“Why should I do that? So you can set the militia in hot pursuit?”
Must the man answer every question with one of his own? “But I won’t. I swear. If you let me go, I’ll forget this ever happened. I’ll forget I ever saw you. We’ve never met. Indeed, I had no desire to improve the slight acquaintance anyway—”
He cut swiftly into her hysterical chattering. “The way you agreed not to scream in your uncle’s study? How easily lies fall from the tongue of a Campbell.”
Katrine had no ready answer to that. With increasing desperation, she said very slowly, as if to someone of deficient understanding, “You just said you don’t want my uncle’s money, and I have already told you the duke won’t pay. There would be no purpose in trying to hold me for ransom.”
“No, not ransom. I doubt your cheese-paring uncle would be willing to part with his silver. But even he wouldn’t want to see you come to harm. Blood is blood, after all. You’ll serve quite well as surety against the ill-treatment of the Duart MacLeans.”
MacLeans, Katrine thought with a combination of dread and distaste. The cattle-thieving MacLeans.
Her thoughts must have shown on her face, for his mouth twisted wryly. “You must see how imprudent it would be to release you, now that you know who we are.”
“Imprudent!” Not for one instant did she believe he gave a fig if she could identify him or his clan. Indeed, back in her uncle’s study, he had seemed to want Colin Campbell to realize whose hand was at work. Such brazenness was not only insolent but reckless. “You must see,” Katrine said with strained patience, “it would be imprudent not to release me. It’s mad, what you’re planning. My uncle will be furious. The duke will be furious. They’ll hunt you down, the soldiers at the garrison will—”
“I’m terrified.”
Her threats weren’t working, she could see. “You can’t do this to me!” she cried in frustration.
“I expect I can.”
The amused mockery was back in his eyes, fanning her ire. Katrine would have stamped her foot in defiance if her ankles hadn’t been bound. “I won’t go with you!”
“I’m devastated to have to disappoint you, Miss Campbell, but you have no choice.”
She glanced wildly about her, looking for a way out, but he must have guessed her intent, for he said easily, “Don’t think of trying to escape, I warn you. You would find it rather undignified if we had to chase you down.”
Before she could retort that it was impossible to escape with one’s feet tied, he turned away, going to his horse. The wiry animal was as black as the Highlander’s hair.
“I hope the soldiers do catch you!” Katrine flung after him.
“You’ll ride with Lachlan,” he answered without looking back.
Katrine’s dismay at this pronouncement was almost as great as Lachlan’s.
“I dinna want her!” exclaimed the brawny man. “I’d as soon ride with a wildcat.”
Katrine felt a small measure of satisfaction at his protest. At least she had managed to give him a healthy respect for her nails in her earlier struggle to be free. But if he dared treat her the way he had then, she would…she would…
Unable at the moment to think of anything violent enough, Katrine glared at Lachlan’s massive back. He had also turned to fetch his horse and was patting the shaggy chestnut’s nose.
“Ma poor beastie,” he muttered to console the animal. “Ye dinna want such a hellion, either.”
“The sentiment is mutual, I assure you,” Katrine declared just as stubbornly. “I’ve no desire to be thrown across a horse like a sack of oats by some cloth-headed halfwit who doesn’t have the—”
“I suggest,” Raith interrupted her from across the thicket as he swung up into the saddle, “you find some other means of describing Lachlan. He doesn’t take kindly to having his intellect disparaged.”
It was on the tip of Katrine’s tongue to ask “What int
ellect?” but the savage way Lachlan was scowling at her made her direct her tart comment to Raith instead. “If he doesn’t like cloth-head, how about lout? Or thatch-gallows? That is what you all are.”
The corner of his mouth twitched as he urged his black mount toward her, coming to a halt a scant foot away. “Might I remind you, Miss Campbell, that your continued good health depends on our continued goodwill?”
His sardonic look and drawl were deliberately maddening. Infuriated, Katrine tried giving him a haughty stare to match his own—and discovered herself at a distinct disadvantage. Even on the ground he was much taller than she, and when he was sitting on a long-legged horse, as he was now, she had to crane her neck just to meet his gaze. What was more, she was still in her night rail, vulnerable to the lecherous gazes of the dozen strange, armed men who were led by this black-haired devil.
Not that her scant attire incited his masculine interest. His dark blue eyes were giving her a skeptical perusal, which said quite clearly that he found her singularly lacking.
Oh, how she wanted to strike him! Determinedly Katrine looked around for a weapon, a stone to throw, anything that would wipe that sardonic sneer off his face.