“I do not know. Ye ha’ yer knife?”
“To be sure.” A man always had a knife. But it would not help much against attack by a man wielding a sword. Or if they came while he slept.
Bradana sat down beside his cot where Wen had been. “D’ye feel any better?”
“Aye.” Only a half-lie. He felt much better now that she had returned.
“Can I get somewhat for ye? Food or drink? Another bolster—”
“Mayhap by and by. Just… For now, just stay wi’ me.”
She did, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes resting on him. Her eyes were perhaps her greatest beauty, large and fringed by brown lashes. If one did not count that glorious hair. Or those lovely breasts.
No matter what she looked like, he had a powerful attraction to her, now alive in the chamber.
“There is somewhat I must say,” she told him. “I feel, in duty—indeed, in decency—bound to do so. For your own good and for the sake o’ your safety. Adair MacMurtray, go home.”
His heart fell. Even though returning to Erin was the greatest wish of his heart—almost.
Steadily he asked her, “Is that what ye wish, Bradana? To see me away?”
Her clasped fingers tightened till they turned white. “Better to ask me what I do no’ want. I do no’ want to see ye beaten so, and I do no’ want to see ye lying dead.”
He looked her in the eye. “Ye think they will go so far as to commit murder?”
“I think my stepbrothers are sometimes very wrong in the head. They might well think they can solve a problem by stabbing ye in the back and tossing ye in the sea.”
When Adair did not reply to that, she went on, “The visitations from your twa brothers caused much consternation. Those here were happy to be rid of them. Only for ye to arrive.”
“They are out o’ patience.”
“I fear so.”
“And”—his lips twisted in a wry smile—“should I then take a failure back to my father? He already thinks me good for little more than telling amusing stories and singing songs.”
“Better he should receive a failure than a corpse.”
A longer silence fell between them. Adair pulled at the rug that covered his knees. Bradana sat quietly, though her clenched fingers did not relax. Outside the open doorway, a whisper of wind stirred. Evening came on, breathing the coming dark.
Adair lay and fought his impulses. So strong were they that even though he knew better, he could not keep from speaking.
“And, Mistress Bradana, what about ye and me?”
Slowly she lifted her eyes to him. “There is no ye and me.”
“There should no’ be, perhaps. Yet there is.”
Quite clearly, he heard the breath catch in her throat. “There is no ye and me,” she repeated. “Have I no’ told ye there canna be?”
“Ye have told me, aye. Ye are set to wed a northern chief, to leave here and go to live with him. Despite that, I find that somewhat does exist between us.”
“It cannot.”
“I understand that. Yet can ye deny it does? Bradana, ’tis as if somewhat”—he struggled almost violently for the words—“somewhat existed between us even before we met.”
She could have denied it, or tried to. Could have used the wordridiculous, or called it fanciful. Naught more than imagination embellishing attraction. Instead, she said nothing.
“If I go home,” he said unsteadily, “and you wed to fulfill this alliance, we would quite likely never see one another again.”
