Claiming Her (Renegades & Outlaws) (4 page)

“
I
am Rardove, sir,” she said boldly, quietly, and foolishly. “And I hold for England.”

He tipped closer. “That has just become a matter for negotiation, my lady. From here on, let us say England shall have to earn Rardove’s loyalty.”

She stepped back, her lips parting. He’d shocked her. The realization caused a small, strange tinge of disappointment in him, that a woman who’d held an English castle beyond the Pale with only ten men would be shocked by such a thing. It seemed somehow…diminishing. But then, Aodh had a taste for rebellion today, and nothing but more of the same would serve.

Still.
 

A movement at the far end of the hall caught his attention. One of his captains, Cormac, poked his head through a door, caught his eye and nodded, then ducked back out. Good. They’d made it to the north side, which meant they’d secured the entire castle. Rardove was his.

And so where was the hot satisfaction of conquest? The rush of triumph? Where was…everything?

Lying at the bottom of the same cold pit that had marked his life for too many years to count, no doubt. Intrigues, battle, courtly maneuvers, it was all the same: naught.

Apparently even coups of castles did not rise to the level of interest anymore.
 

He turned his attention back to Katarina. “My lady, if you will—”

All he saw was a blur of green silk, then her small, bunched fist smashed into his face.

The impact, hard and square, landed directly on his jaw.

Caught utterly unaware—as he’d never been before,
never
, not even when his father had had his head cut off—Aodh reeled sideways. The retreat gave enough room for her to launch herself forward and slam her shoulder directly into his ribs so hard and fast, he grunted and stumbled backward and hit the ground, her on top, twisting like a hellcat.
 

She jammed a knee into his bollocks, and he doubled over protectively, at which point she grabbed one of his fingers and twisted it back almost to breaking, while her other hand—so sinuous and slender it was all but ungrippable—snaked between their writhing bodies and tugged his accursed dagger out of its sheath.

Disappointed, indeed.
 

With a roar, he lunged up off the ground, lifting her with him, and backed her to the wall. Predictably—dimly, he noted he was already predicting things about her—she wrestled like a firebrand. Whirling hair, arms, legs. Kicking, biting, punching, swiping with the knife.

First things first.
 

He caught hold of the feminine fist snaked around the hilt of his blade and slammed it to the wall above her head, gripping her wrist so hard she cried out, but she did not, of note, stop fighting. He finally had to pin her to the wall with his entire body, her toes dangling half a foot in the air, their faces pressed together, cheek to cheek, until he stilled everything that was writhing and flailing and kicking on her curving, rampant, berserker body.
 

Fire burned in his veins, urging him to smash and destroy. He reached over with his other hand and wrenched the blade out of her grip, then tossed it onto the ground behind him.
 

He inhaled slowly, forcing himself to calm. They stood like this for a moment, her body pinned between Aodh and the wall. He supposed she could still kick his shins, but she’d impact against his greaves, and it would hurt her far more than him.
 

She seemed to agree. At least, she didn’t move.
 

He pulled back a few inches, let her feet drop to the ground, and peered down at her. Breathing fast, she flung her head, spraying hair across her face. It was pale and beautiful, with slim, dark brows arcing over what appeared to be intelligent brown eyes. A shocking discovery.
 

“If you were a man, I would kill you right now,” he said in a low voice.

He waited for her response—everything now was a test, every moment a potential tipping point. Would she recoil? Be wise and retreat, apologize, surrender, run scared?
 

Would she be like everyone else?

She shifted the only thing he didn’t have restrained, her left hand, and laid what turned out to be the cold edge of a blade against the side of his throat.
 

“If I were a man, sir,” she whispered back, “you would already be dead.”

God
dammit
.

It was his dagger, one of many strapped to his body. In the mêlée, she’d succeeded in getting it free. In the distraction of staring into her eyes, trying to ascertain if she were mad, she’d succeeded in lifting it to his throat.

A rush went through him, hot and intense. “You are left-handed,” he observed grimly.

“When necessary.”
 

A humming filled his stomach, deep and low. He’d come for battle, and that this slim audacious woman had given it to him, undefended, in a hopeless situation, outmatched and overpowered, bespoke great boldness. Of a kind he’d not seen in a long time. Either that, or idiocy.

She did not appear idiotic. Of course, she’d not appeared reckless either, out in the bailey. She’d seemed calm, clever, pale, and beautiful. Then she’d launched her body into his and turned into a bold, roaring-mad hellcat.
 

Perhaps
everything
in her was latent. Who knew, idiocy might rear its head at any moment. Or more boldness.

Although it was difficult to see how she could become
more
bold than she was at the moment.

Small wisps of hair brushed beside her mouth. Aodh knew battle and fights; her lips ought to be dry with fear, parched and tight. But they were wet. Parted and wet, her chin up, her cheeks a sort of hot red. Her slim body was pressed hard against his, female curves barely detectable through his armor. But the vivid flush of
her
was clear. Her mad, energizing, fearless self was the clearest thing on his mind.      

That and the blade pressed against his neck.

