“You waste time asking me questions while the lady lies dying.”
“Give it to me then, smithy.”
“Oh no. Not so easily—”
“Now who’s wasting time? I want the cure. Give it to me and begone, if you really have it.”
“A boon for a boon,” Adam said flatly.
Hawk had known this was coming. The man wanted his wife. “You son of a bitch. What do you want?”
Adam grinned puckishly. “Your wife. I save her. I get her.”
Hawk closed his eyes. He should have fired the bastard smithy when he’d had the chance. Where the hell were the Rom, anyway? They should have been at Dalkeith by now.
The smithy could heal his wife, or so he said.
The Rom may know nothing.
And all the smithy wanted in exchange for saving his wife’s life was his wife.
Every fiber in his body screamed in defiance. Entrust this woman, bequeath her body and her lush bounty unto another man? Never. Hawk forced his eyes open and stared at the man called Adam. He was to allow this arrogant, beautiful bastard of a smithy to raise his body above his wife’s and capture her moans of pleasure in his lips? The smithy’s lips were even now curving in a cruel smile as he savored the war that waged within the Hawk.
Hawk schooled his face to impassive calm. Never betray the real feelings. Never let them see what you’re thinking when it hurts the deepest. How well he’d learned that lesson from King James.
Yet—still—anything so that she might live. “A lass is not a boon to be granted. I will give her to you if—and only if—she wants you,” he said finally. If she died he would lose her. If she lived, by price of saving her, he would lose her too. But then again, maybe not. Unable to defuse the rage which he knew must be blazing in his eyes, he closed them again.
“Done. You will give her to me if she wants me. Remember your words, Lord Hawk.”
Hawk flinched.
When he opened his eyes again, Adam was holding out a hand to his wife’s face. Sweat glistened in beads above her lips and on her forehead. The wound upon her neck was pussing green around its blackened mouth. “You touch her, smithy, no more than you must to cure her,” the Hawk warned.
“For now. When she’s cured, I touch her all she wants.”
“She is the key word there.”
Adam laid his palm against Adrienne’s cheek, intently studying the wound on her neck. “I need boiling water, compresses, and a dozen boiled linens.”
“Bring me boiling water, compresses, and a dozen boiled linens,” the Hawk roared at the closed door.
“And I need you out of this room.”
“No.” There was no more finality in death than in the Hawk’s refusal.
“You leave or she dies,” Adam murmured, as if he’d merely said “It’s raining, had you noticed?”
Hawk didn’t move a muscle.
“Sidheach James Lyon Douglas, have you a choice?” Adam wondered.
“You have all my names. How do you know so much about me?”
“I made it my business to know so much about you.”
“How do I know you didn’t shoot her yourself with some obscure poison that isn’t even Callabron but mimics it, and now you’re faking a cure—all so you can simply steal my wife?”
“Absolutely.” Adam shrugged.
“What?” Hawk snarled.
Adam’s eyes glittered like hard stones. “You don’t know. You must make a choice. Can you save her at this point, Lord Hawk? I don’t think so. What are your options? She’s dying from something, that much is plain to see. You think it’s Callabron, but you’re not certain. Whatever it is, it is killing her. I say I can cure her and ask a boon for it. What choice do you have, really? They say you make hard decisions look easy. They say you’re a man who would move a mountain without blinking, if he wanted that mountain moved. They say you have an unerring sense of justice, right and wrong, honor and compassion. They say, also”—Adam grimaced at this—“that you are passingly fair between the sheets, or so one woman said, and it offended me in great sum. In fact, they say entirely too much about you for my liking. I came here to hate you, Hawk. But I didn’t come here to hate this woman you claim as your wife.”
Adam and Hawk stared at each other with barely harnessed violence.
Adrienne cried out sharply and shuddered in Hawk’s arms. Her body convulsed, then tensed as if pulled taut on a rack. Hawk swallowed hard. What choice? There was no choice, no choice at all.