It wasn’t right what she was feeling…all jumbled up inside and her face burning.
He was her captor and she was his prisoner! She was an Englishwoman and he was a Scots Highlander! Whatever was the matter with her to imagine that they could ever…?
“No, Juli,no!” she chided herself, pushing away from the tree to walk a little deeper into the woods.
Such musings were impossible, unthinkable. Within another day, she would find herself sleeping on the cold dank floor of a dungeon cell with her fate in the hands of King Robert the Bruce…
Her hands trembling at the thought, Julianna paused beneath a tall oak and lifted her skirt to attend to her needs as quickly as she could. She had no doubt that Roger was growing impatient for her to return.
Mayhap he was growing angry at her delay as well, which would be far better for both of them. No more staring into each other’s eyes and speaking so companionably…
“I canna believe it, Keir, can you? Look at what we’ve found pissing so daintily in the woods!”
Julianna gasped and dropped her skirt as she rose to her feet, but it was too late to run as three slovenly-looking men reeking of sweat and ale surrounded her, one of them flashing a near toothless grin.
Hunters? A local laird’s soldiers? Mayhap thieves—oh, God! Her backbone pressed against the rough bark, she slapped away a dirty hand and then wildly, another, the men advancing upon her.
“Get away from me! Get away, I tell you!”
“Itell you?” mocked the toothless one with a jarring lisp. “Why, she’s not Scots at all, but English from the sound of her. How did you come tae be so far from home, lass?”
“Och, who cares, man?” demanded another man, the burliest of the three. “Shove her down, my balls are itching tae have her—”
“No,no!” Julianna’s shriek desperate, piercing, she flailed her arms and kicked to fight them off only to find herself hurled to the ground, the breath knocked from her.
Stunned, she felt her skirt and linen undertunic wrenched to her hips and then the heaviness of a body pressing her into the dirt and her legs being shoved apart—
“Aagh, God!”
Julianna could not say if the man’s spine-tingling scream came before or after his weight was flung off of her, everything happened so fast. She stared up in shock at Roger as he yanked his bloody sword from her attacker’s lifeless body and then lunged after the other two men who had fled into the trees.
Another chilling scream came—and then died abruptly, and she swore she heard the toothless man’s voice raised in desperate pleading before he, too, fell silent.
Tears blinding her, sobs choking her, Julianna struggled to rise to cover her lower body only to feel herself swept into the air, Roger holding her tightly against him.
His strides strong and sure as he carried her out of the woods, his mouth pressed to her ear and his voice huskily soothing.
“Shh, lass, I’ve got you. Dinna cry…dinna cry…”
CHAPTER8
“Douglas Castle is tae the east behind us…and Dumbarton Castle tae the west in front of us,” Roger murmured against Julianna’s ear, though she gave no indication that she had even heard him.
She had ridden stone-silent in front of him for much of the day since they had set out again after the attack in the woods…as if she had gone into some strange state of shock from which she hadn’t yet awakened.
He didn’t blame her. When he thought of how his heart had slammed against his chest to see her lying in the dirt with that man on top of her, her skirt around her hips, he felt lingering shock, too, that she had come so close to being despoiled by her three attackers.
A moment more…no, mere seconds more—och, God, he could slay those men a hundred times in his mind and still not ease his remorse that he hadn’t gone looking for her sooner.
No matter he had tried to comfort her with soothing words, Julianna had sobbed with her head tucked against his chest for several leagues before she grew quiet, but mayhap her stillness had distressed him even more.
Here she had only just revived herself from one state of grief after a full night’s rest and a wee bit of food only to be overcome by another, Roger missing her indignant outbursts and the flashes of her violet eyes more than he would have thought possible.
He longed to hug her close as they rode together, but as soon as her tears had ceased, she had grown tense sitting in front of him, as if she didn’t want him to hold her—and he didn’t blame her for that reaction, either. To have been thrown so cruelly upon the ground and near ravaged…
“Bastards,” he muttered to himself, yet she flinched against him as if she had read the direction of his thoughts, Roger almost regretting now that he had wrested her from her home.
Almost. To have spared her the horror of the attack in the woods, aye, but still he was resolute in his belief that King Robert needed to hear from her lips what had happened in Cumberland, to add to his own accounting.
