Page 44 of The Irish Arrangement

I furrowed my brow, looking up at him. “Yes. Why? What’s with all these twenty questions?”

He and his brother already asked me about my mother and my grandparents. This felt like a second fishing expedition for answers, but I wouldn’t provide any. It felt too weird. My guard was up. It seemed like he was trying to figure something out, but I doubted he’d ever come out and ask me directly.

But I didn’t offer up anything. I was too scared, too wisely defensive about his interest in my mother. I wanted to shudder at the thought of telling my husband about her illness and her need for that kidney surgery.

He couldn’t actually care. Since he’d transported me here, he gave me no signs and he made no moves to make me feel like family mattered. Sure, his brother seemed to always be with him, but I hadn’t known another family member lived here until the other day.

Declan didn’t value family, not if he didn’t want to introduce me to the little family he had. His idea of family values seemed more like addressing obligation and fulfilling duties, like filling me with his cum until I was pregnant.

If Declan actually cared about my mother’s situation, should I tell him, and if he had a single iota of decency, he wouldn’t keep me locked up in his castle.

“I told you. I want to get to know more about the future mother of my children.”

I glanced up at him. “Like you were last week at dinner?”

He sighed, looking serious again. “Partly. But I’d also like to figure you out too.”

“Yeah, right. Good luck with that.”

He hummed. “Because you’ll only let me see what you want me to see?”

Maybe.

“My mother never married. She never even dated anyone after I was born.”

Nodding, he slowed his walk to match mine as I glanced again at a horse in a stall down this way. It was agitated, and I instantly wondered why.

“What does she do?” he asked.

Lie in bed and rely on medications to make her feel slightly human again.

“She…”

I lost my train of thought, wondering how little I could tell him and not invite any trouble to come back to my vulnerable parent. The less Declan knew, the safer she would be.

Right now, though, all I could focus on was how the burly stable hand whipped the horse in that stall.

I ran. My feet carried me faster without any conscious plan to intervene. It was imminent. If I witnessed animal cruelty, I would react.

“Stop it.”

“Ah, fuck you, lassie,” the drunk man slurred, sneering at me as he lifted his arm to bring the whip down again.

Without my boots on, I was at risk of being stomped on. Those huge hooves could slam down on my feet. The agitated horse could trample me. Kick me. Any number of injuries, but I didn’t consider any of that.

After I threw open the latch to the stall door, I ran inside the space and lifted my arm. Holding it up in a deflecting stance, I put myself between the horse, a mare that likely had just given birth with the size of her teats.

“Stop it!” I ordered, talking back again to the drunk who thought it was acceptable to use a whip to the point of streaking a bloody line on that magnificent equine’s back.

“No!” Declan roared it, rushing in after me as the stable hand released the crack of the whip he intended to strike the horse with.

17

DECLAN

“No!” I bellowed it again, tightening my abs as I braced for the hit.

Cara ran into this stall to protect the horse, but the sight of her so near danger threatened to choke me. I held my breath, tense and livid, so furiously enraged.

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