Page 5

Iona did not move. She could not. His open eyes were looking at her shoe.

A shout came from above her. A second man dropped from the top of the boulder into the heather, a big man in a torn brown plaid, with a broadsword already coming up in both hands. He went straight for Alasdair.

Alasdair did not step back. He took the first blow on his blade, so close above Iona’s head that she heard the steel shriek and felt the jar of it in her own teeth. Then he turned the big man’s sword aside, stepped inside his reach and opened his throat with one short stroke. The man dropped to his knees with his hands at his neck, and fell on his face in the heather.

It had taken less time than a breath.

Iona stared up at Alasdair. Her mouth had gone dry, and her hands shook so hard against her skirts that she had to knot them in the wet wool. All her life she had heard that the MacVey laird was a butcher. She had pictured something wild and red and roaring. This was quick and cold and sure, with not one movement wasted, and it was the most frightening thing she had ever seen. Her heart was pounding against her ribs. She could not take her eyes off him.

Alasdair did not look at either dead man. He wiped his blade on the heather with his eyes on the slope above, and sheathed it.

“Drive them over the top,” he called up to his men, in a voice as flat as if he were ordering in the hay. “Not one of them comes back down.”

Then he bent, put one arm under her knees and the other behind her back, and lifted her clear of the dead man as if she weighed no more than the sheet she had dropped in her father’s hall. He carried her up onto the track and set her down on her feet, and kept his hands at her waist until she stood.

“Look at me,” he said. “No’ at him. At me.”

She looked at him. There was rain in his black hair, and mud to the knee of his boots, and the old scar on his face had gone whiter.

“Ye called me Alasdair,” he said.

She swallowed. “I’d have called a dog by its name if it was standing nearer.”

He bent his head close to hers. “Next time ye scream my name, lass, it willnae be because of a knife,” he said.

Heat went up her throat into her face. Above them the shouting had stopped. His men were coming back down the slope in ones and twos, breathing hard, and one of them called out that the rest had gone over the top and away.

“Let them go,” Alasdair called back. His hands were still at her waist. “Yer father’s men run well, at least.”

The fear went out of her, and rage came roaring in to fill the hole.

“My father didnae send them,” Iona said.

“Who, then?” Alasdair asked.

“Thieves. Broken men. Anyone.” She shoved at his chest with both hands. He did not give an inch, so she shoved harder. “Ye’ve enemies enough, MacVey. Ye’ve made sure of that.”

“I have,” he agreed, and smiled, the slow smile she was learning to hate. “And only one of them kens which road I’d take home with his daughter.”

“Ye’d say anything to blacken him.”

“He blackened himself.” The smile was gone. “Yer father owes me a debt, and he’ll pay it. Ask yer gentle father how mine came home.”

“Ask yer own men what they did to Coll!”

Her hand flew up. He caught her wrist before it reached his face and hauled her in, until her arm was trapped between them and her body was hard against his.

His eyes were grey, the cold grey of the rock behind her, and they had gone to her mouth. She felt that look as surely as a touch. Her breasts pressed into his wet plaid with every breath. She hated him, and some treacherous part of her leaned in anyway.

“Strike me when we’re alone, lass,” he said, very low. “No’ in front of my men. They’ll think ye like me.”

Every one of his men had stopped to watch.

Iona wrenched her wrist free. She walked to his black horse and took hold of the reins herself, and stood at the horse’s head with her wet skirts dragging, because it was that or stand in front of him and let him hear her ragged breathing.

Alasdair came up beside her, unhurried, and held out his hand for the reins.

“In front of me,” he said. “We’ve a way to go yet.”