It was clear most of them had their doubts about her, perhaps because of the strange circumstances that had brought her there, but Martha seemed cheerful enough and never questioned what it was that had brought her new lady to the Keep.
But, of course, everywhere they went, they had been accompanied by his damn guards. Two of them, Donald andGregory, had followed her from place to place everywhere she had gone, from her chambers to the Great Hall for dinner every night, and she did not know what it would take for them to leave her alone.
“Ye dinnae ken what can befall a young woman if ye’re no’ keeping watch, my Lady,” he replied, and his gaze dragged across Martha, like he was imagining at that very moment just how manybadthings he could do to her.
Ailsa glowered at him.
“And are ye going to keep speaking so mysteriously or tell me what it is ye’re referring to?” she asked.
Martha glanced at her out of the corner of her eye, perhaps silently willing her to stop making such a scene, but Ailsa paid her no attention. It was up to her to try to make this place liveable, and it wasn’t going to happen as long as she could always see those two thuggish guards out of the corner of her eye everywhere she went.
But he just shrugged as he stared her down with that doltish gaze, and she could tell that Martha was as uncomfortable as she was at constantly having to be under surveillance in this way—especially after this last comment.
Ailsa was sure that if they had looked hard enough, the guards would see the steam pouring from her ears in a rage as she stormed down the stairs. She needed to speak to Tavish because if these guards tried to cause her any more trouble, she would lose her mind entirely.
Not surprisingly, she could not find him anywhere in the Keep.
Which only made her angrier.
Reaching his chambers—the chambers he had left her to sleep in alone all this time, as a matter of fact—she couldn’t help but turn over everything that had happened till then in her head.
The attack while they had been on the road, then the tease of her wedding night, the way he had avoided her ever since. Was all of it designed to drive her mad? She could not make sense of it, but she was starting to wonder if this man had gone out of his way to make her life harder than it needed to be.
He had already taken her as his wife, after all, why did he need to go about it in such a fashion? Wouldn’t it be easier if he had just taken what he was entitled to as a husband so the two of them could get on to living as they would for the rest of their lives?
She could not stop thinking about what he had said to her when he had pulled back and left her wanting so badly, that he wanted her to beg for him. She could not imagine such a thing, it would be too satisfying for him to see in her such indignity. He might have thought that she was the one who would bend first, but he had not imagined the kind of woman he was contending with.
The sound of sparring from the courtyard below caught her attention then. Peering down, she spotted a handful of men, stripped to the waist and in nothing but kilts, training with swords, the occasional clash of metal floating up through the air around them.
And, amongst them, of course, stood Tavish. She almost scoffed to herself. So, he had time to train with his men but not to attend to his wife?
As she rushed to the training field, her mind turned over everything he had said to her till this moment—especially about the MacCairns. He seemed sure that they were not to be trusted, and it might have been for a perceived attack that he was training for so carefully, but she could not shake the feeling that there was more to it than that.
They had never been anything other than allies, as far as she knew. Malric—now Laird Malric—had visited often, and theyplayed together with Callum and Ailsa as children. What had changed since then?
Well, she could see why he might have taken a slight to Tavish. He hardly seemed like the kind of man who would go out of his way to make nice with the people he should have been paying his respects to.
With her skirts lifted above her ankles, she stomped down the stairs and out to the courtyard, where a half-dozen or so men were training. She had expected to see them lined up in pairs, practicing their technique, but instead, four were clustered around Tavish.
He had his back to her, his blade lifted, his other hand extended as a counterbalance, and for a moment, all she could do was stand there and watch him. Sweat glistened on his back despite the cool weather, his muscles flexing with motion as he paced around his would-be attackers.
What was it he was training so hard to protect this place from?
She chewed her lip as she watched him, the tension hanging in the air as the men before him waited for him to make his move, and then…
In a flash of steel, he lunged forward. With a single blow, in a split second, he sent three swords clattering to the ground and caught the tip of the fourth with his blade and tipped it out of the hand of the man who had been holding it.
Her lips parted in shock, and, for a second, she wondered if she would have been better off returning to her chambers instead of angering a man who could so clearly snuff her out in an instant.
But, before she could consider that thought any further, he glanced around and locked eyes with her, drawing his arm across his brow to wipe away the sweat. His stormy eyes seemed to flash with something she had only seen before duringthe attack that he had rescued her from; a confidence that permeated every inch of his body, as though this was the only place he truly knew he was in control.
“What is it, lass?” he called to her as he planted the tip of his sword into the ground and leaned on it.
The other men, muttering to each other, picked up their weapons, testing to make sure that the attack had not done too much damage to them.
She hated, more than anything in that moment, that she wanted him. And she hated that he had been able to take such utter control of her on their wedding night, to leave her chasing her tail as she tried to make sense of what she wanted from him. If she had been enough to keep his attention, he would have stayed on their wedding night, and even now, he greeted her as if she was little more than a distraction, not his wife.
Well, two could play at that game. She caught the eye of Ewan, the kind Captain of the Guard who had introduced himself to her on the day of the wedding, and she brushed past him and smiled at Ewan.
