Page 29

“Ye’re blue,” Alasdair said. “Fight me when ye’re warm.”

She tore herself around inside the heavy wool and walked away from him, down the slope toward the mare, with the cloak dragging at her heels.

He went after her. He caught the trailing edge of the cloak and hauled on it, and she came back around to face him, so close that the rain ran off his hair onto her face.

“Let go of me,” she said.

“I havenae got hold of ye,” he said. “Only my cloak. Ye can walk out of it any time ye like.”

She did not walk out of it. She stood there with her chest heaving, glaring up at him out of green eyes gone dark with fury, and he saw them drop to his mouth.

He gripped the edges of the cloak in both fists and pulled her into him, hard, and kissed her senseless.

It was nothing like the kiss in the chapel. In the chapel he had taken, and she had fought. Now she fought him for it, and lost, and kissed him back as if she meant to win anyway. Her mouth was cold and furious under his, and it opened at once. Alasdair’s heart slammed so hard that he felt it in his split hand. The cloak fell open between them and his hands were on her, on the wet wool at her waist, sliding up her back, and her body came against him from breast to knee, shaking, and then warm.

He put his torn hand to her face. His knuckles lay along her jaw, wet with rain and his own blood, and she turned her head into them and made a low sound in her throat that set his blood pounding.

Her fingers left his shirt and went up into his hair and held on, and she bit his lower lip, and he groaned against her mouth and kissed her harder. He could taste salt in the rain, from her tears or his blood, and he did not care which.

She broke away first.

She stayed inside the cloak with him, her forehead against his chest and her breath coming in gasps against his wet shirt, her hand still knotted in his hair.

“I hate ye,” she said, into his shirt.

“I ken ye do,” Alasdair said. His voice came out rough. “Ye just showed me how much.”

She lifted her head. Her mouth was red and swollen, and there was a smear of his blood on her jaw where his knuckles had lain. Her eyes went to his hand.

“Ye’re bleeding,” Iona said.

“I hit a wall,” Alasdair said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because of what I did to ye in that hall,” he said. “I wanted something to hurt as much as I did.”

She stared at him, and her chin came up. She did not reach for his torn hand, though he saw her look at it.

“Good,” she said. “I hope it hurts all the way home.”

The rain began to ease. Down the hill his black horse stood beside her mare with its reins trailing.

Alasdair looked past them, down the long grey glen to where his keep stood on its rise above the loch, with every soul in it waiting to see what came back through the gate.

He did not know what she would be to him when they rode in. He did not know what he would be to her.

He only knew that anybody in that hall who laughed at her again would answer to him.

8

Alasdair had kissed Torquil Dunmore’s daughter on an open hill in the rain, and all the way down the glen he could not tell which sickened him more: that he had done it, or how badly he wanted to do it again.

They rode in at the gate soaked to the skin. Iona was on her grey mare with his cloak still around her, and he rode a length behind on his black horse, and neither of them said a word on the road. The carter had got his peats into the yard at last. He stood by his cart with his mouth open and watched them come in. So did the men on the wall, and the girls at the kitchen door.

He swung down and went to the mare’s head. Iona slid off before he could reach up for her, and her knees nearly gave under her on the cobbles. He put out his good hand. She knocked it aside and walked straight past him into the hall.

He thought she would go to her tower. She did not. She went down the passage at the back of the hall and into his own room, where somebody had kept the fire in all afternoon, and she turned at the hearth and waited for him with rain running off the hem of the blue gown onto his boards.