The Viper Read online

  Lachlan had let them have their fun, but he’d drawn the line when they’d tried to shave his head. He’d taken to wearing his hair short like the other members of the Highland Guard, but he didn’t need a damned bald spot at the top of his head. Just his luck, the priest was also a monk.

  It seemed as if he and the young soldier climbed forever, but five stories later they finally reached the top floor of the tower. The man leading him nodded a greeting to the guard at the door. “The priest,” he said, “to see the lady.”

  The other man frowned. Lachlan didn’t like the look of him. He was bigger, older, and shrewder than the soldier who’d led him to the tower. Though Lachlan had a small dirk strapped to his leg under the blasted robe, he didn’t want to use it. Dead bodies were a sure way to put them on alert.

  “Sir Simon didn’t tell me there’d be any visitors today,” the guardsman said. “Only the lady’s attendant.”

  Lachlan affected his most pious and subservient pose, slouching to hide some of his height. But unfamiliar as he was with either piety or subservience, he feared he did a piss-poor job of it. He slid the parchment from his robe and handed it to the guardsman. “My instructions,” he said with as much meekness as he could muster.

  The guard’s frown deepened at the deep sound of his voice that no amount of feigned humility could hide. The guard peered into the dark shadow of his hood but took the missive.

  Lachlan kept his gaze down on his hands folded at his waist as the guard scanned the contents. Damn. He quickly stuffed them in the folds of his robe, hoping to hell the men didn’t notice the battle scars and heavy calluses that covered his palms and fingers. He’d be hard-pressed to explain how a priest had come to have the hands of a warrior.

  Sneaking around in the shadows was a hell of a lot easier than this. But he would never have made it past all these guards without leaving at least a few bodies behind. Intercepting the young priest in the forest beyond the gates of the castle had seemed a stroke of divine intervention, but now Lachlan was beginning to wonder. He had a bad feeling about this.

  After what seemed an eternity, the guard folded the missive and handed it back to him. “You’re to hear the lady’s confession?”

  Lachlan nodded. Seeing the man’s continued scrutiny, he explained. “I’m to make sure the lady is ready to leave on the morrow. Body as well as soul,” he said humbly.

  The man held his eyes on him a moment longer, then grunted what Lachlan assumed was acquiescence when he removed the keys at his waist and began to unlock the door. “Ned here will wait to escort you down when you are done. It shouldn’t take long. The lady is monitored too closely to get in any mischief; she hasn’t seen anyone other than her attendant and my captain in months.”

  Lachlan debated moving his hand in the sign of the cross and saying “bless you my son.” Though the situation seemed to warrant something priestly, he didn’t want to overdo it. His disguise was perilously thin already.

  As the guard started to open the door, Lachlan studied the crude leather tips of the too-small shoes he’d borrowed along with the robe, which he’d be almost as glad to give back to the priest when he woke from his drunken sleep as the robe. Lachlan didn’t want the men to see his face, fearing they’d sense the excitement coursing through him. Excitement that was too palpable to hide.

  This was it. The moment he’d been waiting for. The culmination of more than two years of agonizing delays, waiting until he could free Bella from the hell that he’d foisted upon her.

  Unwittingly perhaps, but it was his fault all the same. He’d let it happen again. Instead of leading his men into a trap, he’d led Ross’s men to the women.

  He’d been distracted. Angry. Trying to calm the violent, unfamiliar emotions twisting inside him and cool his heated blood, his body teeming with the aftereffects of a kiss that had stripped every last vestige of his control. Christ, he’d been moments away from taking her right there against the chapel door.

  She’d had every right to stop him. To slap him. But that didn’t lessen the sting of her rejection. What was it about her that brought out the blackest part of him? That made him want to lash back when she taunted him?

  He’d been so caught up in what had happened with Bella that he’d missed the threat. Because of his desire for a woman, he’d failed his duty, and those he’d been charged to protect had been captured. He knew that Bella thought he’d betrayed them. He hadn’t, but it was his fault all the same.

  The door opened.

  He’d steeled himself, but nothing could have prepared him for the fist of emotion that hit him in the gut as his eyes fell on her for the first time in over two years.

  His knees nearly buckled before he caught himself. Christ, he’d taken sword blows across the chest that had packed less of a wallop.

  She stood with her back to him at the far end of the small chamber, silhouetted against the window in the fading daylight. She’d loomed so large in his memory, it was a shock to see how small she was in reality. Her back was slim, her shoulders as narrow as a child’s. She was much more delicate than he remembered.

  She tilted her head toward the door but didn’t turn around, nor did she speak. The cool hauteur of that gesture released something inside him that he didn’t know he’d been holding. Fear, he realized. A deep-seated fear that they might have broken the spirit and fierce pride that had at times infuriated him, but that had made her different from any other woman he’d ever known.

  “A priest, my lady,” the guard said. He waited for her nod, and then closed the door.

  They were alone.

  After so many months, he was so close he could almost reach out and touch her. Though he could practically span the small room with his arms, she seemed so far away. The forlorn look in her eye cut him to the bone.

  She glanced in his direction. “The constable has sent a priest? He must fear for my soul to warrant such consideration the eve before I am to enter a nunnery.”

  A nunnery? So that’s what they intended. But from her tone he suspected there was more.

  Knowing the guard could well be listening and unsure of how she would react to seeing him, Lachlan crossed the room in two quick strides, slid his hand over her mouth, and pulled her against him so she couldn’t move. He suspected she’d like it this time as much as the first time they’d met.

  Shock nearly made him release her the instant he touched her. God’s blood! His memory hadn’t been faulty at all. What the hell had they done to her? There was nothing to her. She was so slim and slight as to be almost frail. The soft, lush curves that had so torturously haunted him had all but disappeared. Only the weight of her breasts on his arms felt familiar.

  By all that was holy, someone would pay for this.

  But touching her had been a mistake. His body hummed with other memories that apparently hadn’t died.

  He wasn’t alone in his shock. Bella froze at his unexpected movement. But then he heard her gasp. Her gaze shot toward his face, hidden in the shadows of his hood.

  Two big blue eyes dominated her pale face, made more pronounced by the dark shadows underneath and the deep hollows below her high cheekbones. A hand fisted against his chest. Gaunt and fragile, she seemed a ghostly shadow of the woman he remembered. She was still beautiful, but the once bold and sensual beauty was now ethereal and achingly delicate.

  Even before he lifted the hood from his head, every inch of her body—what was left of her—turned as cold and stiff as a slab of ice.

  Her eyes bored into his, shooting him with daggers of pure hatred.

  Time, apparently, hadn’t dulled her feelings for him.

  He deserved it—had expected it, even—but damn it, one foolish part of him had hoped she might not have believed the worst of him.

  “The guard,” he whispered. “Have care. I think he’s listening.” Her eyes flared mutinously. He cursed silently, knowing the moment he took his hand off her mouth, she was going to let out a bellow that would bring the entir