“Nay. He’s no’ been found yet.”
She subsided back onto her knees, which felt numb. How long had she been kneeling here? She didn’t know but had the absurd idea that if she rose and left, Tempest would give up and die.
“Come awa’ out o’ there for the time,” Alan suggested as if he heard her thoughts. “Naught will happen. There are others about.”
“Nay, I maun be here if—if he does return.”
“Ye think ye could hold him off?”
“I will.” She felt utterly convinced of it.
“Men are out looking for him. We’ll know it, if he’s found.”
“Aye.”
“Rest yoursel’ a while.”
Annista ignored that and narrowed her eyes at him. He had his arms—the shirt sleeves rolled above the elbow—resting atop the half door, and he gazed at her searchingly over them. With his hair mussed, he looked like any common workman or laborer.
A fine and handsome one.
Aye, so, her husband was a handsome man. One she might well begin to admire—were he not her husband.
She slanted a look up at him, remembering again how he’d seized Evan up in that chamber, hauled him out of the bed. Some unnamed emotion stirred within her.
“Wha’ will Earl Kallan do wi’ Evan if he finds him?” she asked. “Will he be able to rein him?”
Alan considered this. She could not see his eyes in the dim light, but she felt him thinking.
“Nay,” he admitted at last. “I doubt it. He never has, in the past.”
“Wha’ good, then? We shall need to be constantly on guard.” Even as she spoke the militant words, she stroked the stallion’s neck in gentle comfort.
“Tempest will heal, Annista. He’s a half-wild horse wi’ a lot o’ strength.”
“And if Evan comes back, still angry, to attack him once more?”
“If he’s angry wi’ anyone, ’twill be me.”
“Aye, so.” If Evan remembered what had happened up in the bedchamber. Did she want to see her husband and Evan MacKallan in an out-and-out battle?
Nay.
“Leave the horse,” Alan urged again. “He is strong, as I say.”
“He is, aye. And no doubt harder to cow than a gentle young woman far from her home for the first time. And yet, ye see how he’s been left. Even the strong ha’ a breaking point.”
Alan’s gaze fell to Tempest, acknowledging perhaps that aye, the horse lay broken. And that, if anything, would keep him from rising.
Alan heaved a sigh. “Ye will come awa’ when ye are ready.”
“I will.”
He removed himself from the half door and drifted away like a shadow. To stand guard or return to the house, Annista could not tell.
****
Annista remained at her post all that day, though at one point even Alan’s mother came out to urge her away. She left briefly, presumably to relieve herself and to gobble down a swift meal out in the stable proper, only to return after.
