Amanda Scott Read Online Free Page A

stone she weighed, and his powerful shoulders were easily twice as wide as hers. She trembled when she recalled the small heed he had paid to her struggles despite using only one arm to hold her.
    Still glowering, he said, “You clearly have something to say to me. I am not always so generous, but I will allow you to speak your mind to me now.”
    “I… I thought you were dead.”
    “Nay, not yet,” he replied. “God kept me alive to finish the task He’s set for me. But I’m pleased to hear that you remember me. Our acquaintance was so brief, I doubted you’d recall it at all.”
    “In truth, sir, I do not remember your name.”
    “You’ve no need to remember it. You will call me ‘master’ or ‘my lord.’ ”
    She would call no man master, but he did not look as if he would respond well to a declaration of that fact, so she made none. Having endured a brief encounter with him at Orkney, she remembered only that he was somehow kin to the Sinclairs. He had been menacing even then, but surely, he was not implying that God had restored him to life after he had died. Only a madman could believe that.
    “I did hear that you’d died last summer,” she said. “In a tragic fall.”
    “I told you how it was. God spared me because He has further use for me.”
    “But He cannot have sent you to abduct me. Why did you?”
    “I dislike ingratitude,” he said, his eyes glittering so that she trembled again, beginning to think he
was
mad. “I was told that you sought rescue from an unwanted marriage,” he added. “If my informant misled me, I’ll hang him.”
    He made the threat so casually that she could not believe he meant it.
    “If I say that he misinformed you, will you take me home?”
    Instead of answering, he roared, “Fin Wylie, come hither to me!”
    One of the three other men wheeled his horse and galloped it toward them. Reining in hard enough to make the animal rear, he faced his leader. “Aye, master?”
    “Did you not tell me the lady Adela was unhappy with her father’s choice of a husband for her and wanted the wedding stopped?”
    “I did, my lord.”
    “She says you lie.”
    “Nay, master!” The man’s face lost color, but he did not look at Adela.
    Much as she would have liked to deny having called him a liar, she feared that to do so would further anger her captor. Still, the henchman’s visible terror reinforced her earlier assessment of his master’s mental state, and she feared he really would hang the poor fellow if she insisted he had lied.
    The master said to the man, “I warrant her ladyship would like to hear how you came to know her thoughts, Fin Wylie.”
    “ ’Twas the messages, my lord, two o’ them, both the same and meant for Sir Hugo Robison. But ye ken that, sir, since ye set us to watch for such messages. Ye ken, too, what we learned—
and
that the matter were gey urgent.”
    “So did those messages lie, lass?”
    She wanted to tell him he should refer to her properly, not be so familiar. She was certain that, in the same situation, Sorcha or Isobel would have said he should, because neither had ever lacked courage. But Adela’s courage had deserted her.
    She would not call Sorcha a liar, though, even if her messages to Sir Hugo
had
caused the whole horrifying situation.
    With forced calm, she said, “I did not send those messages.”
    He slapped her face so hard that she bit the inside of her lip and tasted blood. Equal amounts of shock and cold terror swept through her.
    “When I ask you a question, you will answer it,” he said harshly. “When I give you a command, you will obey it—instantly. In other words, you will do exactly as I say, when I say. Do you understand me?”
    She nodded, licking blood from her lip.
    “Do you understand me?” he repeated.
    “Yes,” she murmured.
    “Yes, what?”
    “Yes, sir.” When his eyes narrowed, she remembered what he had told her to call him earlier and swiftly corrected herself. “Yes, my