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It was nothing like the chapel. He kissed her hard and open-mouthed, as if he had been starving for weeks, and she made a sound against him that was half fury and half want, and kissed him back the same way. Her good hand fisted in his shirt and dragged him down to her. He walked her back against the bedpost and kept on, her mouth, her jaw, the hot skin under her ear, until she was gasping.

“Iona.” He could barely get it out. “Is it aye?”

“Aye.” She was already pulling at his shirt. “Aye, ye great fool. Hurry.”

He did not unlace the brown gown so much as drag it apart. A lace snapped under his fingers. He pulled it down off her shoulders, careful of nothing but the bound arm, and it fell at her feet, and her shift went after it over her head. She stood in the firelight in nothing but her stockings and his knife, breathing hard, and did not cover herself.

He could not speak. He pulled his shirt over his head and flung it away. Her gaze went over him, slow and hungry, and then her fingertips followed, over the white scar on his jaw and down his throat to his chest, and that light touch undid him worse than any blow.

He caught her by the waist and lifted her onto his bed and came down over her, and kissed his way down her body. Her throat. The hollow of her shoulder. Her breasts, until she was arching up off the sheets after his mouth with her fingers knotted in his hair. He jerked the strap loose at her thigh and dropped the knife on the chest by the bed without looking where it went. Then he kissed the soft inside of her thigh, just where the sheath had lain, and she cried out and clapped her good hand over her own lips.

“No,” he said, and drew her hand away. “I want to hear ye.”

He touched her then, his fingers between her thighs, and found her wet and hot for him. She arched against his hand. He stroked her slowly and then not slowly at all, watching her face, learning what made her gasp and what made her swear at him, and her hips rose to meet every stroke.

“Alasdair,” she said.

“I have ye,” Alasdair said. “Let go.”

She came apart under his hand with her head thrown back and her heel dug into the sheets, and he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life.

She gave him no time to look. She tore at his belt with her good hand, furious with it, until he stripped off the rest himself and came back to her. She dragged him over her with a strength he had not known she had.

He caught her face between his hands. “Look at me, lass,” he said.

She looked at him. Her eyes were green and dark and swimming in the firelight.

He pushed into her. She stiffened under him, and her fingers dug into his back, and he went still at once with his forehead against hers, though it cost him every scrap of will he owned.

“Breathe, lass,” he said. “There’s no hurry in it.”

She breathed. Little by little the stiffness went out of her, and she shifted under him, and then she lifted her hips to him of her own accord.

“Move, MacVey,” she said against his mouth. “I’m no’ made of glass.”

He moved. Slow at first, and deep, watching her face, and he saw the moment the pain went out of it and something else came in. Her lips parted. Her eyes went wide and then closed. Her good hand slid down his back and pulled him harder into her, and the slowness went out of both of them.

He took her then as he had wanted to for weeks, hard and deep, the bed knocking at the wall, her breath breaking against his mouth with every stroke. She met him. She wrapped her legs around him and pressed her heels into the backs of his thighs and said his name, and then said it again, rougher, as if it were the only word she had left.

When she broke again she clung to him and cried out into his shoulder, and the feel of her tightening around him took the last of his will. He followed her over with her name in his throat.

Afterward he lay with her head on his chest and her bound arm laid carefully across him. Her hair was everywhere, dark red on his pillow and his skin.

He thought she was asleep. Then he felt her eyes open against his chest, and her body go quiet in a way that had nothing to do with rest.

She was looking past him at the shuttered window, south, toward the hills that ran down to Dunmore.

He did not ask what she was thinking. He knew it already. She had given herself to a MacVey tonight, in a MacVey bed, with a MacVey knife on the chest beside her. Her father’s name was still hers.

Alasdair lay in the dark with his hand in her hair and wondered which of them she would believe, her father or her husband, when it came to it.

13

Alasdair had killed men for less than Archibald Leith had done between the broth and the meat, and he sat at his own high table with his hands flat on the wood to keep them there.

The hall was packed to the doors. Leith had ridden up the glen at noon with a tail of his own men, and they sat thick along the lower tables among the MacVeys, elbow to elbow. The folk from the burned village had the benches by the far wall, Neil MacKay among them with a bowl in his ash-grey hands.

Leith sat at Iona’s left, where a guest of his rank had the right to sit. He had been a handsome man once and was going to fat in comfort, with a soft chin over his collar and a ring on every finger. He talked of wool and cattle prices, and of an alliance between his glen and this one against the riders in no colours. Alasdair had heard about half of it. The rest of the time he had been watching the rings.