Sighing, he lay back again, determined to try.
But he’d no sooner closed his eyes and drifted into the sweet bliss of a deep, dreamless sleep when the sound of hastening footfalls woke him.
That, and the renewed surge of red-hot fire tingles in his legs when Buckie stirred and pushed slowly to his feet.
Trying again not to curse, Ronan once more opened his eyes, this time staring up into the smoking, hissing flames of a handheld rush light.
A few sparks dropped onto his chest and he brushed at them, frowning.
Now he knew what had disturbed Buckie.
He blinked. Then he raised a hand to wave away the smoke from in front of his eyes, half wondering if he’d wakened in the fires of hell.
Before he could decide, the rush light moved and he saw Anice, the large-eyed slip of a serving lass, peering down at him. Her throat worked convulsively and her thin little face looked white as the moon.
“O-o-oh, sir!” she cried. “You must come at once! They’ve ravaged your bedchamber and —”
“What?” Ronan blinked again, the last dredges of sleep making it hard to think. “They who?”
The girl shook her head so rapidly that one of her thin black braids slipped from its pins. “I’m sure I dinna care to know,” she wailed, and then Ronandidknow.
He leaped from the pallet. “Lady Gelis,” he demanded, snatching up his plaid. “Is she harmed?”
“Nae, sir, she’s fussing about the fine victuals having been tossed out the window.”
At the niche’s opening, Buckie dropped onto his haunches and whined.
Ronan’s eyes widened. “The repast I ordered? It was tossed out the window?”
Anice looked down at the rush light in her hand, unable to meet his eye. “Aye, that’s the way of it, my lord. The lady thinks it was you what did it.”
The Raven’s stomach clenched, an icy dread streaking down his spine.
Whipping around, he dashed from the little niche to sprint across the darkened hall, making for the stair tower. He raced up the winding stairs, taking them two at a time and not even bothering to curse when, almost at the top, a misstep caused him to slam his bare toes full into one of the unyielding stone steps.
Pain shot up his leg and made his eyes water, but he didn’t even scowl.
There’d be time enough for that later.
He hadn’t expected the Holders to move so quickly.
Nor, he realized, hearing Buckie clumping up the stairs behind him, would he have believed how much Lady Gelis’s safety meant to him.
Somehow, somewhere in the brief span of time since she’d first flashed him her brilliant smile and he’d dreamed of kissing her on some narrow strip of shingled shore, she’d become more than a well-born lass he wished to keep from harm.
She’d become important to him.
And that was a greater danger than the Holders and all their unholy mist wraiths combined.
A greater danger indeed.
And one he wasn’t at all sure he could conquer.
He just knew that he must.
Chapter Six
Prepared for the worst, Ronan burst into his bedchamber only to come to a skittering, undignified halt. Far from requiring rescue, Lady Gelis knelt calmly on the bearskin rug in front of the hearthstone, her delectably rounded bottom bobbing in the air as she jabbed an iron poker at a tidy pile of just-beginning-to-smolder peat bricks.
