The Guardian

time she was going to let him get under her skirts, he knew it. Heaven help him, he was going to explode right here if she kept moving against him like that.

It was time to take his wife upstairs. At last. Just as he was about to lift her off her feet to carry her up, he noticed a mark on her neck.

It was a white line, barely visible. A scar.

He ran a finger over it. “What’s this from?”

She went rigid. When she tried to jerk away from him, he held her in place.

“How did ye get this?”

“ ’Tis nothing,” she said. “Let me go, I mean it now.”

He pushed the edge of her gown down an inch or two for a better look. The scar continued down her back, out of sight.

She turned around in his arms and rested her palms on his chest. Looking up at him from under her lashes, she said, “I want ye to kiss me.”

His gaze locked on her full, parted lips, and he was sorely tempted. But why was she so desperate to divert him? When she slid her hands up around his neck and leaned against him, it was damned hard to resist her.

He brushed her soft cheek with his thumb. “What is it that ye don’t want me to know?”

She pressed her lips into a thin line and narrowed her eyes. Her brief game of seductress was over. A shame, that. But something here didn’t sit right with him.

Each time he had kissed her, things had gone well—very well—until the moment he began unfastening buttons or hooks. As he thought about that, it came to him that this was the first time he’d seen her with her hair up.

“Ye can cooperate or no,” he said, “but I’m going to have a look.”

Her bottom lip trembled. Saints above, what was this about? Sileas never cried. Even when she was a child of six and her father forgot her places, leaving her to find her own way home, she hadn’t shed a tear.

He kissed the side of her face and gently turned her around.

“Don’t,” she said in a small voice, but he could tell she had given up expecting him to concede.

His fingers felt big and clumsy as he unfastened the tiny hooks. When he had them undone to her waist, he pushed the gown off her shoulders. The chemise she wore beneath it dipped low enough in the back for him to see what she was hiding.

Rage took him like a storm, pounding in his ears and making his hands shake. He reached around her to slam his fist on the table. “I’ll kill him. I swear, I will kill whoever did this to you.”

She was weeping silently, but he was so filled with violence that he was afraid to put his hands on her.

“Who did this to ye?” he asked. “Ye must tell me.”

She wiped her face with her hand. “Who do ye think? My step-da.”

“Ach, Sil, why didn’t ye tell me?” He wanted to throw his head back and howl in his outrage. She had still been a child when Murdoc did this. “If I’d known he was hurting ye, I would have done something.”

But he should have known. He had always been her protector, and this had happened under his nose.

“When did he do this?” He strained to soften his voice, knowing anger was not what she needed from him now, but it was hard when his body still pulsed with it.

She took a shaky breath. “Mostly Murdoc didn’t trouble himself with me. As ye know, he expected my mother to give him a son who would inherit Knock Castle.”

Sileas’s mother had lost several babes before they reached a year. And Ian had no idea how many miscarriages the poor woman had.

“After she died losing that last baby, Murdoc got it into his head that he could keep my lands by wedding me to his son Angus. He gave me no peace after that. When I told him I would never marry a MacKinnon, let alone that disgusting son of his, he tried to beat me into agreeing to it.”

Ian clenched his jaw until it ached to keep from shouting curses. Years ago, Angus MacKinnon had nearly caused a clan war by raping a woman from Ian’s mother’s clan, Clan Ranald. The matter had been settled with a hefty payment, but hard feelings remained—as did rumors of Angus’s penchant for violence.

“But ye know how stubborn I am,” Sileas said, glancing over her shoulder to give him a bittersweet smile. “In the end, Murdoc locked me in my bedchamber and sent for Angus.”

“And that was the day I found ye?” Ian asked, though he already knew the bitter truth.

She nodded. “Murdoc didn’t know about the tunnel.”

Christ, forgive me. All this time, he had blamed Sileas for their forced wedding. He thought she’d caused it through some girlish foolishness that had gone farther than she expected. He’d had no notion she was in serious trouble that day.

But then, he hadn’t made much effort to find out, either.

She covered her face and said in a choked whisper, “I knew ye would find me disgusting again once ye saw it.”

“God help me, Sil, how can ye say that?” He turned her around and pulled her against his chest. “Please tell me ye don’t think so little of me.”

He held her tight and kissed her hair until she ceased to weep. Then he lifted her in his arms and carried her to