“Or mayhap you require more lessons?”
He chuckled, and bent down to kiss her. The noise stopped him, which they both heard. Brenna raised a questioning brow. Garrick had had forewarning from Ivarr, and so guessed accurately.
“You should be pleased,” he said. “The dangerous prisoner has just been chained.”
The sound made sense to her now. “To a wall?”
He shrugged indifferently. “Merely secured to it, I should imagine.”
Brenna snorted. “She is not dangerous.”
“Selig must think so.”
Garrick had not been present for that bath incident, but she had. “What Selig undoubtedly thinks is that she will hate it. I believe our son has a number of things in store for her that he hopes she will not like.”
“So that is the revenge he will take?”
“Or merely part of it. He would not say what he means to do with her. ’Twould seem we must wait to find out the same as she…”
A while later they were awakened by more noise, but this much more obvious, Kristen shouting, Royce growling back, a crash as one of them tackled the other to the floor out in the hall. It was anyone’s guess which one.
Brenna started to get up. Garrick pulled her back down with a sigh. “We could have wished he had chosen a less quiet hour to chastise her.”
She squirmed to get loose of his hold, but that was one thing she had never been able to accomplish. “She does not appear to agree she needschastisement.”
“Like mother, like daughter.”
She ignored that to demand huffily, “You are going to do naught?”
“And what would you have me do when Royce is justified in his grievance? She would not be getting this chastisement if he did not love her. She acted foolhardy. Even she knows it—which is why she is protesting so loudly.”
“That makes as little sense as everything else going on around here today,” Brenna grumbled.
“Were she not guiltyandfeeling it, shewould have just said so. Instead she shouts excuses.”
“Valid ones, from what I can hear.”
“Not valid enough to ignore the risk she took. Royce could have brought Selig home just as easily, without her help. If she had no husband right now to point that out to her, I would do it.”
He grunted from a punch in his side that he got just before she rolled on top of him. “You know better than to account women helpless, Viking. I say Kristen did the right thing, the same thing I would have done.”
“Then mayhap she is not the only one who needs chastisement.”
“I would advise you not to try it.”
Garrick thought about it, he really did. When she challenged him like that, it raised his fighting instinct every time. But he could not see having his wife mad at him over a moot point.
“’Tis well, then, that you were not here to take her place.” And he kissed her before she could take the argument any further.
Chapter 22
ERIKA AWOKE TOraised voices and the bright light of a new morn pushing at heavy eyelids. The voices she recognized with little difficulty—Selig’s and his sister’s. She had had more difficulty, though, recognizing the same sort of shouting with the addition of loud thuds when it had awakened her sometime in the middle of the night.
So much racket had occurred, she had wondered aloud, “Are we being invaded?”
She had not expected an answer, but got one, for the noise had awakened Selig, too. “Do not sound so hopeful, wench. ’Tis only Royce chasing my sister. Likely he has recalled that he owes her a beating.”
Kristen would blame that on Erika, too. Another reason to hate her. But right now it seemed she was blaming it on Selig—nay, that was not what they were arguing about.
