Both men looked grim. Colyne shook his head. “He is with the men who were traveling to Mull. They’ve not returned.”
“What do you mean they haven’t returned?” Tor exploded. “Even with the added travel time to Iona, they should have been back yesterday.”
Neither man responded. His stomach took a sudden turn as if he’d just swallowed a mouthful of rancid beef. Panic welled up inside him, but he tamped it down. She was fine. There had to be some explanation. But Rhuairi hadn’t finished. “This arrived for you not an hour ago. The messenger said it was for your eyes only.”
Tor unfolded it, the premonition of doom suffocating him.
His heart stopped and the blood drained from his face as he read the crudely written words on the scrap of parchment. Words that changed his life. “Men killed. English took your lady. Dumfries. Do not delay.”
Do not delay. They’d murdered his men and meant to kill her as well.
The loss of his men enraged him. He wanted to kill someone. But the thought of Christina in danger …
Bile rose up the back of his throat. He thought himself fearless, but fear unlike anything he’d ever known consumed him—black, soul-eating fear that tore like acid through the steel encasing his heart. He felt raw. Exposed. And more terrified than he’d ever been in his life.
If the news of her leaving him had jolted him from his emotional stupor, the news that she was now a prisoner of the English was like a lightning rod of clarity, forcing him to acknowledge the truth.
He loved her.
Too late, he realized what a fool he’d been. Stubborn pride in the belief that he was impervious to emotion had blinded him from what had been there all along. It was the reason he could never stop thinking about her. The reason he looked for excuses to spend time with her. The reason it felt so different to make love to her. It was what made him content to hold her in his arms for hours and listen to her voice as she read him those silly, romantic tales. It was the reason he wanted to wake up beside her every day for the rest of his life. It was the reason his chest twisted when he walked into a room and she looked up to see him, a wide smile spreading across her face.
She’d brought warmth back into his life, broken through the icy shell that he’d erected around his heart, and dug down deep to find emotions long buried.
And now he might never have the chance to tell her.
Images long suppressed flashed before him. His mother’s naked, broken body covered in bruises and blood. The look of terror fixed for eternity in her gaze. And then he remembered the rest. How he’d thrown himself over her and refused to let his father’s men take her body away. How he’d cried. How the pain had burned and ravaged him, just like it did now.
It couldn’t happen to her, too. The thought of never seeing her again … never touching her … never inhaling that soft, flowery scent was unbearable. He couldn’t lose her.
Something inside him snapped. Rage. Madness. A single-minded determination to find her and to strike back with the sword of vengeance. He would hunt down every man responsible for the murder of his men, and if they’d harmed one silky dark hair on her head, he vowed to make their deaths slow and painful.
Edward’s minions had made a fatal mistake. In killing Tor’s men and capturing his bride, the English had made Scotland’s warhiswar.
His course was clear. Tor began immediate preparations to rejoin the men at the broch. To have any chance of rescuing Christina, he needed them. Surprisingly, the admission didn’t bother him. Before he left, he gave Rhuairi a short message to send to MacDonald: “Weare ready.”
He’d made his choice. There was no turning back.
“I apologize for the captain’s manners, Lady Christina. It appears he was a bit overzealous in his questioning.”
A bit? Christina stared at the richly outfitted and impeccably groomed English commander, seated opposite her in the luxuriously appointed solar of Dumfries Castle. His eyes told her that he was not at all sorry. But beating a woman—even a Scotswoman—was un knightly. Lord Seagrave, with his crisp white-and-gold embroidered tabard and gleaming mail, struck her as the type of man who didn’t like to sully himself with the more unpleasant aspects of his position, as the commander of the English garrison at Dumfries Castle in Galloway. At around fifty years of age, he was one of the king’s most experienced commanders in Scotland, having taken part in most of the major engagements for the past decade.
Though she wanted to throw his false apology back in his face and rail at him for attacking their ship for no reason and killing all those men, she knew that to protect her husband and family she had to continue playing the frightened, simpering girl as she’d done since her capture. The past two days had been the longest of her life. Horrified by the senseless killing of her husband’s men, she’d lived in a constant state of fear that they would change their minds. She had to survive long enough to let someone know what happened. Their deaths had to be avenged.
The English captain had broken the tedium of their long sea journey by questioning her about her father and husband’s activities. When he hadn’t liked her answer, he struck her. The captain’s arrogance, however, worked in her favor, as it was clear that he did not truly expect her to know anything. To most men, women were inferior creatures, and Englishmen with their haughty superiority were even worse.
She’d learned far more than she had revealed. The men talked freely around her—especially at night. She’d discovered that they’d just come from Inverlochy Castle, the Highland stronghold of the Lord of Badenoch, the Red Comyn. The Highland escort mostly consisted of Comyns and their MacDougall kinsmen.
When they’d arrived at the Galloway Castle, Christina had been brought to the English garrison at Dumfries while the Highlanders had gone to Dalswinton Castle to await the arrival of their lord.
She was almost certain something nefarious was afoot and that it involved the Earl of Carrick, Robert Bruce. One of Comyn’s guardsmen had made a stray mention of him in an English prison, but that was all she’d been able to discover. She hoped to learn more from Lord Seagrave.
She resisted the urge to put her hand on her swollen, bruised face and tell Lord Seagrave exactly what he could do with his sympathy. Her face would heal, and her chances of escape were better if they underestimated her. She would die before she would betray her husband. The past few months had given her strength and courage she didn’t know she possessed. She cowered now to play a part, not from fear. So instead of a rebuke, she bowed her head and said, “My father is a loyal subject of the king. What your man inferred”—she leaned over and whispered—“is treason.”
She hoped she had the proper amount of innocent shock in her voice.
He smiled indulgently, as if deferring to her simple womanly intellect. “Have you forgotten that your father was imprisoned for treason not so long ago?”
Her eyes widened. “Of course not, my lord. That is the reason I can assure you of his loyalty to the king. Though he said he was treated with every courtesy,” she lied, “he has no wish to return.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I think it’s because he missed his whisky and cook’s apple tarts.” She forced a wrinkle between her brows. “Do you have apples in England?”