He laughed low in his throat. It had been a long time since he’d felt this hum inside him, this energized, this vital. He leaned closer until his mouth was an inch from hers, until he felt the honed edge of his own blade indent the flesh of his throat.
 

“Do it, lass,” he whispered. “Or drop it.
Now.
”

Chapter Five

MAD IRISHRY.
 

The thought pounded through her brain with each beat of her heart. Her insides rattled like a winter leaf. This moment was constructed of madness. A pit of madness.

The sensible voice inside her, the one she
relied
upon to restrain her from acts of recklessness just such as this, had utterly failed her. She was alone with the bright fire of passion. It had taken over like an ember tossed back onto a dry forest bed.
 

“Do not push me,” she warned in a shaky voice.

“Oh, but I will.” He shifted on his booted feet, pushed his hips harder against hers, until she felt a part of the wall. A part of him. “You lifted a blade to me, Katarina. I’m going to push you hard.”

Fear spiked through her. “That is unwise.”

“Wisdom has never been my strongest trait. Tell me, how do you foresee this ending? Shall I help you think it through?”

She jerked her head in an abbreviated shake. “Stop.”
 

“You will either kill me or be very sorry you tried. Neither ends well for you, as my men have taken over the castle.”

“One ends poorly for you,” she pointed out.

“Then do it.”

“Y-you are not in a position to issue commands, sirrah.”

But he was. Even with a blade held against his throat, he was a mighty presence, and her hand was growing sweaty around the hilt.
 

Her breath was coming too fast, her heart hammering too hard, her hand—the one she’d punched him with—throbbed as if she’d punched a wall, not a man. Steel before and stone behind, she was, most literally, between a rock and a very hard place.
 

He was all wild thing, untethered and unafraid. His hair had been shaved close on the sides and back, growing long down the middle, banded at the base of his neck, so he looked familiar and yet utterly foreign. His face was all cut planes of male fury, hard cheekbones, dark brows above the ice-blue eyes pinned on her. She felt like she was staring at a flame burning inside a shard of ice.

“The blade is exceptionally sharp,” he assured her, his voice a rumble of cold, calm advice. “If you press the slightest bit, you shall see results.”
 

“Then stop pushing me,” she almost begged.

“No.”

She began to tremble outwardly. The rush of fury was fading; fear would soon settle in. Terror would come on its heels. And then, sanity, sense, reason, restraint.
 

The column of his neck, strongly muscled, pressed against the blade. Sheer hard will was the only thing that kept her from lowering it, for the moment she did, she was a dead woman.

His icy gaze roamed her face. “I see
‘
I shall do it’ in your eyes.”

Her hand tightened on the slippery hilt. “Indeed I shall.”

“Ah, but I see a thousand ‘I shall do its’
in your eyes, and yet, you do not.”

Swoosh
. The blood coursing through her body washed cold, then hot. How had he done that, seen straight through to the heart of her?

“Are you going to drop it?”

“Are you going to kill me?”
 

Another mad smile. “Drop it and see.”

She squeezed the blade tighter, because that was terrifying.
 

Then, God save her, he leaned in closer yet, until she felt his breath on her cheek and he put his mouth by her ear and said, “I dare you.”
 

Dare?
“To what?” she whispered back, as if they were in secret council and this was his whispered advice.

For a beat of her heart, he remained still. Then, like some animal, like some untamed, unbroken, undaunted sensual being, he ran his tongue across her ear, his breath hot and male.

She felt struck by lightning. Burnt, charged, dangerous. Whatever had been coursing through her before became a flood. Hot and raging.

She flung her head and leapt backward, but there was nowhere to go, and as she rebounded between his rock-hard body and the stone wall, she dropped the blade.

In a single move, he kicked it away and clamped a fist around her wrist, pinning it to the wall high above her head. He caught her other wrist and held it low beside their hips, their bodies still pressed together. Then he went suddenly, absolutely, terrifyingly motionless.

She felt the beat of his heart against her chest—it was not racing as fast as hers, but it was a strong, hard beat. She saw the vein on his neck thudding.
 

She had no idea what a warrior might feel inclined to do at such a moment—hanging; a simple, swift beheading—but none of them occurred. Nothing happened, nothing but the tension slowly rising through her body the way a flood tide rises on a riverbed. She was awash in awareness of him, pinning hers from chest to knee, in the way he was watching her with inscrutable eyes, in the hard, absolute motionlessness of his body.
 

She was doomed. Walter had been saying it for seven years, and now all the predictions were coming true.

Boots sounded on the stairs, then stopped short. A loud male gasp sliced through the stony entry chamber. “Dear God in
heaven
.”
 

Walter.

“My lady, what have you
done
?” It was barely short of a wail. “Did I not
tell
you this habit of the blades would turn out poorly?”

Aodh Mac Con moved his gaze to the steward. “They are not her blades.”

“My lord,” was Walter’s next attempt to reinsert sanity into the moment, and she had to admire him for it. “I beg you, sir, go gentle with her.”

She felt the Irishman’s hard body still against hers. “Gentle with
her
?”
 

She had the oddest moment of wanting to smile.

She was losing her mind.