Highland Savage Read Online Free PDF Page B

lands, and a verra wee dowry. The other lass gets all the rest. There is nary a doubt that the council would have approved of ye as a husband for our lady so Agnes had to be rid of ye. Can ye nay see now that our lady had no cause to do ye harm, that ’twas only to her benefit to keep ye alive so that ye might choose her as your wife?”
    “Aye, but I can also see that, if Katerina thought I was turning to Agnes, it would be to her benefit to see me dead and gone.”
    A sharp curse escaped William, but then he shrugged and turned all of his attention back to his carving. “As I said, I begin to think ye too daft to live. After all, if the lass truly wished ye dead, all she had to do today was leave ye to Ranald and his dogs and just let the bastard finish what he had started a year ago. Mayhap ye ought to think on that for a wee while.”
    Lucas was thinking on it, but he would never admit it to William. It was the onething that kept his doubts about Katerina’s guilt alive and pestering him. What she had done for him today did not change what had happened that long ago night, he told himself firmly. Perhaps she had been tormented by guilt and regret while they had been apart and could no longer condone his murder. Lucas knew he would be staying with Katerina and her men for now and intended to use the time to find the answers he needed to uncover all the truth.
     
    Wearied from weeping, Katerina slowly dragged herself off her bed and bathed her face in cold water. The very last thing she wanted was for Lucas to see that she had been weeping. She still felt stunned by his accusations, but she refused to let him know how deeply they had hurt her.
    Her stomach rumbled, demanding food, and she knew she would have to return to the hall to get something to eat. That meant facing Lucas again and she dreaded it. The pain was still too fresh. So, too, she realized, was the anger his accusations had stirred within her. It was clear that all his sweet kisses, his passion, had been false or he never would have condemned her so. A little doubt she could understand and forgive, but not this cold condemnation. He did not even give her denials a moment of consideration. Katerina doubted that even showing him the many scars she had gathered that day would sway him. She would have trusted him with her very life, but it was now clear that he had never trusted her at all.
    The problem was what to do now, she mused as she poured herself some wine. Sipping the wine, Katerina paced her small bedchamber and thought about the best way to handle Lucas. Her first inclination was to just ignore the man, to cut him from her heart and treat him as a complete stranger. It was a good plan, if only because she knew it would annoy him to be completely ignored, but Katerina decided she would not be able to hold to that plan for very long. She had never even been able to ignore Agnes for long and no one angered her as her half-sister did.
    That left her with the choices of spitting his anger and mistrust right back at him or trying to convince him that he was utterly wrong in his suspicions. The former might relieve her of any bile stirred up by being thought so poorly of by the man she had given her heart and innocence to, but it would make life very difficult for her men. The latter sharply stung her pride. Why should she have to convince him of the truth just because he was too witless to see it? Of course, when he did finally see the truth, she would have the pleasure of gloating. Men did so hate to be wrong, she thought, and suspected Lucas would suffer even more because of what they had once meant to each other.
    “And that is something it would be wise to forget,” she muttered.
    Especially since she may well have been utterly deceived in what she believed they had shared, she thought, and felt like weeping all over again. She ruthlessly buried the pain and tried to face the truth. The love she had thought she and Lucas shared may well have been a