Claiming Her

“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.

Walter cleared his throat. “Sir, I will make her stand down—”

The Irishman cocked a brow. “Will you? How?”

Walter fell silent, struck dumb. A feat only a barbarian could achieve. A perverse bolt of satisfaction surged through Katarina.

“My lord, take heed,” Walter spoke in a confidential tone. “There are reasons for my lady’s mania. ’Twas a murrain in the sheep last spring that almost wiped out the flock, then the fire less than a twelvemonth past, and all those

Spaniards washing up on our shores, and…well, in truth, sir, it has been a most trying year for us all, Lady Katarina more than most, of course, as she is a woman and as such, perhaps not as well equipped as you or I…”

Walter’s voice drifted off in momentary pity for her less equipped nature. “But she has never done this sort of thing before,” he concluded carefully. Implying she’d done other sorts of things.

She felt an urge to stab him. With the Irishman’s blade.

Aodh Mac Con’s face turned down to hers. “He thinks you ill-equipped to handle murrains.”

“I am not fond of them,” she admitted in a whisper.

And there it was again, the faintest hint of a smile.

By the stairs, Walter tutted in an impotent, clerical way. “Sir Bertrand, I beg you, if you and I could but speak—”

“He is not Bertrand of Bridge,” Katarina said loudly, but her voice sounded as if it was coming from a long way off. “His name is Aodh Mac Con, and his men have taken over our castle.”

Finally, finally, Walter stopped talking. He might have stopped breathing, the silence was so complete. Then he gasped, and boots scraped against the stony ground, and then…

“He is running,” the Irishman said, sounding surprised.

A strange bubble rose up inside Katarina, an iridescent sort of lightness. Buoyant. Dreamlike. Perhaps she was going into shock. “He is frightened.”

“So were you.”

She shook her head the slightest bit. “No. But it shall come.”

He never looked away from her. His eyes were so blue, so intensely, palely blue, so utterly focused on her, it was like being immersed in a sea. An ocean of consideration.

It was the oddest moment, so quiet, so…connected, his body pressed to hers as they conversed quietly about her cowardly steward. The Irishman’s hard body had taken away all her choices. She was shorn of responsibility as she’d not been since she was eight, and in consequence, she felt…like a soap bubble.

She became aware they were breathing in unison.

Shock, most certainly.

Then she heard Walter cry out, “Oh sweet and merciful Lord,” and a contingent of Irishman thundered into the entryway, foaming up the stairs like a steel river.

One of the warriors bounded up from behind and stopped short, perhaps taken aback by the sight of his master pinning the lady of the castle against a wall, an assortment of blades scattered on the ground around them.

“Aodh?” the warrior said carefully.