The Arrow Read online

  “Then don’t.”

  He shot her a glare and ignored the comment. “What you want is impossible.”

  “How do you know what I want?”

  One side of his mouth lifted in a wry smile. “What do all young girls who fancy themselves in love want? The faerie tale. Marriage. Children. A husband who loves them back. But that isn’t me, Cate. I’m not the settle-down-with-one-woman type. When you are a little older you will understand.”

  Now it was Cate who was angry. “Do not patronize me, Gregor. I’m twenty, not a fifteen-year-old girl anymore. I’m old enough to know my own feelings. I do not ‘fancy’ myself in love. I love you, whether you choose to accept that or not. Although the rest sounds nice, and I do think you are the settle-down-with-one-woman type—the right woman—all I want from you right now is to acknowledge that you feel something for me.”

  “What I feel is lust, but I care too much about you to give in to it. Damn it, I’m trying to protect—” Suddenly, he stopped and looked as if he’d just been shot with one of those arrows he was so good with. “How old are you?”

  She winced a little sheepishly. “Twenty.”

  His gaze narrowed. “Why did you let me think you were younger?”

  She shrugged. “You never asked. Your mother thought you’d guessed but didn’t want to know.”

  He swore again, dragging his fingers through his hair again but this time more harshly. “Christ, twenty?” He dragged out the word accusingly, scanning her up and down as if she were some sort of strange creature from a menagerie that he’d never seen before.

  “Is it really that important?”

  “Yes,” he snapped. “No! I’m still your guardian, and you’re still too young.”

  Cate’s nose wrinkled. Was that what this was about? Was that why he was fighting his attraction so hard? Because of some misplaced sense of responsibility toward her? She was no longer a foundling in need of rescue. “As you have just seen, I don’t need a protector anymore, Gregor. I can take care of myself.”

  “Like you did with young MacNab? Do you know his father wanted to arrest you?”

  “For what, defending myself?”

  “For humiliating his son.”

  She gaped at him as if he were jesting. “So I should have let him strike me?”

  “Of course not. You shouldn’t have intervened in the first place.”

  “He was hurting Pip.”

  “There were a half-dozen of them, Cate. You should have gone for help. What would have happened if I hadn’t shown up when I did?”

  She would rather not think about that. “Have you never fought when the odds were against you?”

  His mouth fell in a hard line—a hard defensive line. “That isn’t the point.”

  “What is the point, then? We are not talking about my fighting, we are talking about why you won’t act on this … lust.” She moved closer, putting her hand on his chest—which he promptly removed. “You don’t need to feel responsible for me.”

  “I am responsible for you, and taking advantage of your youth and inexperience would be wrong.”

  Cate clenched her teeth to keep her temper in check—barely. She wanted to touch him again, but squeezed her fists at her sides in frustration instead. “Yet you had no problem kissing Seonaid, and she is a year younger than I am. What about her youth and inexperience?”

  He clenched his teeth right back at her. “That was a mistake.”

  That he knew it just as well as she made it somehow worse. She stared up at him. “How can you do that, Gregor? How can you share intimacies with women when they don’t mean anything to you?”

  He barked out a sharp laugh. “Quite easily. The fact that you can ask that question shows just how little you understand of lovemaking. Believe me, caring is not required.”

  Cate hated the flush that rose to her cheeks—hated that he could make her feel so silly and naive. “It doesn’t sound like lovemaking at all if you don’t care about the people you are making love to. Does it not bother you to break all those hearts?”

  He laughed, actually laughed. “Oh, Lord, you are sweet. Do you think the women I take to my bed care about me? I assure you when a woman is making herself available two minutes after meeting me, it is not me she has fallen in love with but ‘the most handsome man in Scotland.’ ”

  “Because that is all you ever let anyone see.”

  He smiled, that dazzling roguish smile that had probably felled many a heart but to her felt like a slap. “And you think there is something else?”

  She held his gaze steady. “I know there is.”

  Her quiet certainty seemed to bother him. He frowned. “Don’t look for something more, Caty. You will only be disappointed. I am quite happy with my life as it is.”

  She stiffened at the childish diminutive. “It doesn’t bother you to have them use you like that?”

  “Use me?” He laughed again, shaking his head, and then in mock seriousness said, “Aye, it’s a hardship having women eager to jump in my bed, but somehow I manage to carry on.”

  But she knew it did matter to him, and that he was making fun of her made her want to lash out and prove it. “And when your sister-in-law used you to make your brother jealous, that didn’t matter either, did it?”

  His expression went so cold for a moment she felt a whisper of fear. She thought about stepping back, but his fingers latched around her arm like a vise. The change that came over him was blood-chilling. Gone was the handsome heartbreaker and in his place was a deadly warrior. “Who told you about that?”

  She bit her lip, not wanting to give away the confidence.

  Guessing the source of her conflict, he pushed her away disgustedly. “Mother. She’s the only one who could. John and Padraig know nothing about it. What did she tell you?”

  “Enough to know that it wasn’t your fault. That you cared for Isobel, and she manipulated you.”

  He laughed harshly. “So being stupid and gullible is an excuse for bedding my brother’s future wife?” Cate’s eyes widened, and he laughed harshly. “Aye, I’d wager my mother didn’t know about that. But that’s the risk when two young people start playing a game in which they don’t know all the rules.” That warning was directed at her. “She played me perfectly. I thought she loved me, and she thought flirting and allowing a few liberties to the laird-to-be’s ‘useless but beautiful to look at’—her words—younger brother would make Alasdair jealous. Imagine her horror when we were both carried away by a few liberties. More than once. But her plan worked. Alasdair heard the rumors—or some of them—and came home.”

  Cate reached for him, but he shrugged her hand off.

  She tried to ignore the stab of hurt provoked by the rejection. “He didn’t know that you and she …?”

  The gaze he turned on her was full of pain and self-loathing. “Not right away. I left to fulfill my service for my uncle, thinking I would be announcing our engagement when I returned home; instead she was married to my brother. But he must have learned the truth at some point. The brother I’d idolized could barely stand to be in the same room with me.” He shrugged as if it didn’t mean anything, but she knew it meant everything. “He left not long after I returned and was killed during the siege of Bothwell Castle a few months later. My father blamed me, of course.”

  “That’s ridiculous! You had nothing to do with it!”

  His eyes were hot and empty as he glared at her. “Didn’t I? The truth destroyed my brother. You see, it turned out he really did love her. She needn’t have used me at all—he’d intended to marry her all along. Her betrayal—my betrayal—drove him to the edge, and he volunteered for every dangerous job he could. Eventually one killed him.”

  “That isn’t your fault, Gregor. You cannot be responsible for your brother’s actions—or Isobel’s.”

  He held her gaze a long time. Eventually his mouth quirked. “My father didn’t agree. After we buried my brother it was as if I ceased to exist. Turns out disdain