Page 81 of A Highland Rogue to Ruin

He turned again and leaned menacingly into her face. “Because my blood being spilled nay matters, but yers? It matters verra much. And I’ll no’ stand for it. Ye asked me once if it was yer demon or the warlord speaking. And I’ll tell ye only once.” His eyes bounced back and forth between hers. “There is only the warlord.”

“A lie,” she breathed. “I’ve seen the man within—”

“I made a mistake,” he cut. She gasped as if he’d pummeled her. “I’ve nearly gotten ye killed.”

“Ye did no’! Ghost did!”

“Because of me!” he erupted, jabbing his chest with his thumb. “I knew this would happen and I pursued ye anyway!”

“Tormund,” James warned, putting his arm around her protectively to pull her back.

“Ye said ye wanted to keep me,” she breathed.

“And I also said I’d do anything to protect ye,” he replied.

Yet all she felt was cold and hard and rigid as a tear managed to vault down her cheek.

“Watch yerself, Demon,” James threatened.

“Nay act angry, man,” Tormund laughed darkly, that smirk pitching up his mouth as he mounted Nykr. He looked down at James, who’d always been his adversary. “Ye never wanted me to pursue her in the first place. Stay away from her. She nay needs your darkness. And so. I am done with—”

“Dividing us is what he wants,” she whispered, cutting off his venom, unable to withstand another drop of it. “I love ye, Tormund. I had hoped ye’d come to…” feel the same, though she didn’t finish. Because she knew it was over. Everything they’d built this sennight, nothing now but a smoking pile of debris.

“Then it seems ye made a mistake, too,” he said.

“Oh, I did. Any vessel worth sailing would have needed a willing captain,” she added cryptically, a menacing darkness of her own that she’d never felt before welling up to her lips. “And ye prove to me now, ye’re no’ willing to be anything more than a sailor bowing to the swells instead of rising up to conquer them. Or mayhap, for all yer brawn and battle prowess, ye’re just too much of a coward to do what’s in yer heart. For if ye nay fear, as ye profess, ye’d seize what ye want and fight for it instead of against everyone else! And I deserve someone better.”

She ripped away from James and ran, no longer caring about lurkers in the woods. Nykr’s hooves plodded away. It was as if Tormund didn’t even care that he’d just torn her heart out. No longer feeling anything but the sting to her cuts and the numbness in her core and the wrenching in her heart. Damn him for opening her eyes to a world of possibilities, then yanking it all away.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“What the hell was that about?” James thundered.

Tormund drew back the reins and creaked around in the saddle to see James storming to him. He couldn’t look at her receding from him and let his last image be of her heartbroken. He’d do his damnedest to remember the goddess floating trustingly in the water as he taught her to swim, laughing as he twirled her to the music or splashed her feet in the sea, who basked in his reading and fed him berries like old lovers who’d spent a lifetime together.

“Just what it looked like. She’s better off without me.”

Her disgust in him was bitter but brought comfort. At least he knew she’d not pine for him, but would hate him in time. It made it easier to leave.

“Ye make that decision for her? Ye break her heart?”

“’Twill mend.”

“And discard her love so easily?”

He shrugged. Yet the thought of breaking her, someone so good and kind, assailed him with guilt. There were a hundred enemies who deserved breaking, but his angel had deserved the world.

“Aye, she truly does deserve better,” James replied heavily.

“Finally something we can both agree upon.” Tormund had been telling Brighde that from the start.

James scoffed, disbelieving. “She believed in ye. She argued with me over ye. She told me I was wrong, and hell, I began to believe her. I thank ye for showing her yer true colors, Demon,” James spat wryly as he nodded toward his men to assemble. “Where are ye going?”

“To an ambush. I ken what Ghost is about now.”

“What ambush?” James eyed him suspiciously.

Tormund stared coldly. “Yers. Ghost’s on his way to ambush ye, as I so ordered when I arrived here.” He watched the betrayal bloom on James’s face as his blue eyes narrowed into slits.