Page 31 of My Scot, My Surrender
“Why do you even care?” she asked. “It’s exceedingly obvious you don’t wish to be saddled with a wife…or me. You should leave while you can. I can look after myself.”
“I don’t doubt that, but I gave your brother my vow.”
“You seem to hand out vows rather easily, Mr. Pierce.” Her nostrils flared. “Your word is not worth the breath that expelled it.”
“Sorcha—”
She spun on her heel and moved toward the grazing horses, but froze at a crashing sound from the nearby bushes.
“She went this way, I tell you,” a man’s voice said. “I saw her and the Englishman with that gray horse of hers.”
“Are you sure, Coxley?”
Brandt frowned.Damn.Malvern’s dog…the twisted, belly-slitting ex-colonel who had been at his liege’s side in the Selkirk stable yard. If Coxley was here, it meant Malvern was close. Brandt met Sorcha’s eyes and placed a finger to his lips, wishing that the horses were closer and not at the river’s edge. But it was too late to make a run for it, or to whistle for Ares. The approaching sounds grew closer, and then Coxley and his guard emerged from the other side of a large tree, his expression triumphant as it fell on the two of them.
“Well, well, what have we here,” he crowed, pointing two pistols right at them.
Chapter Nine
Sorcha couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. They were standing in the wide open, with nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run. And blast it all to hell, she’d left her sword and bow with her horse!
Brandt had planted himself directly in front of her, obscuring her view of Malvern’s two men a split second after each of them aimed their pistols right at Brandt. A spike of fear took hold inside of her, a lick of fire racing up the back of her neck and sending out a frenzied beat of panic.
“Send the Beast over here,” Coxley said, beckoning with his free hand. The words did not bother her, but the sight of the man, as always, made her feel nauseated. She loathed Malvern, but Coxley made Malvern seem like an angel in comparison. “We’ve instructions to deliver her unharmed.”
“She isn’t going anywhere with you,” Brandt replied, his tone flat and obstinate and so bloody certain. Was the man addled? He sounded far too confident, as if there weren’t a brace of pistols a crack away from ending his life.
“You’re not very bright, are you?” Coxley’s man asked with a bark of mean laughter.
“I just have a better view,” Brandt replied.
Sorcha peered up at her husband’s profile, trying to understand his words, when a shot rang out. She startled and yelped as the man beside Coxley crumpled to the ground, gunpowder smoke clouding the air directly behind him. With a war cry, Ronan leaped from the woods the two men had just come through and collided with Coxley, taking the man to the ground.
“Go!” her brother roared to them as he used his spent weapon to crack the knight across the temple.
Sorcha felt a hand wrench her arm and then she was being dragged back, toward the dense forest, Brandt shouting at her to run.
“Ronan!” she cried, half turning as they stumbled toward the woods to view her brother facing off against Coxley, who’d somehow found his feet. The brutish first knight attacked Ronan with a fist to the ribs, but she didn’t get to see what happened next. Her feet tripped over themselves and she spun forward, nearly falling on the uneven ground. Ronan could handle himself, but she’d seen Coxley’s cruelty before, when the marquess had visited Maclaren. He’d pummeled one of his own men bloody just for looking at a wench he’d been lusting after. The man fought dirty, and without any shred of honor.
“Faster, Sorcha!” Brandt ordered, wringing her arm practically from its socket to keep her from falling. But she couldn’t. Her legs were jelly, her heartbeat thrashing. Her brother was the most powerful and capable warrior she knew, but he had just come through battle and was tired. What if he faltered? What if helost?
Her eyes stung, and the tree trunks and thick canopy were blurred as she and Brandt entered on foot, their horses left behind at the river’s edge.
“We must go back, we must help him!” she said as they veered around a giant boulder, Brandt still gripping her arm and pulling her, as if he knew she would stop and turn back otherwise. And he was right, she would have. Sheshould. What had she done? Seven of Ronan’s men had died that morning.Seven. And now her brother… She squeezed her lids shut to clear the haze of tears. No. Ronan would not fall. He was the future laird of Maclaren, and he would survive.
But those other men. Their blood had been spilled, their lives extinguished, because of her and her foolish and selfish desire to avoid marriage to Malvern. Her feet turned to lead.
Brandt stopped running then and stooped to wrap his arms around her waist. With an easy toss, he flipped her over his shoulder and took off again, running through the forest’s undergrowth. Her furious shriek snagged in her throat, the blood swamping her head at the ungainly position.
“Put me down, ye wretchedamadan!”
“You’re too slow,” he huffed, “and too damned mulish.”
Sorcha pounded him on the back, insisting he let her down, that she could run just as fast as him. But with every pounding step he took, she felt the sharp press from the shallow slice in her ribs. The tip of an enemy sword had sliced into her during the several moments of pure terror she’d spent distracted by the sight of Brandt being tossed from his horse and set upon by that hulking warrior. She’d quickly skewered the man who’d injured her, but the cut hurt like the devil, and now, folded over her husband’s shoulder, she felt the brunt of it.
“Brandt,” she protested again, “put me down!”
She wasn’t by any means light, what with her long legs and the muscle she’d built over years spent in the keep’s training grounds. And yet here this lunatic was, running with her with as much ease as if she’d been a sack of feathers instead of a full-grown woman. His strength astounded her. If she weren’t so fuming angry and worried, she might have appreciated his brawn and determination. She might have even spent more time viewing the hard, muscled backside and powerful legs that were fully in her view. Even upside down, she felt her pulse quicken.
