Page 27 of Bride of Fire
Again she pounded for entrance, a bit harder.
No one replied.
She got the fleeting impression that perhaps the nurse had deserted the babe.
Which meant no one was going to open the shutters.
Jenefer was going to freeze to death on this ledge, fall to the ground, and shatter like an icicle into a thousand pieces.
Out of desperation, wondering if she could splinter the wood with her hand, she reared back a fist to bang as hard as she could on the shutter.
Just as she punched forward, the shutter was snatched open. Momentum made her spill awkwardly into the room, landing in a heap on the floor with the leine bunched up around her waist.
Towering over her was the scowling Highlander.
Chapter 15
Morgan was dumbfounded.
It took a lot to leave him speechless. But the beautiful lass sprawled bare-arsed at his feet did just that.
The bawling bairn had been shocked silent as well.
Beside him, his maidservant Bethac, holding the red-faced infant close to her bosom, suffered no such affliction. She blurted out, “Who areye?Where did ye come from?”
The wild-eyed lass didn’t answer. She scrambled to her feet and tugged down the hem of her leine.Hisleine, he amended.
“What the devil?” he barked.
Startled, the bairn resumed its wailing, filling the chamber with a long-winded lament.
Morgan’s plot to antagonize his captives by imprisoning them next to a loud and restless infant had proved a double-edged sword. The soul-piercing cries had kept Morgan awake as well. So in frustration, he’d charged in to the chamber to insist that if the nurses couldn’t stop the infernal keening, they should take the bairn downstairs.
When he first heard the banging at the window, he assumed it was a loose shutter stirred by the wind. The last thing he expected to see when he snatched open the shutter was Jenefer, the comely lass he’d imprisoned…in the chambernext door.
She looked feral and breathless in the firelight, her eyes crackling with life, her hair dripping like honey over her tempting shoulders. One of those shoulders was dangerously bare where his oversized leine hung off the side.
But more dangerous than her beauty was the fact she was standing close to his son and his heir.Tooclose.
“How did ye get in here?” he demanded.
The bairn arched his back and let out a particularly shrill cry. Bethac handed him off to the wet nurse, Cicilia. She tried to quiet him, encouraging him to take suckle at her breast, to no avail. The infant turned his head away and screamed all the louder.
Then, before Morgan could send the servants and bairn from the chamber for their own safety, the warrior lass reached out and seized the child from the mortified nurse’s hands.
The breath caught in Morgan’s chest. His heart hammered at his ribs. He froze. He didn’t want to incite the lass to some unspeakable act. But his gaze drifted to the open window behind her. For one horrifying moment, he imagined…
His mouth opened and closed, but he could find no words to prevent her.
He’d thought his son meant nothing to him.
He’d blamed the infant for his wife’s death.
But now that the bairn’s life hung in the balance…
The lass didn’t seem to notice his panic. She was holding the bairn,hisbairn, awkwardly before her in her two hands.
“What ails you?” she demanded, scowling down at the child. “You’ve got food and drink, aye?”
