Damn, but why should he care what she felt? He didn’t know this woman. Didn’t owe her a bloody damned thing! Hadn’t wanted to bring her...
And yet he had.
It occurred to him suddenly that if he truly hadn’t wished to bring her, he simply wouldn’t have. He cared what she felt, because she’d reached some part of his soul that had lain untouched for too many years. Somehow, she’d pierced that shadowy realm with that first heart-stirring glance.
Mounted before him, towering above him as she did, her long plait unraveling down her back, her dark eyes flashing and luminous, and her stance proud, she seemed almost a wild thing in that instant. Wild and unapproachable, like the deer of the forests, those wide brown eyes both forbidding and heedful at once.
For an instant Iain was wholly mesmerized by those fathomless dark pools, some part of him yearning to leap into their misty depths, discover the hidden mysteries... and pleasures.
He knew she thought he pitied her, that much was apparent. He could spy it in her eyes, but God... it was so far from the truth. If anything, he admired her. Not many men could have taken the abuse he sensed she’d received at her father’s hands, and still come through unscathed as she had.
Though wounded she might be, she was far from conquered.
He envied her, too, he realized. Envied her for the freedom she was unafraid to embrace.
He thought about the moment he’d first spied her, soaked from a midnight swim no true lady would have dared even fancy. Her eyes had flashed with defiance, though she’d been cast at his feet.
Christ, he wanted, in that moment, not to conquer, but to join her.
Too many years he’d lived in this dark room that was his life—always doing what was right, what was just, never pursuing the candlelight that beckoned just beyond his chamber threshold.
He’d been his father’s only son, and for all intents and purposes had been born into the world a man. His father, though Iain was certain had loved him well, had never truly been a father at all, but a teacher, instead, always fearful that his only heir would somehow depart this life before him and that his sovereign bloodline would end. He had both protected Iain interminably and trained him fiercely so that he might fend for himself and his clan when at last the old laird closed his eyes. And Christ, he’d closed them all too soon, his final time during Iain’s seventeenth winter.
His father would have been proud of him, he thought, for he had given everything to his clan. Every moment of every waking hour of his life.
He’d spared them naught.
And still some part of him was not his own to give, for it eluded even him.
And then he’d been alone.
He’d never known his mother, had never ceased to mourn that fact. Though sometimes... sometimes... he thought he spied her kindly face shrouded amidst his deeper memories.
Nothing more than fancy, he knew, for she’d never even held him within her arms. He’d never had the chance to look into soothing eyes— didn’t even know what color they were, though he had the vaguest impression of blue—to suckle as a babe at her breast, to spy her watching him as he played with other children.
Mairi, too, had been his duty to his clan.
He’d wanted so much from her, so much—mayhap too much. He was willing to take that much responsibility for her death. Hell, he’d taken it all—as ever was his duty. Her rejection of him, and the infernal ends to which she had gone to escape him, had finally extinguished the lone guttering taper he had tended so zealously all of his life. In the space of a heartbeat, in the wake of her flight from his high tower window, the candle had flickered and died.
The woman sitting so proudly before him was like that light shining just beyond his threshold, beckoning him out from the darkness he knew so well.
God... and he wanted to follow it.
Those brief moments of reflection were Iain’s undoing, for she seemed to recover herself from the stupor they had shared, and reacted suddenly with all the vengeance her eyes foreboded.
Too late, he seized the reins from her hands. She spurred Ranald’s mount furiously. The horse reared, surging forward. Iain lost hold of the reins with all but one finger, and with that tentative hold, he tried to force her to stop.
Ranald’s mount, addled now, seemed to hesitate, and Iain at once tried to regain his hold upon the reins, but she spurred the horse again, more furiously this time, and he was flung forward. The leather sliced the flesh of his hand, searing it with the force of its pull. His arm twisted within the rein, and he was dragged with her.
He howled in pain, trying to find a foothold, but the horse tore away too swiftly. Realizing in that moment that she was bloody well going to kill him, that she wasn’t going to stop, that he would need pursue her with his own mount, he tried to free himself at once. He succeeded, though not before managing to drag himself under the horse’s hooves. His answering curse was a cry of pain.