Claiming Her (Renegades & Outlaws) (15 page)

“And stubborn.”

“And now he is dead.”

Good.
“So be it,” was all he said.

She sighed. “So be it. ’Twas a waste of everything but the dream.”

He smiled grimly. He knew the waste of dreams, far too well. Then, because he’d learned to listen deeply, he said softly, “Is money all you lost to Gilbert Humphrey, lass?”

She took a long inhalation as color flowed across her cheeks, down her neck, and her chin dimpled. The response was gone in an instant. “I was seventeen. It was a mistake,” she said quietly.

“I’ve made a few.”

She gave a little laugh and shook her head while she traced the lines on the map, outlining Bohemia. “Such things are never the same for men.” Her finger migrated west, into the Holy Roman Empire.
 

He reached out and swept up her hand, lifted it to his mouth. “I do not care for such things. They do not concern us.”
 

Her eyebrows slanted into a confused V, her eyes wary. “How could such things not concern you?”

“Because they are the past.
 
We are now.” He nodded to the map. “Do you like the world I’ve given you?”
 

It earned a startled laugh. “It’s very nice. Rather
flat
, of course. But quite nice.”
 

“I also have a gown for you.”

She looked up. “A gown?”

“And seed.”

The hand still held in his tightened.
 

“Wheat. And rye. For the spring planting.”

Her fingers curled into his. “You brought seed?”

“I brought seed. Will that suit, Katy?”

Katarina stared at him, stricken breathless. Who was this man, who conquered with gowns and wheat seed and maps of the world?

As if she forgot
entirely
that this was a ruse, she smiled at him. “It suits quite well, sir.”

He smiled back, the lazy half smile that couldn’t be bothered to stretch all the way to the other side. It was rather devastating.
 

From the far end of the hall came a bustle, and a figure appeared. It hurried forward into the shifting amber light thrown by the leaping, roaring fires and materialized into a man. He tiptoed up beside the table and leaned near to Aodh.
 

“The papers, my lord.”

Still smiling faintly, she said, “Papers?”
 

Aodh pushed aside the map, while the tonsured clerk—Aodh had a
clerk
?—began setting down a sheaf of papers and pens and inkpots. Aodh glanced at her, his blue eyes level. “Betrothal papers.”

“
Now?
”

“Aye. Now.”

Her heart skipped a beat. Then another. Then it lurched forward in a cold staccato rhythm.

She stared helplessly at the preparations of Aodh and his clerk. Where had the
clerk
come from? “But—”

Aodh paused above the papers being spread out in front of him. “But what?”

She could not sign
betrothal papers
. Signing her name would be tantamount to treason. Her father had been
hanged
for less.

Oh, this was not going
at all
as she had planned.

She searched for a reason to delay the formalization of her subterfuge, some way to mitigate the damage. For as much as the Queen of England was not a woman to cross, neither was Aodh Mac Con a man to cross. And Aodh was much closer to hand.

And notwithstanding that they’d started as enemies, and much as he could reasonably expect nothing even approaching honesty from her, let alone loyalty, still, somehow…somehow, to say no felt like a betrayal.

To say yes felt like a binding.

If she wed Aodh Mac Con, he would never let her go.

Chills ran down her body. “What of the banns?” she asked, shocked to hear how shaky her voice had become.

He took a pen from his clerk. “There will be banns.”

The clerk competently uncorked an ink bottle and laid it before Aodh. With a flourish, he set out a second pen. The bottle squatted above the papers, ready for dipping. The ink was red, like blood.
 

“But we must wait…three weeks…”
 

The clerk had taken his seat, a pouch of sand laid beside the parchment he was now scribbling on. Aodh stood looking over his shoulder, but at these words, he glanced her way.
 

“We shall not have the ceremony until three weeks.” He leaned close and murmured, “But to alleviate any concerns you may have, Katarina, know this: we shall consummate. Hard and well.”

Her knees almost collapsed. She curled her fingers around the back of the lord’s chair. In truth, the ceremony meant nothing. These papers were all. Her signature, on the papers, their union afterward, this binding to Aodh.

It could not be.
 

“What of witnesses?” she whispered. It was a hopeless gesture, a shot in the dark, for she knew nothing would slow this down. Aodh Mac Con meant to have her.

The rock she’d tossed into the air was coming down now, hard.

He snapped his fingers without looking over. “Call for Cormac and Ré,” he ordered the soldier who appeared, then turned to her. “Who do you wish for, my lady?”

“I— Wish for?” A list of patron saints floated through her mind.

“As witnesses. I suppose you’ll want the coward?”

“Walter?”
No.
“Yes. Of course.”

“Bring her steward,” Aodh ordered the soldier, and turned back to the clerk, murmuring something about jointure.

Her mind whirled as they talked through the time it took to round up several servants and Aodh’s grim-faced soldiers, who looked no happier about this union than she, then finally, Walter appeared, stern and disapproving.
 

A pen was placed in her hand.

His men stood arrayed around the front of the dais table. Walter stood like a monument of disapproval, his already prodigious brow quivering with disgust that the family had been reduced to this: marriage to an Irishman.

She stared down at the papers, covered in scrolling black scribbles. Words, surely these were words. But she could decipher none of them. Her heart was thudding too fast, the roar in her head was too loud.
 

Aodh’s clerk was speaking in Latin, saying something, saying their names…saying Aodh’s name…
Aodh Mac Con Rardove.
 

