Page 158 of Laird of Smoke
“What do you mean?”
“’Tis much easier for you to leave Rivenloch and ride away in the dead of night if the clan is busy looking for me.”
Brand didn’t reply.
“So where are you going?”Adam asked.
“’Tisn’t your affair.”
“Of course, ’tis my affair.You’re my kin,” Adam said.“I’ve always looked after you.”
“Not this time,” he replied.
Adam suddenly heard his cousin with different ears.Brand might be two years younger than him, but somehow he’d become a man in his own right.
Still, Adam couldn’t let Brand just disappear.
“I don’t intend to let you wander off without letting anyone know where you’re going or when you’ll return.”
“You mean likeyoudo?”
That struck him as powerfully as the lance blow to the chest Brand had given him in the tournament.But he wasn’t wrong.
Adam sighed.“Well played, cousin.”
“So you’ll let me go?”
“On two conditions.”
Brand blew out a vexed breath.“What?”
“You tellmewhere you’re going.And you won’t breathe a word about…this.”
He hoped to spare Eve the embarrassment of an awkward wedding night.Bedding his new wife in the stables was not something he wanted bandied about the castle.
“Why would I agree to that?”Brand smirked.“What’s in it forme?”
“I won’t run to your mother and tell her you’ve gone.”
Brand took a moment to think it over.“Maybeyouwon’t.What abouther?”
Eve replied.“I won’t breathe a word either.”
“Why should I believe you?”Brand asked.
Adam’s blood boiled at the insult to his bride.But then he recalled it wasn’t long ago that Brand had deemed lasses utterly useless and undeserving of his notice.
Before Adam could reply, Eve answered.“I was a nun.Nuns don’t lie.”
Adam knew that wasn’t true.Not at all.Eve had told dozens of lies.Including this one.
But it was more useful to back her up.“Bloody hell, Brand.You’d question the word of a woman of God?”
Brand let out a long-suffering sigh.“Fine,” he conceded.“I’m going to Berwick.”
“Berwick?”Berwick was a town on the border between England and Scotland.A war-torn place that was always changing loyalties.With a castle currently used to imprison the king’s enemies.“Why?”
“The king has awarded me my first command as a knight,” he said proudly.
