“Yer brew,” the chieftain commanded to another one of his men, and then caught something in his hand. “Drink this.” He held the nozzle of a small hide skin sack to her lips. “It’ll dull the pain.”
She glared at him with tears misting her eyes. “Did you kill Amish and John?”
He stared at her, unaffected by her sorrow. “I dinna kill old men. They are no’ here. Now drink the brew.” The intensity of his piercing gaze compelled her to obey.
She covered his hand with hers and took a long guzzle. Then she began to choke. Mother Mary! She had never tasted anything so foul! It was like drinking liquid fire. Her skin tinged green, and she shivered so violently her teeth rattled. She brought her hand to her mouth to stop herself from crying out . . . or from throwing up.
“It’ll pass.” Her captor moved slightly away and commanded her to look at him. When she did, his eyes fastened onto hers, and something in their ardent depths told her he did not expect to see weakness in her. She inhaled deeply. He would not find it.
“It’s poison,” she finally coughed.
“’Tis only whiskey.” A smile lurked at the edges of his mouth, but that was the only evidence of softness in his striking features. An instant later, even that was gone. “Where is yer uncle?”
“For the last time, I don’t know.” Kate closed her eyes to stop herself from weeping all over her enemy. Amish and John had been like foster fathers to her and Robert. Dear God, where were they? Where was her uncle? “He was here earlier. We were to leave for Inverary tomorrow. He must have fled when he saw the McColls.”
“True to his cowardly Campbell nature.”
Kate looked up at him. Cowardly was killing old men, or slicing open her father’s spine as one of this vermin’s kin had done. “Take your filthy hands off me, MacGregor.”
For a terrifying moment, Kate thought she might be looking at the Devil MacGregor himself. For his eyes were the color of fire: blue-gold embers that singed her flesh as they regarded her beneath the sable fringe of his lashes. Then his mouth crooked into a ruthless smirk as he opened his arms and released her.
Kate grasped his forearm to keep herself from slipping from his lap and crashing to the ground. She gritted her teeth as a fresh assault of withering pain ripped through her. “Damnation,” she swore, narrowing her eyes on him through a haze of tears. “You bastard.”
Her insult earned her a look of cool indifference. “Though ye look like ye could use some coddlin’, I dinna have the heart fer it.”
“I expected no less from a MacGregor,” she countered, then stiffened and grimaced when his arm snapped around her again.
The pain was beginning to dull, along with her senses. Dear God, she’d never been wounded so. Damn the McColls. Raiding her cattle was one thing. Trying to kill her was another. They had never done the like before. But today, because her uncle’s guardsmen had joined in the melee, the McColls had fought to kill. When two of the Highlanders swung at her, she’d had no choice but to unsheathe her blade and fight back. After over a quarter of an hour, her strength had been drained and she knew she could not hold them off much longer. She’d thought she was going to die. Though she had spent many years learning to wield a sword, no straw opponent could have prepared her for true fighting. She had been frightened many times in her life—three years ago, when the crop had failed and she’d thought her small family was going to starve. When her nursemaid Helen grew ill with the fever and did not recover. And after that, when Robert left and the wind howled and battered against her door at night, like a demon trying to enter. But she had never been as frightened as today, too weary to save her life, waiting for the strike of someone’s cold blade to cut through her flesh. Then he came.
She was not afraid of the MacGregor laird, though when she had first laid eyes on him sitting atop his great warhorse, the hilt of a bloody claymore clutched in his hand and a dozen dead McColls around him, she had been certain her death was imminent. But instead of killing her, he saved her life. Even after she had wounded him, he fought to protect her. Why would a MacGregor do the like?
Her head suddenly felt too heavy to hold up. Just before her eyes closed, she gazed up at the warrior cradling her in his arms. He smelled of heather and mist. The scent covered her, going straight to her head. The sun hovered just behind him, splashing light over his shoulders like a golden mantle, reminding her of Robert’s tales of Camelot. She smiled and then went limp in his arms.
Callum watched her head loll back, spilling her hair over his arm. His gaze fell across her throat, over the beguiling mound of her bosom pushed slightly upward by the brown bodice cinching her waist. God’s fury, he must be going daft, but he found her completely mesmerizing. She fit so perfectly in his arms. Indeed, he had the feeling that they had been crafted this way and he hadn’t known she was missing until this very day. Nae, he reminded himself, she was a Campbell, someone he was born to hate.
He had come here to kill the Earl of Argyll, not to save the bastard’s niece. He looked away from her, and his eyes burned with frustration. “Gather the men and let us be away from here.”
“And the lass?” Graham asked before turning to the others.
“Well, I dinna want her if she canna hold her whiskey.” Coming up behind them, Angus laughed when his laird tossed him back his pouch.
She had held it better than most, Callum decided, unable to help himself from looking at her again. Others usually retched after just one sip of Gillis’s potent brew. The way this woman had fought the whiskey’s worst effect revealed the kind of strength he valued and had never expected to find in a Campbell.
“I’m takin’ her,” Callum said, raising his gaze back to his men. “If Argyll wants to see his niece alive again, he will have to find me and finally face me in battle.”
“And if he finds our holding in Skye?” Graham asked.
“Let him.” Callum’s snarl was razor sharp. “He fears me and will nae doubt garner another army to bring with him. We will see them coming from ten leagues away and strike them doun as we did in Kildun. Argyll will die slowly, though.”
“What if the lass dies before we reach Skye?” Jamie asked, dropping a small pink bud he’d been inspecting in exchange for the girl. Her skin was deathly pale and her breathing shallow.
“Ye dinna die from an arrow in yer shoulder,” Brodie scoffed.
Angus swiped him in the chest with his fist. “How’s he supposed to know that? We’ve never seen an arrow in a lass before.”
“Women are more delicate than men,” Graham agreed, tossing a lingering glance on the lass in Callum’s arms. “She’s a bonny one too.”
“What in damnation does that have to do wi’ anything?” Angus asked after another deep pull of his brew.