Aodh, son of the Hound of…Rardove?

Another cold blast struck her. She dragged her gaze up from the parchment. “You are the Hound of
Rardove
?”

“Aye.”

She curled her hand tighter around the chair to steady herself, reeling. The Rardove clan was
dead
, or all but. Living on the fringes of Irish society for centuries, they were a pale shadow of their former selves, slowly dying out, notwithstanding a brief, if spectacular, resurgence a couple decades ago. But they posed no threat, they had no presence. Legend said the Rardove chiefs were doomed to die young, half from heartbreak, half from drink, half from…oh dear God save her,
recklessness
.

“I thought…I thought you all dead,” she whispered.

His icy eyes flicked her way. “Not yet.”

Her knees were bending now. Force of will was all that held them straight. She would not sit. She would not fall over.
 

The clerk’s voice droned on in Latin, and the Irish Hound was replying—
in Latin
—then the clerk read the terms aloud in French, and then in English, to ensure no confusion—oh, there was nothing
but
confusion—while Walter’s grim, furious, and yet vaguely triumphant face glared at her.
 

She had done precisely what she’d told him not to do: seriously underestimated Aodh Mac Con.

The pen was placed in her hand. She could not catch her breath. Everyone was staring. Silence spread through the hall. A boot shuffled, leather creaked, a burning log shifted, then fell into hot ash in the hearth. All she had to do was sign her name.
 

All she could do was stare at the paper.
 

If she signed this, she was doomed.

Traitor. Treason.

Dead woman.

At the tip of the pen in her hand, a drop of bright red ink hung, suspended. Aodh’s name was already on the page, scrawled in gorgeous, bold,
educated
letters, large enough to be read in Windsor.

He was afraid of nothing. This castle, this rebellion, Katarina—he claimed it all.

Trembling, she looked up into his eyes.
 

“Aodh,” she whispered. It had slipped out helplessly.
 

He went into motion. “Leave us,” he ordered, taking the pen from her hand.
 

And once again, the people in the hall dispersed like pebbles running down a hill. His clerk and hers, the witnesses and soldiers, everyone turned and left, until she and Aodh were, once again, alone.

Shaking, she stood, head down, staring at the ground, braced for his fury. That is what men did, vent their fury. It would be over soon enough. He circled her once; she watched his boots make the circuit around her body.

“What is it?” he asked while behind her.

She inhaled, shook her head. She looked at the papers, the signatures, then her eyes dropped to his sword. Everything about this was a conquest.
 

“I…cannot,” she whispered.

He’d followed her glance at his sword, and with a swift sweep of his hands, he unbuckled it and let it fall. It clattered to the ground. He stepped over it and came nearer.
 

“Why are you saying no?”
 

“Because I would lose everything.”

“Och, lass, you’ve already lost everything. All you can do now is gain.”

She gave a broken laugh. “That is not a good answer.”

His gaze roved over her face, then he took the last, natural step and drew up before her. “Listen to me.”

She shook her head. “No.” She could not listen to his low resonate persuasions, spoken in that dark Irish lilt, the one that tempted as if it were touch.

He curled a finger beneath her chin and tipped her face up. “You cannot think it would have gone well for you when Bertrand of Bridge arrived? The queen’s interrogator?”

She gasped. “Wh-what do you know of it?”

“In England, they are calling you a traitor. A priest-lover. An unwed dye-witch.”

Shock made her hands fly to his chest. Fear curled them into fists, bunching his tunic. “No.”
 

“Aye. So now, maybe, it is not so mad an idea.”
 

“Oh no,” she whispered as he curled his fingers around the back of her neck and guided her closer, up to the towering length of him, until they were touching from knees to stomach.
 

“I swear to you, Katy,” he said in a low rasp. “I will protect you.”
 

Confusion washed through her, an amalgam of shifting emotions.
 

Protect her? When he was the danger, England her salvation?
 

 
Protect her?
No one protected Katarina.
She
was the protector, of Rardove, of the people within, of the queen’s rights in Ireland.
 

But that this warlord had offered…

Their mouths were so close she could feel his breath on her. She wanted his breath.
 

Slowly, the hard fingers cupping the back of her neck pushed up into her hair and tipped her head back.

“Now, Katy, let me show you the truth of us,” he said, and bent to her neck.

She leaned back against the table before her knees buckled, her neck arched as he kissed the base of her throat, raining a wash of chills down her body so potent, she almost did not notice the wide palm skimming down her waist. She was far too focused on his other hand, plunging deeply into her hair, fingers splayed, forcing her head back further. The pressure was hard and exquisite. Heat streaked down her body, followed by chills. It tore a heady, hot gasp from her lungs.
 

He worked his way up her neck, over the ridge of her chin, and, wasting no time on preludes or introduction, when he reached the summit of her mouth, he simply claimed her. Slanted his lips over hers, spread her mouth wide, and delved in deep.
 

Stunned by the onslaught, whipped by fiery threads of desire, she could do nothing but follow the command of his hands to bend back more, the urging of his lips to open wider, to meet his tongue with her own in a hot swipe that made him groan deep into her mouth, which sent a shudder of excitement through her. And somehow her hands were around his shoulders, and she was pushing her body up to his.
 

This emboldened a man who needed no more boldness, and he tore his mouth free enough to suck her bottom lip into his mouth.
 

Her mind shut down, shocked by the carnal move, but her body, oh, her body reveled in it. She pushed up on her toes to meet him, to give him more.