Claiming Her

Chapter Three

SIXTY-FOUR MEN rode through her gates.

Katarina saw one.

Hooded and helmed, riding a pale gray horse, their leader resembled mist taking shape. A simple dark gray woolen cape was draped over his horse’s dappled rump, and silver-gray armor covered his legs and forearms. Under helm and hood, it was impossible to see where he was looking. But Katarina did not need to see. She felt his gaze on her, as if a long, taut cord had been plucked inside her.

Swinging off his horse, he spoke a quiet word to his men, then started toward her with long, confident strides, somewhat like a mountain in motion. It wasn’t that he was so very large, although he was tall. It was more a sense of the space he took up, the certainty of him being in that space, moving aside the air to inhabit it.

But then, “presence” was to be expected when an armed knight strode through one’s bailey, cape tugged back in the steely winds, a heavily armed detachment spreading out behind him like an unsheathed blade.

She did not recall such presence in Bertrand of Bridge.

He reached her side and bent a knee, bowing his head. “My lady.”

It was a simple male rumble, but it sent something entirely unsimple tingling through her limbs. She returned a curtsey and extended her hand.

“You are well met, sir. I am pleased to see you.”

Liar.

He closed his fingers around hers and straightened. They were warm in the winter cold. She could barely make his face out amid the shadows of hood and helm. Indeed, the steel accentuated all the hard, capable things about his face.

The nose, broken no doubt sometime in the past, the hard slash of a mouth, lined with small crescent curves along each side, the rough growth of hair that brushed his cheeks and jaw, but above all, the eyes peering out at her. They were blue-gray, reflecting the steely sky. Hard, perceptive, uncompromising eyes. Just what was needed for the Irish marches.

Mayhap the distant Crown had chosen well this time.

Although she did not recall Bertrand having blue-gray eyes.

“My lady, we must speak at once, on a matter of some urgency.” His voice was pitched low, with a rasping rumble underlying it.

A chill pierced down her spine. “Is it the Irish?”

Slate-blue eyes dropped to hers. “When is it not?”

She nodded but felt honor-bound to add, “When it is the English, my lord.” He ought to be told such things, and who else but Katarina was going to inform him of the shifting realities and immutable truths of life on the marches?

“If we might speak? Alone?” he said quietly.

“Of course.” She gestured to the castle. “Come inside.”

He released her fingers. Behind them, the outer gate lowered with a creaking thud. She slid a sideways glance at his hooded profile as they hurried across the bailey: grim, serious, silent. Intent on the castle doorway.

“Tell me of the defenses, lady.”

“The west wall is weakest, as you may have noted upon your arrival, but it will hold.”

“The garrison? Your outer gate was unmanned.”

“We have been undermanned of late,” she admitted. Miserably so. For years.

“That is unfortunate,” he said. In truth, it sounded as though he’d said that is fortunate, but his voice was pitched so low, the wind must have whipped away his prefix, as it tore away so much else.

As if in answer, a rogue blast of wind roared through the bailey, rattling the castle windows and ripping a section of thatch off one of the outbuildings. It almost tore Katarina’s cape off her shoulders, and she spun to the side to ward it off, catching her hood against the side of her face.

He was there at once, hand on her back, one of his hard legs behind hers, righting her. She lifted her head and stared into the broad expanse of an armored chest, then tilted up further to look into his eyes.

“My thanks, my lord,” she said, rather breathlessly, from inside her billowing hood. The winds did that every so often, took one’s breath away.