he said, his eyes gleaming. "Lots of the lads from the stables go there of an evening for a drink or two. Some of the bandit leaders meet there late in the night. The bartenders overhear them, and if you buy them a drink or two they're willing to share."
"Have you told Kieran this information?"
The boy shrugged his shoulders. "I tell him the more interesting bits and pieces, but he seems to always know. He's got his own sources."
Sarah smiled, thinking back to Kieran's last account of his patrols. She'd always wondered why he stopped in and visited with so many of the townsfolk – now she was beginning to suspect that it was more than just a social call. He had a network of informants, keeping him in the loop about what was going on in the countryside. No wonder he and his men were frustrating the bandits so much.
"It's said that one of the bandit leaders has put a bounty on Captain Kieran's head," the groom said softly, shaking his head. "Says anyone who can kill him will be handsomely rewarded."
She bit her lip. Kieran, of course, was no stranger to threats and danger – it was part of the job for any guard, and especially the Captain. But the thought of a bunch of murderous bandits having extra incentive for harming him… well, it made her worry. And it made her worry now a lot more than it would have a few weeks ago, she thought, a blush threatening to rise to her cheeks. A connection occurred to her, though, and she brought it up the next time she was sharing a hearty lunch with Kieran. He'd just come back from a patrol – she'd been so delighted to see him stomping wearily across the courtyard that it had been all she could do to stop herself from throwing herself into his arms. They were still keeping their relationship on the down-low… though she had a suspicion, from the subdued whispers she'd heard around the corridors, that their secrecy might not last much longer. Word traveled incredibly fast in this castle.
"I've heard whispers," she told him, eyes twinkling.
"Oh, aye? You've already established a web of spies, have you?"
"What's a woman without a network of spies to call her own?" she said archly, drawing a rare chuckle from him. That was one of her favorite games, trying to make the taciturn captain laugh. "Anyway, they said you're very unpopular with the bandits."
"Aye, I'm not surprised," he said, shaking his head. "Word I've heard is there's a bounty on my head. Insultingly low, as far as I'm concerned."
"Could that be why they attacked the castle a few weeks ago?" she wanted to know, thinking back to the rather chaotic night of the fire outside of her room. "Were they trying to get to you?"
"Aye, that's a possibility," he acknowledged. "They might also have been hoping for a more substantial fire… hoping to destroy a good chunk of Castle Dunscaith so that we wouldn't have time to keep chasing them during the rebuilding effort. But this place has withstood worse than a few flaming arrows, that's for certain," he said, a smile playing at the corners of his lips. "Scathach built it well. With, no doubt, some protective wards woven in."
Sarah blinked, a little thrown by the casual reference to magic and witchcraft from the taciturn Kieran. "Are you joking?"
"About magic? Why would I be?"
"Because it's… not real," she said, raising an eyebrow.
"Oh, aye? You came here from the distant future on horseback, did you?"
"Unexplained doesn't mean magical, necessarily," she said, irritated by this sudden revelation that the man she was beginning to develop feelings for believed in spells and magical protection. "Just because we don't understand it, doesn't mean it defies comprehension."
"Whatever you say," he said, shrugging his massive shoulders. "All I know is that this castle is said to have been built by the warrior witch Scathach, centuries ago. It's stood strong for all those years, against wind and rain and worse things than these bandits."
"Sure, but –" She shook her head, giving up. "Whatever. Witches. Magic. Fine." She'd had more than enough of trying to argue with Kieran for this week that was for sure. He had this way of digging his heels in when they argued that made her want to fly at him in a rage and shake him. And she was enjoying his company too much to risk too big an argument keeping him away from her… though she might have to reconsider that position if he continued to be such a stubborn jackass about DeBeers.
Hostilities continued to brew, though, over the next few days. Guards were reporting more and more violence from the thieves, who, rather than melting away or fleeing at the sight of them, had started firing arrows when they spotted them. A few injuries – thankfully non-lethal – put several guards out of action, and Kieran was at his wit's end trying to maintain an already over-ambitious patrolling schedule with fewer and fewer men to fill his roster. Sarah even volunteered to go out on patrol herself, though she knew what the answer would be – a firm no. Not until she could handle herself in a sword fight. Well, she was working on it. The men of the guard had a few decades' experience on her, of course, but she'd catch up soon enough. She'd always been a quick learner.
Sarah was sitting in the courtyard, trying to absorb some of the uncommonly strong morning sunlight as she waited for Kieran to get back from patrol. He'd been out overnight, and though he'd been due back before breakfast, she wasn't worried – he often got caught up and wound up running late back to the castle. He'd be apologetic when he arrived, she thought smugly… and that always meant a little extra attention and affection for her. Maybe they'd slip away into the stables today, right down the back, where a clean, empty stall was full of soft, inviting hay…
But when the gates slammed open, she knew right away that something was wrong. For a start, the men opening it weren't calling friendly greetings down as they usually did when Kieran and his men returned. And secondly, there were far more men surging through the gate than she'd been expecting. Kieran had taken a group of four with him – but there were at least ten horses moving through the gate, and her eyes widened when she saw a couple of wagons bringing up the rear, loaded with supplies. There were strangers among the five guards, and she saw with a start that several of them were nursing wounds – one still had an arrow jutting from his chest, wincing every time the movement of his horse jarred the injury.
Kieran roared over his shoulder to shut and bar the gates, and Sarah rose to her feet, running down to meet him, frightened and confused by what was going on. He was uttering low, rapid fire instructions to the four worried-looking guards who had dismounted their horses along with him, and when he looked up at her his drawn expression confirmed that something was terribly wrong.
"What's going on? How can I help?" she asked, feeling her worry give way to the icy calm that traditionally took her over when chaos reigned.
"The bandits," Kieran said grimly, shaking his head. "We were escorting these merchants the last few miles to the village. Usually an armed escort is enough to dissuade them from trying anything… this time, they seemed to have been waiting for us. Dozens of them jumped us on the road into town. I've offered them she
lter here until –"
But he was cut off by a cry from the top of the wall. One of the guards was pointing down the road that led to the village, shouting over his shoulder. Sarah's heart sank in her chest. A group of bandits was approaching the castle – and they seemed to have bows.
"You'd best get inside, Sarah," Kieran said softly, taking her firmly by the arm. "It'll be dangerous out here –"
"I want to help," she said firmly, glaring up at him. "I'm not just going to sit inside while the castle is attacked. I can help."
"Very well," he said, though he didn't look happy about it. "You can help see to the merchants."
A flurry of activity gripped the castle. Laird Cameron was there before long, fetched by the guards, his hand on the sword at his side and a murderous expression on his handsome face. He strode out to the gate, his body tense with anger, spoke in a low voice with Kieran before heading up to the top of the wall to see for himself. It seemed the bandits were gathered some distance from the wall, in surprising numbers, and Laird Cameron's face was drawn when he headed down from his vantage point.
Sarah found ways to help when and where she could. Her first aid training wasn't much, but it was enough to assist the castle's healers with tending to the wounded merchants. The worst of the injuries was the young man with an arrow sticking out of his chest. She'd been worried it might have pierced his lung, but to her relief the arrowhead itself had lodged in his shoulder, not his chest – and though it was painful, it wasn't as deep as it looked. She stood by and held the young man's hand as the healer expertly removed first the arrow shaft, then the barbed head from the wound – and she helped clean and bandage it, too.
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