The musket ball left the barrel with a loud report that sent the startled sheep stampeding to the far end of the glen, bleating frantically. As the bullet caught her, the she-wolf seemed to pause in mid-air before falling with a sickening thud to the soft grass. Discarding the gun and pulling his dirk from his belt, ready to spare her any suffering if necessary, Conall sped towards his prey.
The dirk dropped unheeded from his grasp as he stared in utter disbelief at the body on the ground. Not a she-wolf, but definitely female. Very female. Naked, and very beautiful, he noted distractedly. She was also bleeding profusely.
Conall dropped to his knees by the woman’s body, just as he had knelt at the side of another woman’s lifeless form, that fatal night nigh on five years ago. He could not believe it was happening again. That familiar feeling, of wanting to reel back time like a line on a fishing rod, of railing at the Fates for colluding against him, made him curse long and fluently as he searched frantically for a pulse, tearing off his shirt to staunch the bleeding as the faint fluttering on her wrist signalled that she was still alive.
The musket ball had passed clean through her thigh. A quick inspection showed him that it had narrowly missed the bone. ‘Thank God, thank God,’ he muttered, tying the makeshift bandage tightly round the wound before hefting his victim over his shoulder and making his way, as fast and as carefully as his legs would carry him, back to the ramshackle castle he, and he alone, called home.
The throbbing ache in her leg awoke her. Sorcha moaned as her hand encountered some sort of binding. The world pitched like a stormy sea when she opened her eyes, so she quickly closed them again. What had happened? Where was she? Think!
Running. Her wolf had been running through a glen. A stream gurgled. She was thinking of bathing in it, anticipating the breathtakingly icy splash of the mountain water on her skin. Then something stopped her in her tracks.
A man.
A gun.
A shot. She had been shot! Why had she not sensed any danger? Why was she not sensing it now?
Squinting through the swirling mists that clouded her vision, Sorcha forced herself upright. She was in a bed. In a large, gloomy room, so dark that she could well have been at home on Kentarra in the cavern bedchambers. Inching carefully to the floor, she limped to the window embrasure and drew back the heavy curtains, coughing and sneezing as the movement threw up clouds of dust. It would have been a pretty room were it not so neglected. The chandelier was clad in cobwebs. The sapphire-blue window hangings, which matched the canopy on the bed, were threadbare and moth-eaten. The nightstand, escritoire and several chests were thick with what looked like years of grime.
She sank back down on the bed, upon which the yellowed linen looked like it had been freshly made up. The bindings on her thigh seemed to be made from the same material. She tugged at the knots.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
It was him. The hunter. Standing in the doorway. Once again, she’d had no warning, no premonition of his presence. Startled rather than frightened, Sorcha leaped to her feet, only to stumble as her injured leg gave way. He caught her just before she hit the threadbare carpet, picking her up bodily and throwing her back onto the bed.
‘For God’s sake woman, do you want to bleed to death?’
He towered over her, hands on hips, his expression furious, his stance implacable. A wild-looking man in a worn shirt and plaid quite at odds with his air of authority, he glared out at her through a tangle of dark brown hair which reached down to his shoulders. His eyes were fierce, a startling blue, set deep below a brow that seemed to be formed into a permanent frown. A scar cut his left eyebrow in two. There was another little nick in the shape of a crescent on his chin. A hard face softened only by his mouth, which was full and sensual, though it didn’t look as if it did much smiling.
She didn’t like the way he was looking at her, but she could not seem to get her legs moving, and when she sought her wolf, it whimpered in distress and cowered deep inside her. Gritting her teeth, Sorcha made a painful lunge from the bed, only to find herself held fast in a pair of ruthlessly strong arms.
‘For the love of God, will you stay where you are. I mean you no harm.’
His voice was deep, harsh, as if, like his smile, it was rarely used. ‘No harm?’ Sorcha gazed at him in disbelief. She still couldn’t believe it. Above all else, she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t sensed the impending danger, any more than she sensed it now. She tried desperately to focus her powers, but there was nothing there—not even fear, which should have been. None of the usual cloud of images and symbols she had learned to interpret, to harness and to trust. What was wrong with her?
‘You shot me,’ she said.
‘I aimed at a wolf. I shot at a wolf. And yet…’ Conall shook his head, still quite unable to account for what had happened. ‘Who are you—or rather what are you? Are you some kind of evil spirit, sent to haunt me?’
‘I am real enough, as was the wolf.’
Her accent was strange, but not as strange as her words. ‘Then what happened to it?’
Despite the dull ache in her thigh, which was already fading, despite the failure of her powers, the human’s obvious bewilderment tickled Sorcha’s sense of the absurd. Perhaps she could sense no danger because there was none? ‘She’s right here,’ she said with a hint of a smile, ‘inside me.’
Her voice was like smoke. Her mouth was sinful, redolent of dangerous pleasures. Those lambent eyes, the same silver-grey as the wolf’s, gave her a fey look. Her figure was voluptuous, full breasts with dark, jutting nipples, hips rounding delightfully from her waist; she was as lovely and as luscious as a siren. And as dangerous. ‘You’re Faol,’ Conall said slowly, quite awed by the realization. ‘Clan Wolf.’
‘You know of us?’
‘Your warriors are legendary, but I’ve never heard tell of a female coming to the mainland.’
‘It is rarely permitted.’ She tried, but could not quite disguise the resentment in her voice.
‘Tell me, do you always wander about naked?’
Sorcha grabbed the sheet from the bed and wrapped it roughly around her. ‘I dropped my clothes when you shot me,’ she said tartly, confused by the way his gaze made her pulse thrum like a hummingbird’s wings.
Her skin was lightly tanned, the same colour all over. Her silky fall of hair was so long it caressed her bottom. Fascinated, and appalled by his own blatant display of interest, Conall dragged his eyes away. His shaft hardened with the unaccustomed stirrings of desire, and with it came acute awareness. Of the sweet, heady scent of her. Of the ripeness of her. The tantalizing otherness.
What the devil was he thinking? He ran his fingers through his wild tangle of hair. ‘You should be resting your wound.’
‘It’s not serious. The pain is already fading,’ Sorcha replied. The way he looked at her made her feel as she did when she shifted. Excited. An ache of wanting something intangible. She couldn’t understand it. Not only had he tried to kill her, but he was not at all handsome by Faol standards—and she had been wooed by the most handsome Faol in the pack. She licked her lips, quite innocent of the effect. ‘My leg will fare better without these bindings.’
‘Bandages,’ Conall said distractedly, fascinated by the glimpse of pink tongue on the darker pink plumpness of her lips.
‘Did you apply them?’ She imagined those calloused hands, the surprisingly well-cared-for fingers, on her skin. He was so different from a Faol man in every way. Bigger. Much more muscled. Broader. And his scent was different, too. Salty. Musky. Yet quite definitively male.
‘Yes I did. Luckily it’s a clean wound.’ Conall couldn’t take his