Page 2 of To Wed a Highlander
An unmistakable sound hissed through the evening and reached his sensitive ears, and Niall held up a hand signaling for quiet.
Everyone froze.
Niall could hear through the walls what others could not. Angry voices. Anxious movement. Whispers. The sound of a whip connecting with flesh.
No cries of pain met the punishment, though, which to Niall meant one thing.
“Ready your weapons,” he gave a hushed order. “I think there aremenin the abbey. We may have to fight after all.”
His favorite sounds in the world vibrated through mist toward him, abrading his most heightened Berserker sense. The rasp of metal against scabbard. The creak of a strong, sure grip on an axe handle, and the quickening of breath in anticipation of death or glory.
Niall gave a moment’s pause in pity for the nuns and the slaughter about to be visited upon them. He was especially sorry for whoever was being whipped, for he would have to meet the wrath of Niall’s Berserker whilst bound and injured and would have to watch his death coming at him with no way to shrink from it, or to fight it.
Not that either of those actions would save him.
The mist chose that moment to consolidate into rain, falling rather than gathering, streaking their hair to their scalps and muddying the dying autumn earth.
“These doors are heavy.” Bulvark reached a hand to the tall arched gates, held with iron hinges and thick ingots.
Ingmar made a sound of juvenile anticipation comparable to that of a giggle, and rubbed his hands together. “Then it is good we brought our own battering ram.” He slapped Niall on his shoulder and made a grand gesture toward the oak doors that doubtless were buttressed by a bar of thick wood on the inside. “After you my good man,” he said, solicitously bowing in a mock gesture of the gallant English knights they’d fought in the fields.
“Thank you, Sir Ingmar,” Niall replied, throwing his cloak of firs behind his wide shoulders as though casting aside a pretty lord’s cape. “You are a most chivalrous gentleman.”
At that, his troupe guffawed, but formed a crescent around him in preparation for bloodshed as Niall backed away from the door to get a running start.
He connected dead center, and the gates exploded open as though hit with thousands of stones worth of pressure rather than the shoulder of a lone warrior. His men rushed past him, spilling into the courtyard, half of them splitting along the right wall, half of them to the left, leaving Niall standing in the center of the gate, framed by the Highland storm.
Breasts.
The most incredible breasts he’d ever seen. Nipples the color of pink rose petals puckered against the rain streaming from flesh as white as skimmed cream.
It took Niall the space of two blinks and the sing of the whip to break the strange spell the sight had cast upon him. The whip connected with tender flesh.
Herflesh.
She still didn’t scream, though a great shudder wracked through her lithe form before she drooped against the ropes at her delicate wrists.
A hot anger built inside him, along with an alarming instinct he couldn’t identify.
He’d been wrong. It wasn’t a man who took the abuse of a whipping with admirable stoicism, it was awoman. A small woman, standing between two stakes, stripped to the waist and bound to each post with her arms open.
She looked so fragile slumped over like she was, her bonds becoming her only support as her dirty feet sagged in the mud of the courtyard. Hair the color of a brassier fire fell over her face and hung in long, wet streams, hiding her visage.
As far as Niall could tell, she’d lost consciousness.
And still the Valkyrie-sized nun drew her considerable arm back; her dark eyes alight with a feverish zeal as she let the whip fly toward the smaller nun once more.
Niall didn’t know what drew him to intervene. Couldn’t tell why he barreled through the small crowd of panicking women with his Berserker speed to catch the whip on his arm before it could mar one more inch of that pale, delicate skin.
The leather of the whip bit as it wrapped itself around his forearm, and Niall let it feed the rage building within him. With a jerk, he ripped the whip from the elder nun’s hand and enjoyed her gasp of shock and pain as his presence registered through what seemed to be a fog of hatred in her eyes.
“What is the meaning of this?” she screeched, her chin straining against her wimple as she dared to reach past him for her instrument of punishment.
Niall sneered with disgust as he easily subdued her with one hand. “Are you too intent on hurting this tiny, weak woman to notice that you are being raided?” He shook her roughly for effect.
The woman, dressed in a longer, thicker habit than the rest of the nuns, blinked as though seeing him for the first time.
“Raided?” she whispered. “I—”
